‘All I needed. That chief engineer was a good fellow. He had it ready in his head. I could hardly write fast enough. When he stopped he went flat out. That was what was keeping him together—“ma responsibility.” You know they’d walked—the ones that could walk—five days to get here.’
Wilson said, ‘Were they sailing without an escort?’
‘They started out in convoy, but they had some engine trouble—and you know the rule of the road nowadays: no waiting for lame ducks. They were twelve hours behind the convoy and were trying to pick up when they were sniped. The submarine commander surfaced and gave them direction. He said he would have given them a tow, but there was a naval patrol out looking for him. You see, you can really blame nobody for this sort of thing,’ and this sort of thing came at once to Scobie’s mind’s eye—the child with the open mouth, the thin hands holding the stamp-album. He said, ‘I suppose the doctor will look in when he gets a chance?’
He went restlessly out on to the verandah, closing the netted door carefully behind him, and a mosquito immediately droned towards his ear. The skirring went on all the time, but when they drove to the attack they had the deeper tone of dive-bombers. The lights were showing in the temporary hospital, and the weight of that misery lay on his shoulders. It was as if he had shed one responsibility only to take on another. This was a responsibility he shared with all human beings, but that was no comfort, for it sometimes seemed to him that he was the only one who recognized his responsibility. In the Cities of the Plain a single soul might have changed the mind of God.
The doctor came up the steps on to the verandah. ‘Hallo, Scobie,’ he said in a voice as bowed as his shoulders, ‘taking the night air? It’s not healthy in this place.’
‘How are they?’ Scobie asked.
‘There’ll be only two more deaths, I think. Perhaps only one.’
‘The child?’
‘She’ll be dead by morning,’ the doctor said abruptly.
‘Is she conscious?’
‘Never completely. She asks for her father sometimes: she probably thinks she’s in the boat still. They’d kept it from her there—said her parents were in one of the other boats. But of course they’d signalled to check up.’
‘Won’t she take you for her father?’
‘No, she won’t accept the beard.’
Scobie said, ‘How’s the school teacher?’
‘Miss Malcott? She’ll be all right. I’ve given her enough bromide to put her out of action till morning. That’s all she needs—and the sense of getting somewhere. You haven’t got room for her in your police van, have you? She’d be better out of here.’
‘There’s only just room for Druce and me with our boys and kit. We’ll be sending proper transport as soon as we get back. The walking cases all right?’
‘Yes, they’ll manage.’
‘The boy and the old lady?’
‘They’ll pull through.’
‘Who is the boy?’
‘He was at a prep. school in England. His parents in South Africa thought he’d be safer with them.’
Scobie said reluctantly, ‘That young woman—with the stamp-album?’ It was the stamp-album and not the face that haunted his memory for no reason that he could understand, and the wedding-ring loose on the finger, as though a child had dressed up.
‘I don’t know,’ the doctor said. ‘If she gets through tonight—perhaps—’
‘You’re dead tired, aren’t you? Go in and have a drink.’
‘Yes. I don’t want to be eaten by mosquitoes.’ The doctor opened the verandah door, and a mosquito struck at Scobie’s neck. He didn’t bother to guard himself. Slowly, hesitatingly, he retraced the route the doctor had taken, down the steps on to the tough rocky ground. The loose stones turned under his boots. He thought of Pemberton. What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. He had cut down his own needs to a minimum, photographs were put away in drawers, the dead were put out of mind: a razor-strop, a pair of rusty handcuffs for decoration. But one still has one’s eyes, he thought, one’s ears. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.
Outside the rest-house he stopped again. The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?
‘Well, Major Scobie?’ It was the wife of the local missionary speaking to him. She was dressed in white like a nurse, and her flint-grey hair lay back from her forehead in ridges like wind erosion. ‘Have you come to look on?’ she asked forbiddingly.
‘Yes,’ he said. He had no other idea of what to say: he couldn’t describe to Mrs Bowles the restlessness, the haunting images, the terrible impotent feeling of responsibility and pity.
‘Come inside,’ Mrs Bowles said, and he followed her obediently like a boy. There were three rooms in the rest-house. In the first the walking cases had been put: heavily dosed they slept peacefully, as though they had been taking healthy exercise. In the second room were the stretcher cases for whom there was reasonable hope. The third room was a small one and contained only two beds divided by a screen: the six-year-old girl with the dry mouth, the young woman lying unconscious on her back, still grasping the stamp-album. A nightlight burned in a saucer and cast thin shadows between the beds. ‘If you want to be useful,’ Mrs Bowles said, ‘stay here a moment. I want to go to the dispensary.’
‘The dispensary?’
‘The cook-house. One has to make the best of things.’
Scobie felt cold and strange. A shiver moved his shoulders. He said, ‘Can’t I go for you?’
Mrs Bowles said, ‘Don’t be absurd. Are you qualified to dispense? I’ll only be away a few minutes. If the child shows signs of going call me.’ If she had given him time, he would have thought of some excuse, but she was already out of the room and he sat heavily down in the only chair. When he looked at the child, he saw a white communion veil over her head: it was a trick of the light on the mosquito net and a trick of his own mind. He put his head in his hands and wouldn’t look. He had been in Africa when his own child died. He had always thanked God that he had missed that. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion. He prayed silently into his hands, ‘O God, don’t let anything happen before Mrs Bowles comes back.’ He could hear the heavy uneven breathing of the child. It was as if she were carrying a weight with great effort up a long hill: it was an inhuman situation not to be able to carry it for her. He thought: this is what parents feel year in and year out, and I am shrinking from a few minutes of it. They see their children dying slowly every hour they live. He prayed again, ‘Father, look after her. Give her peace.’ The breathing broke, choked, began again with terrible effort. Looking between his fingers he could see the six-year-old face convulsed like a navvy’s with labour. ‘Father,’ he prayed, ‘give her peace. Take away my peace for ever, but give her peace.’ The sweat broke out on his hands. ‘Father …’
He heard a small scraping voice repeat, ‘Father,’ and looking up he saw the blue and bloodshot eyes watching him. He thought with horror: this is what I thought I’d missed. He would have called Mrs Bowles, only he hadn’t the voice to call with. He could see the breast of the child struggling for breath to repeat the heavy word; he came over to the bed and said, ‘Yes, dear. Don’t speak, I’m here.’ The night-light cast the shadow of his clenched fist on the sheet and it caught the child’s eye. An effort to laugh convulsed her, and he moved his hand away. ‘Sleep, dear,’ he said, ‘you are sleepy. Sleep.’ A memory that he had carefully buried returned and taking out his handkerchief he made the shadow of a rabbit’s head fall on the pill
ow beside her. ‘There’s your rabbit,’ he said, ‘to go to sleep with. It will stay until you sleep. Sleep.’ This sweat poured down his face and tasted in his mouth as salt as tears. ‘Sleep.’ He moved the rabbit’s ears up and down, up and down. Then he heard Mrs Bowles’s voice, speaking low just behind him. ‘Stop that,’ she said harshly, ‘the child’s dead.’
IV
In the morning he told the doctor that he would stay till proper transport arrived: Miss Malcott could have his place in the police van. It was better to get her moving, for the child’s death had upset her again, and it was by no means certain that there would not be other deaths. They buried the child next day, using the only coffin they could get: it had been designed for a tall man. In this climate delay was unwise. Scobie did not attend the funeral service which was read by Mr Bowles, but the Perrots were present, Wilson and some of the court messengers: the doctor was busy in the rest-house. Instead, Scobie walked rapidly through the rice-fields, talked to the agricultural officer about irrigation, kept away. Later, when he had exhausted the possibilities of irrigation, he went into the store and sat in the dark among all the tins, the tinned jams and the tinned soups, the tinned butter, the tinned biscuits, the tinned milk, the tinned potatoes, the tinned chocolates, and waited for Wilson. But Wilson didn’t come: perhaps the funeral had been too much for all of them, and they had returned to the D.C.’s bungalow for drinks. Scobie went down to the jetty and watched the sailing boats move down towards the sea. Once he found himself saying aloud as though to a man at his elbow, ‘Why didn’t you let her drown?’ A court messenger looked at him askance and he moved on, up the hill.
Mrs Bowles was taking the air outside the rest-house: taking it literally, in doses like medicine. She stood there with her mouth opening and closing, inhaling and expelling. She said, ‘Good afternoon,’ stiffly, and took another dose. ‘You weren’t at the funeral, major?’
‘No.’
‘Mr Bowles and I can seldom attend a funeral together. Except when we’re on leave.’
‘Are there going to be any more funerals?’
‘One more, I think. The rest will be all right in time.’
‘Which of them is dying?’
‘The old lady. She took a turn for the worse last night. She had been getting on well.’
He felt a merciless relief. He said, ‘The boy’s all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Mrs Rolt?’
‘She’s not out of danger, but I think she’ll do. She’s conscious now.’
‘Does she know her husband’s dead?’
‘Yes.’ Mrs Bowles began to swing her arms, up and down, from the shoulder. Then she stood on tip-toe six times. He said, ‘I wish there was something I could do to help.’
‘Can you read aloud?’ Mrs Bowles asked, rising on her toes.
I suppose so. Yes.’
‘You can read to the boy. He’s getting bored and boredom’s bad for him.’
‘Where shall I find a book?’
‘There are plenty at the Mission. Shelves of them.’
Anything was better than doing nothing. He walked up to the Mission and found, as Mrs Bowles said, plenty of books. He wasn’t much used to books, but even to his eye these hardly seemed a bright collection for reading to a sick boy. Damp-stained and late Victorian, the bindings bore titles like Twenty Years in the Mission Field, Lost and Found, The Narrow Way, The Missionary’s Warning. Obviously at some time there had been an appeal for books for the Mission library, and here were the scrapings of many pious shelves at home. The Poems of John Oxenham, Fishers of Men. He took a book at random out of the shelf and returned to the rest-house. Mrs Bowles was in her dispensary mixing medicines.
‘Found something?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are safe with any of those books,’ Mrs Bowles said. ‘They are censored by the committee before they come out. Sometimes people try to send the most unsuitable books. We are not teaching the children here to read in order that they shall read—well, novels.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Let me see what you’ve chosen.’
He looked at the title himself for the first time: A Bishop among the Bantus.
‘That should be interesting,’ Mrs Bowles said. He agreed doubtfully.
‘You know where to find him. You can read to him for a quarter of an hour—not more.’
The old lady had been moved into the innermost room where the child had died, the man with the bottle-nose had been shifted into what Mrs Bowles now called the convalescence ward, so that the middle room could be given up to the boy and Mrs Rolt. Mrs Rolt lay facing the wall with her eyes closed. They had apparently succeeded in removing the album from her clutch and it lay on a chair beside the bed. The boy watched Scobie with the bright intelligent gaze of fever.
‘My name’s Scobie. What’s yours?’
‘Fisher.’
Scobie said nervously, ‘Mrs Bowles asked me to read to you.’
‘What are you? A soldier?’
‘No, a policeman.’
‘Is it a murder story?’
‘No. I don’t think it is.’ He opened the book at random and came on a photograph of the bishop sitting in his robes on a hard drawing-room chair outside a little tin-roofed church: he was surrounded by Bantus, who grinned at the camera.
‘I’d like a murder story. Have you ever been in a murder?’
‘Not what you’d call a real murder with clues and a chase.’
‘What sort of a murder then?’
‘Well, people get stabbed sometimes fighting.’ He spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb Mrs Rolt. She lay with her fist clenched on the sheet—a fist not much bigger than a tennis ball.
‘What’s the name of the book you’ve brought? Perhaps I’ve read it. I read Treasure Island on the boat. I wouldn’t mind a pirate story. What’s it called?’
Scobie said dubiously, ‘A Bishop among the Bantus.’
‘What does that mean?’
Scobie drew a long breath. ‘Well, you see, Bishop is the name of the hero.’
‘But you said a Bishop.’
‘Yes. His name was Arthur.’
‘It’s a soppy name.’
‘Yes, but he’s a soppy hero.’ Suddenly, avoiding the boy’s eyes, he noticed that Mrs Rolt was not asleep: she was staring at the wall, listening. He went wildly on, ‘The real heroes are the Bantus.’
‘What are Bantus?’
‘They were a peculiarly ferocious lot of pirates who haunted the West Indies and preyed on all the shipping in that part of the Atlantic.’
‘Does Arthur Bishop pursue them?’
‘Yes. It’s a kind of detective story too because he’s a secret agent of the British Government. He dresses up as an ordinary seaman and sails on a merchantman so that he can be captured by the Bantus. You know they always give the ordinary seamen a chance to join them. If he’d been an officer they would have made him walk the plank. Then he discovers all their secret passwords and hiding-places and their plans of raids, of course, so that he can betray them when the time is ripe.’
‘He sounds a bit of a swine,’ the boy said.
‘Yes, and he falls in love with the daughter of the captain of the Bantus and that’s when he turns soppy. But that comes near the end and we won’t get as far as that. There are a lot of fights and murders before then.’
‘It sounds all right. Let’s begin.’
‘Well, you see, Mrs Bowles told me I was only to stay a short time today, so I’ve just told you about the book, and we can start it tomorrow.’
‘You may not be here tomorrow. There may be a murder or something.’
‘But the book will be here. I’ll leave it with Mrs Bowles. It’s her book. Of course it may sound a bit different when she reads it.’
‘Just begin it,’ the boy pleaded.
‘Yes, begin it,’ said a low voice from the other bed, so low that he would have discounted it as an illusion if he hadn’t look
ed up and seen her watching him, the eyes large as a child’s in the starved face.
Scobie said, ‘I’m a very bad reader.’
‘Go on,’ the boy said impatiently. ‘Anyone can read aloud.’
Scobie found his eyes fixed on an opening paragraph which stated, I shall never forget my first glimpse of the continent where I was to labour for thirty of the best years of my life. He said slowly, ‘From the moment that they left Bermuda the low lean rakehelly craft had followed in their wake. The captain was evidently worried, for he watched the strange ship continually through his spyglass. When night fell it was still on their trail, and at dawn it was the first sight that met their eyes. Can it be, Arthur Bishop wondered, that I am about to meet the object of my quest, Blackbeard, the leader of the Bantus himself, or his blood-thirsty lieutenant …’ He turned a page and was temporarily put out by a portrait of the bishop in whites with a clerical collar and a topee, standing before a wicket and blocking a ball a Bantu had just bowled him.
‘Go on,’ the boy said.
‘… Batty Davis, so called because of his insane rages when he would send a whole ship’s crew to the plank? It was evident that Captain Buller feared the worst, for he crowded on all canvas and it seemed for a time that he would show the strange ship a clean pair of heels. Suddenly over the water came the boom of a gun, and a cannon-ball struck the water twenty yards ahead of them. Captain Buller had his glass to his eye and called down from the bridge to Arthur Bishop, “The jolly Roger, by God.” He was the only one of the ship’s company who knew the secret of Arthur’s strange quest.’
Mrs Bowles came briskly in. ‘There, that will do. Quite enough for the day. And what’s he been reading you, Jimmy?’
‘Bishop among the Bantus.’
‘I hope you enjoyed it.’
‘It’s wizard.’
‘You’re a very sensible boy,’ Mrs Bowles said approvingly.
‘Thank you,’ a voice said from the other bed and Scobie turned again reluctantly to take in the young devastated face. ‘Will you read again tomorrow?’
‘Don’t worry Major Scobie, Helen,’ Mrs Bowles rebuked her. ‘He’s got to get back to the port. They’ll all be murdering each other without him.’
The Heart of the Matter Page 14