by Owen Stanley
Chapter IX
When the Prouts returned from their trip to Port Moresby, they were aghast at the fury of Fletcher’s reprisals. And when they saw his wanton destruction in the Mission houses, and heard of the brutal humiliations of the staff, Prout’s previous contempt was transformed into a vivid personal hatred.
His immediate reaction was to send a note to Fletcher, giving him a week to make arrangements to leave the island, but the day after sending it, Moncreif casually informed him of Fletcher’s legal impregnability. In a mood of baffled rage, he dismissed Fletcher from his post as Resident Magistrate, and all associated offices, and began the tedious proceedings to petition the Privy Council to also deprive Fletcher of his Wardenship of the Goldfields. It was also necessary to restore the morale of his staff, which had been notably depressed by the apparent impotence of the Mission to quell the irrepressible Fletcher.
“Whatever he thinks he can do with his private army of thugs, I want to reassure you that the days of police rule and gaols have gone for good,” he told his staff. “We won a notable victory last Saturday, in fact, by showing to all persons of good will that the true basis of his violent repression is not the welfare of the people, but his own self-interest.” It was apparent even to Prout that most of his listeners considered this to be a rather thin and unsatisfying sort of victory, so he decided that he should further inspire them by visions of future progress.
“We shall consolidate our moral position by sweeping hygienic, cultural, legal and technological reforms, of which the keystone will be independence in the middle of next year. So-called practical people would criticise us for granting independence so soon, but of course, they overlook the fact that all our reforms are hampered at present by our colonialist relationship with the people. We may talk of equality between ourselves and the indigenes, and I am sure that all of us in this room sincerely believe that they are our equals in everything that matters, but until their land is restored to them a dark shadow will be cast over all true co-operation between us. Independence will not mean the end of our mission here but, on the contrary, will lay the foundations for a new and deeper relationship between us and the people.”
This time he was warmly applauded. He also went on to explain that, since Fletcher obviously had every intention of staying on, there was no longer any need for secrecy in obtaining evidence about his murders. It was therefore with distinctly unacademic relish that Prout announced a reward for information on Fletcher’s crimes was to be circulated among the people.
But the major event of the moment was the arrival of the equipment for the gas works, and its installation on the site of the old fort. The tanks and ancillary apparatus were flown in during the course of a single week, and assembled by expatriates before the end of the month, much to the wonder of the Moroks, who came in their hundreds to gaze in silence at the towering orange cylinders, and “to the lasting credit of Mr. Treadwell,” as Prout expressed it during the unveiling ceremony. Miss Ursula Fratchett arrived from Melbourne to supervise the organization of the Mission library, with her staff of four, and Miss Gudrun Holmstrom finally made her appearance at the Sex Education Clinic, to begin preparing her travelling exhibition of “The Twentieth Century Orgasm.”
Tristram Daubeny, the most painstaking and agitated of all the various benefactors of the Moroks, was also occupied. As a young boy he had been distinguished by an almost morbid preoccupation with the sufferings of others, for which, in a vague way, he felt personally to blame, constantly thrusting nutritious scraps upon those whom he conceived to be the deserving poor. Unfortunately, they usually turned out to be tramps or gypsies, who, after examining the eagerly proffered dainties, hurled them away with an oath when his back was turned. His other preoccupation was with “potties” and “big jobs,” a propensity of mind which moved his nanny, Mrs Cumberland, to observe on more than one occasion, “you’re a dirty-minded little boy, Master Tristram, and dirty-minded little boys go to an early grave.”
At his public school, where there was a notable deficiency of tramps and gypsies, he deadened the pangs of guilt by owning up to the offences of others, not so much for the benefit of the culprits, but to experience the satisfaction of the punishment. On leaving school, he felt that he had already been given more than his share of this world’s privileges, and earned none of them, and that to proceed to university would be, for him, an act of reprehensible greed and selfishness. A stray copy of National Geographic in his Housemaster’s study had persuaded him, in a flash of insight, that his true vocation was to teach the uses of manure to the poor natives of Africa and Asia. The smellier the manure, the nastier the climate, and the surlier the natives, the more he relished the prospect in his fantasies. His parents were naturally grieved that his expensive education should qualify him for nothing more than “teaching wogs to shovel shit,” as his father insensitively put it, but he was not to be dissuaded, and after courses at an agricultural college, and with UNESCO in Paris, he was assigned to Elephant Island.
The Moroks carried off all the traps he could provide for them, and this initial success had raised his stock considerably among his colleagues. He proposed to follow this achievement with a lecture tour through the mountains on his favorite topic, manure. All Prout’s staff had been studying Pidgin English intensively, so that, by means of a few Morok interpreters, the worst communications problems had been solved. And the Moroks were looking forward to seeing Daubeny again, since they regarded him as the red man who had done most to enhance the quality of their lives.
The dam restraining the bloodlust of the Moroks had been severely weakened by the abolition of police patrols, and now the gift of the gin traps produced the first visible cracks in its walls. Memories of pig stealing, ravaging of gardens, rapes, insults, and humiliations by their neighbours crowded thick within their narrow and inflamed imaginations, and the now unparalleled opportunities for carnage provided by the current situation set them thirsting for vengeance. Soon, along the forest tracks and the paths through the high kunai grass, pattered the mountain men, their eyes glittering with feverish anticipation as they carried their new traps bound in jungle vines. Each village chose its favorite points of ambush and set up the traps, hidden by rotting logs and drifts of leaves, upon some path which was frequented by their enemies—and to the Moroks, every stranger was an enemy.
Marbek and his kin secured the first victim, a careless youth of Tolava, over the ridge from Dolivi, who came to hunt the cassowary in the forests. As he lay beside the trap, groaning and twisting, his right leg mangled by the jaws, they came and disemboweled him with a jagged branch. Other victims, more desperate, succeeded in prising open the metal jaws, and dragged their broken bodies away along the forest floor, clawing up the earth, their hearts pounding and their necks rigid with terror as they sought safety with bulging, frightened eyes. This was the best sport of all to their enemies, who enjoyed watching a victim crawl to safety, only to surround him on the brink of freedom and see his hope die, before despatching him with pitiless abandon.
The women heated stones for the earth ovens, and laid out carpets of kovelapa leaves, upon which the corpses were to be dismembered, for the Moroks strongly disliked eating dirty meat. The smoke of the ovens rose in all the land of the Moroks, and the songs of the hunters, their dripping prey slung on poles, filled the valleys. And under the moon the dancers thundered on their drums, their bellies hot with human flesh, and waved the bones of their enemies.
Oblivious to all this unpleasantness, Daubeny and two chooks arrived in Laripa one afternoon, exhausted but cheerful. It was now well into the rainy season, and the second half of their journey had been made in the pouring rain. But though the weeping mists hung low over Laripa, they received a tumultuous welcome. Malek, Macardit and Garang led the people, who danced out to greet them. Once installed in the rest house, a large pig was brought and killed; great quantities of yams, sweet-potatoes and smoked pandanus nuts were piled before them, and lengthy orations wer
e delivered by Malek and the other chiefs. At length, secure in the affections of the people, they slept well.
The next morning, before delivering his lecture on the place of fertiliser in modern agriculture, Daubeny made a tour of the village and gardens. In the course of this he noticed a line of men and boys standing outside a rather imposing structure, decorated with polished bully-beef tins, beer bottles, plastic bags and other fragments of gaily-colored industrial waste.
An hour’s frustrating enquiry through the interpreter and the chiefs finally dispelled the mystery. When Dr. Smith had last visited them he had expressed Prout’s wish that the people should build latrines. The people had been extremely puzzled by this eccentric idea. They knew, of course, that the red men, including Tikame and Oburabu, stored their wastes at Ungabunga in stone boxes under the earth, but the Moroks had long since decided that since the red men were not human beings the ordinary rules did not apply to them. The Moroks, the True Men, had no need of such strange devices, of course, since the pigs and dogs did all the scavenging necessary, even if they were a bit slow. But it could do no harm to humour the whims of the Father of Nyikang, so they erected a ceremonial latrine in his honour. Naturally, it was only to be used when the red men came on an official visit, so as not to spoil it, and was tied up with vines the rest of the time to stop inquisitive pigs and children falling down the hole. The line of men using it were thus paying a delicate compliment to the visitors, and they expressed the hope that Daubeny liked the decorations as well.
Indeed, before the explanations had been concluded, Daubeny was besieged by the members of the latrine party asking for sticks of tobacco and newspaper as compensation for their trouble. They were the insignificant members of the village, the rubbish-men, who had been conscripted for the job by Malek the previous night, with the assurance that they would be well-rewarded by the red men. The chiefs, of course, did not intend lowering their dignity by participating in such grotesque and indecent behaviour.
Feeling obliged to humour them, Daubeny distributed the tobacco to clamorous hands, and asked for the people to be called together to hear his lecture. They responded obediently and cheerfully, as they always did when a chief from another village paid a formal visit and speeches were to be made. On this occasion they were also hoping for a handout of money, and preferably, more tobacco. The women and small children formed themselves into little groups in the background, while the men sat in a more coherent phalanx at the front. A few of the oldest men, their heads bound up in bark cloth to hide the shame of their bald heads, tottered about leaning on their sticks and cadging tobacco from the younger men.
The lecture went well enough at first. Daubeny patiently explained that the “pekpek house belong Doctor Prout” was intended to be used by all, by men and women, young and old, every day, and several times a day if possible. He informed them that Dr. Prout wanted many of these admirable houses to be built, legions of them, covering the length and breadth of Elephant Island, and that only when this was done would Dr. Prout be pleased with his children. Having explained the benefits of sanitation he passed on to the real subject of his discourse: manure.
At this stage in the Moroks’ education, Daubeny thought it wise to avoid overloading their comprehension, and he planned to take them at a gentle pace through the basic principles of erosion and soil degradation, crop-rotation, and composting. Since Pidgin is not well suited to the expression of technological concepts, and the interpreter was not very competent, the lecture collapsed into a stumbling embarrassment to all concerned, especially the audience. Etiquette forbade them to get up and leave, so they sat there and stoically endured, as Daubeny argued with the interpreter, who would launch into brief, hectoring admonitions on the backwardness of bush-kanaka gardens before stopping short and requesting clarification of a point from Daubeny in long intervals of muttering collusion.
Before the first hour was up, many of the audience were dozing, and the children had long since abandoned their mothers and scampered off to play. Daubeny felt more depressed than at any time since coming to Elephant Island. These people had asked him for bread and he had given them stones. But how could he break through to them, convey to them in a few simple words and gestures the revolutionary implications for their future, and their children’s future? If only there were some ecological liturgy, some universal symbolism that could burst the chains of language and brand some meaningful image upon their simple minds. Surveying his audience, dozing, scratching, talking in low murmurs, picking their noses, and utterly indifferent, his desperation overwhelmed him, and he cast feverishly about for the means of finding some definitive symbolic act with which to set their minds and hearts on fire.
Suddenly, in a moment of inspiration, he spotted an unsavoury offering that had been deposited on the grass that morning, strode forward and plunged his hands into it. He held it up as though he were Prometheus when he had introduced Man to fire. A collective shudder ran through the assembled Moroks; the sleepers awoke as at the crack of doom; idle chatterers stopped in mid-sentence, their jaws dropping; even the little children in their play faltered and stood still, gazing mutely at the astonishing spectacle before them. Under their riveted gaze he spoke in a voice of thunder.
“This fellow pekpek, you bury him along garden, by and by him make big cargo.”
He flung it down, and returned their gaze defiantly. As soon as they had recovered their wits, the women fled with their babies, fearing they knew not what nameless horrors. The men leapt to their feet and broke into groups, shouting and arguing fiercely, darting significant glances in Daubeny’s direction. Feeling that the lesson had got out of hand, he judged it prudent to withdraw to the rest-house and await the results.
Among the Moroks, to even bring a foot into accidental contact with excreta, of any kind, would call forth ribald insults from those who witnessed the defilement, and the resentment of the insults in turn sometimes led to violence. For a red man to do what Daubeny had just done, not secretly, or by accident, but ceremonially, in full view of hundreds, was a devastating blow to the nature of things as the Moroks knew them. Garang, as the interpreter of the strange ways of the red men, was called upon to lead the discussion.
“’Tis sorcery, lads, ’tis sorcery,” he declared, “or else the spirit Bolgump hath seized him.” Bolgump, one of the less malignant Morok hobgoblins, was notorious for his lavatorial humour.
After an initial discussion, they adjourned to the men’s house to further debate the significance of this astonishing turn of events. Garang could produce no convincing explanation of Daubeny’s behaviour beyond the fact, obvious to all, that it had some hidden meaning. They decided to be cautious and to propitiate Daubeny, who had, after all, provided them with the excellent traps, so vastly superior to their own.
As it happened, only the other day they had caught a woman of Dolivi in one of Daubeny’s traps, down by the river bank where she had gone to catch frogs. After listening to her cries for an hour or so, Apuk and Macardit, whose hunting territory it was, had gone down and after enjoying a lengthy rape, they butchered her. They removed the thigh-bones, to allow the legs to be folded up neatly, and cut out the viscera, some of which they ate on the spot, and brought the rest of the meat back to Laripa. Apuk had selfishly and impolitely absconded with the head before the formal distribution, since it was a delicacy to which he was particularly partial, but not all the best bits had been consumed. Part of a breast and a hand were still left and it was proposed to make a present of these to Daubeny, to express their appreciation of the traps, and to ensure that he did not take amiss the commotion at his lecture.
But Pariak and Malek objected that, as a red man, he would not appreciate these delicacies which would be wasted on him, and that he would be quite happy with a bit of rump. Fortunately, a rubbish-man called Aiwell had put a nice piece of rump on one side in the men’s house and this was appropriated, his whining objections being silenced by a scowl from Malek.
Dauben
y spent that afternoon with the two clerks in a state of nervous anticipation. The interpreter fled when Daubeny made his dramatic gesture, so the three had no means of guessing what the men of Laripa would do next. It was therefore an immense relief when they saw a deputation of notables approaching the rest house at sunset bearing a parcel of leaves tied up with vine. Assembling at the foot of the steps leading up to the verandah, Malek solemnly presented the bundle while the others, smiling made claws of their fingers to simulate the action of a trap. They pointed to a pig nearby to indicate the nature of the meat. Daubeny signified his pleasure at the gift, and after much smiling and hand-shaking on both sides, the men of Laripa withdrew, pleased that he was not offended, and doubled up with laughter at the trick they had played on him.
Daubeny and his companions roasted the meat on an impromptu fire, ate it with some tinned asparagus, and spent a thoroughly uncomfortable night, since they had virtuously come without carriers and only had one blanket apiece. The next day, Daubeny decided to return to Ungabunga. Though delighted by the kindness and hospitality of the Moroks, it was clear that, culturally, they responded better to physical demonstration than to lectures. And although the prospect of repeating his dramatic gesture in every village of the Moroks was sufficiently disgusting to gratify even Daubeny’s hunger for self-abasement, the response was likely to be emotional, and therefore unpredictable. Caution dictated that he should set up a model farm at Ungabunga, so that he could demonstrate his principles in a practical way. Dr. Prout wasn’t going to like it, but he would understand, though Treadwell would certainly have it in for him. He cringed in anticipation of those contemptuous eyes in that great purple face, radiating the spiritual pride of a man who imagines himself to be a victim of society.