by Nevil Shute
I suppose I’d known that was coming, though I didn’t know why. My face must have shown my disappointment, because she looked up at me and said, “I’m just terribly sorry. It’s not that I don’t want a holiday with you. It’s Bali.”
I sat down on the edge of the desk. “What’s it all about?” I asked, as kindly as I could. “What’s wrong with Bali?”
She said, “I don’t want to go there, not just now.”
“Don’t you want to see Connie? I thought you’d like the chance.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to see him for a bit.”
I reached out and took one of her hands in mine. “Tell me why,” I said. “I’m only trying to help.”
“I know you are,” she said. She smiled a little. “You’re doing that in your own way all the time. That’s why this party runs so well.”
“I’d like to know why you don’t want to go and see Connie,” I observed.
“I know you do,” she said thoughtfully. “Otherwise you’ll think that it’s because I don’t want to go away with you, and it’s not that at all.”
“Thank God for that, anyway,” I said.
She raised her eyes and looked at me. “I want to leave him alone for a bit,” she said. “I don’t mind you going. It might be quite a good thing if you did. But I don’t want to go myself, not now. I think he’s better without me.”
“Why is that, Nadezna?”
She withdrew her hand, and walked over and stood by the open window. The people were beginning to go past to the place by the hangar for the evening prayer. She was silent for a bit, and then she said, “Did you meet this girl, Madé Jasmi?”
I was amazed that she should raise that thing again. Surely, she wasn’t jealous? I said, “Yes, I just met her. She was with her mother when we were settling how much they were to pay. I didn’t speak to her, of course. I couldn’t.”
“Is she nice, Tom?”
“She’s got rather a nice face,” I told her. “To look at her, you’d say she would be kind and even-tempered, and probably faithful.”
She nodded slowly. “That’s what Gujar said. Did Gujar tell you much about her, Tom?”
“He said that she looked after Connie mostly. There’s another one who’s looking after Phinit.”
“Did he tell you that she was in love with Connie?”
“Yes,” I said. “He told me that.”
She stood looking out at the muddled buildings between us and the hangar, with glimpses of the tarmac and the sea beyond. “If that’s true,” she said, “it’s the first time it’s ever happened.”
“The first time anyone has ever been in love with him?”
“I think so. You don’t know of anyone, do you?”
I shook my head. “I never saw him take an interest in a girl, or any girl in him.”
“Nor did I,” she said. “But now, if Gujar Singh is right, there is a girl, and she’s in love with him.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Well, you can put it like that,” I said at last. “I don’t know much about the Balinese, and I don’t think Gujar Singh does, either. She’s a very lovely girl, Nadezna, but it’s a very primitive village. She may want to go to bed with him. Probably she does. But whether you can put it any higher than that, I wouldn’t know.”
She said, “I only wish she would.”
I grinned. “Think it’ld do him good?”
She said gravely, “I know it would.”
She came and stood by me again. “I want you to try and understand about Connie, Tom,” she said. “There’s such a lot of nonsense being talked about him, that one can’t deny, because it means so much to so many people. So many people think that he … that he’s a prophet, or something. They do, honestly, down in the souk. They think that he’s a sort of prophet.”
I took her hand again, and examined it. “I know,” I said. “Some people quite high up are starting to say that.”
“You don’t believe that, do you, Tom?” She looked at me appealingly.
I smiled at her. “I don’t. I think he’s just a damn good chap who’s got a bee in his bonnet. Perhaps he’s been out in the East too long.”
She nodded. “I think he has. He always was interested in religions, ever since he was a little chap. And then, when we lived in America we were Asiatics, you see—different to the rest. Mother was Russian-born and we always reckoned we were European, but we weren’t really—not Connie and I. And of course, it made a difference. I don’t think Connie ever had a girl friend in his life, not one. And his religion made up.”
“I see,” I said. This was a new light on the man I knew.
She said quietly, “Tom, I believe this is his chance, and it may be the last one that he’ll have. I don’t care who she is so long as she’ll be kind to him, and make him happy like an ordinary man, and give him children. If she’s an Asiatic, well, he’s Asiatic too, and so am I. I want her to have him. He’s never had a girl in love with him before, and that’s what’s made him into what he is. I want her to make him love her, and make him an ordinary man.”
I stood studying her fingertips, holding her hand in mine. “You think that’s what he’s missed?”
“I know it is,” she said. “He’s always been incomplete, because he’s never had that. He’s slid deeper and deeper into his religion, just to compensate.”
I stood thinking, perhaps, more about Nadezna whose hand I was caressing than about Connie. I was wondering if the same Asiatic nature of her birth had denied her boy friends, too. It might well be so. But she had had her mother to look after, and perhaps she had found compensation in that way.
“You’re a good bit younger than Connie, aren’t you?” I asked.
She nodded. “Eight years,” she said. “There were two others between us—both boys. There was a typhoid epidemic in our street down by the harbour in Penang, and my father and Ivan and Victor all died. After that, Mother took Connie and me to London, because my father died fairly well off and Mother didn’t want us to grow up as Chinese. My father had helped Sir Alan Cobham on one of his flights through Penang, and Mother wrote to him in London, and Sir Alan took Connie on as an apprentice. That’s how he got started in this business.”
I came back to the point that we had started from. “Why don’t you want to go to Bali, then?” I asked.
She said, “I might frighten her, and spoil it.”
“I see.”
She said, “Gujar and you say she’s just a village girl, living in a very primitive place. But Gujar says that she’s in love with him, and Phinit, living there with him, is living with another of the girls there, one of Madé Jasmi’s friends. If ever Connie had a chance of knowing what love means it’s now. And if he can have that, I think he might snap out of all this prophet stuff, and come back to us as a normal man.”
“Why do you think you’d frighten her?” I asked. “You’re on her side.”
Nadezna said, “If she’s a village girl like that, she’d never believe it. Different clothes, different speech, different colour … If I turned up there as his sister she’d be terrified of me, and angry, too, because she’d think that I resented her and wanted to take him from her. I’d never get her to believe that I want her to have him.”
“No,” I said thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you would.”
“I think I’ll have to keep away,” she said. “However much one wants to help her I think this is a time when another woman just can’t help at all.”
“Would you rather I kept clear of them, myself?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I think it might be helpful if you went, if you can spare the time. Connie thinks so much of you, Tom. He may want to talk to somebody before he takes her.” She smiled. “He’s such a bunch of ideals,” she said. “He’s quite capable of keeping a girl hanging round while he consults a friend to ask him if he’s doing the right thing.”
I laughed. “You want me to push him into it.”
“I do,” s
he said, but she wasn’t laughing at all. “I think that it’s the only thing to save him now.”
There was real pain and anxiety in her when she said that, and for a moment I thought that she was going to start crying. I put an arm clumsily around her shoulders. “It’s not as bad as that,” I said. “After all, nothing’s going to happen if he doesn’t get this girl.”
“Only one thing,” she said sadly.
“What’s that?”
“I think he’ll turn into a prophet.”
I was silent.
“I don’t know how a man becomes a prophet,” she said quietly. “But thousands of people, spread all through the East—they think he’s one already. I suppose that if a person gives up earthly things and preaches a new, simple way of life to people who are hungry for his teaching—I suppose that’s what a prophet is, isn’t it? Or is there something more to it than that?”
I pressed her shoulders gently. “Look,” I said. “I don’t know what a prophet is, or what makes one. I only know that it’s a very long time since there’s been a prophet in the world. Far as I know, Mahomet was the last, and he lived about fourteen hundred years ago. That’s a good long time ago. I don’t know what a prophet is, but I do know this: that it’s pretty long odds against our having one here in our little party, now. In all these ages, people must have been thought to be prophets who weren’t really, just ordinary chaps who’d been out in the East too long. That’s all that Connie is, Nadezna—honestly. And if we treat him that way, it’s the best thing we can do.” I paused. “I’d like to see him have a job in a cold climate for a time. In England or America.”
She smiled, and pressed my hand, and said, “Dear Tom. But he wouldn’t go.”
“No …” I thought about it for a minute. “Well then, I’d like to see him get this girl. I think you’re quite right there. I think that it would do him good, perhaps.”
She looked up, smiling. “If he became the father of twins it’ld knock him off his perch, wouldn’t it?”
I burst out laughing, and she freed herself from my arm and laughed with me. “Well anyway,” she said, “you go alone this time and find out what he’s up to, and give him a push the right way.” She was calm and matter of fact about it now, all apprehensions of the unknown put away. “I’ll stay here and look after things with Dunu.” She paused. “But don’t think it’s because I won’t come with you for a trip, Tom. I’d like to do that—but not to Bali. Not just now.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go and see what I can make of it.”
Arjan and Hosein took the Tramp down for the next journey to Bali, and I went on quietly at Bahrein, making my preparations to go down on the following trip and spend a fortnight there. I flew one of the Airtrucks once or twice upon a local journey, and I spent some time in the hangar with Chai Tai Foong and the ground engineers. Most of the time I spent in the office, because it was there that I liked to be now. There was always something to talk about with Nadezna, something to make a joke about with her.
I never took her out anywhere, for the very good reason that there was nowhere to take her to in Bahrein. There was no restaurant where we could have a meal together, or anything like that. If one drove out in the car you got out into the dry, parched desert in a couple of miles, without a tree or any vegetation whatsoever. I did think once or twice of taking her bathing, but that’s not much catch in the Persian Gulf; you can’t go in more than knee-deep because of the sharks, and there’s no shade at all, which makes it rather trying. I’d never felt the need of anywhere to go except the office up till then, and now it was in the office that we met and got to know each other. It was very pleasant there in those few days.
Hosein and Arjan came back in the Tramp according to their schedule, and I warned Gujar Singh and a new pilot that we had called Kadhim that they would be the first and second pilots for the next trip down to Bali, the one I should be going on. Hosein and Arjan Singh had spent the night in Pekendang with Connie and Phinit, but they were neither so observant or so much in my confidence as Gujar Singh, and I didn’t like to question them too closely about the women. I learned nothing from them. Nadezna asked Gujar to find out anything he could from them, but they had little information for him. They were both devout followers of Connie, Hosein in particular, and it had probably never entered their heads that the Teacher could take any interest in a woman.
Two days before I was due to leave for Bali, I was in the hangar with Tai Foong when Nadezna came to me. “Wazir Hussein’s just arrived and wants to see you, Mr. Cutter,” she said. She always called me Mr. Cutter in front of other people. “He’s in the office, waiting.”
I left the hangar and went over to the office, wondering what he wanted. I was up to date with my payments on the loan to buy the Tramp, and with the work that the machine was doing I could step the payments up, if need be. I thought about that quickly as I walked over to the office, past the maroon car with the Arab chauffeur.
I went and greeted him. “How very nice of you to come,” I said. “Let me order coffee.” I nodded to Nadezna in the doorway and she nodded back that she would send for it, and closed the door softly behind her, so that I was alone with Hussein.
We began to talk about the weather and the crops as usual, and very soon he asked me how the Tramp had been behaving, so I knew it wasn’t that that he had come to talk about. I told him all about it and the work that it was doing, wondering all the time what he had come for if it wasn’t that, and he listened politely and said all the right and courteous things at the right time. Then Dunu brought a tray with the small cups of Turkish coffee, and put it on the desk between us, and went out and closed the door behind him.
Presently the Wazir said, “And where is Shak Lin now, Mr. Cutter?”
“He’s at Bali in Indonesia,” I said, “looking after the far end of our service there.” I told him what Shak Lin was doing and how he was living. I found he did not really know where Bali was, and he wasn’t too sure about Indonesia either, so I took him to the big map of Asia that I had pinned up upon the wall and showed him where Bali was and how the aircraft flew there every fortnight to meet the Dakota coming up from Darwin. He was an able man with an alert mind, and he grasped the various points very quickly.
We went back to our chairs. “And will El Amin be coming back here to Bahrein in the near future?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said carefully. “As you must know, there was a small amount of friction here about him, and the Liaison Officer suggested to me that he should be sent away.” He inclined his head, and his face darkened; with his black beard and aquiline features framed in the white cloth of his head dress he looked quite an ugly customer for a moment. “Things are much more pleasant now,” I said. “I think perhaps if I were to ask for his return the Government might allow it.” I paused. “On my side, I don’t need him back here. He’s doing good work for us where he is, and the Chinese boy, Chai Tai Foong, who has succeeded him, is doing well.” I added, “Doing well in the straight performance of the work, I mean. No one could replace Shak Lin as a teacher of ground engineers, or as a man.”
He nodded gravely. “That is very true. He is not likely to return here, then?”
“I don’t think he is.” I hesitated. “I doubt if he would want to, himself. When he left here, he felt that his time here was over, that it was time that he moved on, in any case. He went without resentment, for that reason.”
He nodded again, and we sat together for some time in silence. At last he said, “My master, the Sheikh Abd el Kadir, is becoming an old man. He will not live for very many months more. He is not ill, but he is tired now and ready to put down his burdens. He wants very much to meet El Amin once again, to pray with him and take his blessing before he lies down to die.”
“I see,” I said. The old man, after all, had lent me sixty thousand pounds at a time when I needed it badly. I still owed him most of it. “That’s very easy to arrange,” I said. “Shak Lin can come ba
ck here on one machine and go down again on the next trip. He’d have about four days here, if he did that. I should have to ask the Resident, of course. But this new Liaison Officer, Captain Morrison, would help us there. And as for Shak Lin, I know he’d be glad to come.”
He said evenly, “My master would not ask the Resident for any favour in this matter, nor would he allow you to do so.”
There was another long silence while he left that to sink in. I had known, of course, that there was some bitterness; I had not realized that it was quite so strong as this. Time would heal it, of course, because the old Sheikh would be dead before so very long, but it seemed to me to be a sad thing that official clumsiness should have produced such lasting ill feeling. If anyone could ease the matter for the Resident and Captain Morrison, perhaps now, queerly, it was me.
“What can we do about it?” I enquired at last. “How can I help your master, who has helped me so much?”
He said, “My master would like to travel to El Amin. I do not think that he would ask so great a man to come back here, halfway across the world, to visit him. My master wishes to arrange that you should fly him to El Amin in your large aeroplane, with some members of his household, so that he may see Shak Lin again and talk to him before he dies.”
I thought quickly. The Sheikh would have to go in his own aeroplane, the Tramp; no doubt that was his idea. Because of the relationship between the Arabia-Sumatran and the Sheikh by which they paid for his oil, Johnson would probably forego one of his fortnightly trips for this purpose, if I put it to him. We could free the Tramp for the job. But the Tramp was a bare box inside, unfurnished, unheated, and unsoundproofed; a poor vehicle for an invalid old man to live in for four days to Bali, and four days back, all through the tropical extremes of heat and cold.
I said, “Of course I will do that, Wazir. If that’s what he wants to do, he shall do it. I can arrange for him to fly to Bali in the Tramp, the large aeroplane which he lent me the money to buy, or I can arrange for him to charter a more comfortable aeroplane, that an old man can travel in without so much fatigue.” And I went on to tell him of my doubts about the suitability of the Tramp.