The Missionaries

by Owen Stanley

  For several days after the departure of Daubeny and his companions, Garang went off to his rock overlooking the foaming waters of the Loma river with his favorite pig Naibiri. What was the Hidden Meaning of the Unmentionable Act? On the fourth day of his cogitations, when he thought the darkness of his mind would last for ever, he felt a tingling in his calves, his fingers twitched, his head reeled, and illumination burst upon him.

  Of course! The secret of the red man’s Unmentionable Act lay in the Houses of Filth that the men of Laripa had been commanded to build. The red men were no fools—they had power and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of his ancestors. So why should they store in their Houses of Filth what even fools could see was better thrown away? The young red man had given them the answer when he held up the filth in his own hands and told them it would turn into riches. If the True Men built these houses, as similar to those of the red men as possible, one day they would find, at the bottom of the holes, that their own filth had turned into riches: heaps and heaps of money, and jars of brilliantine, and lolly water, and sunglasses, and pressure lanterns, and radios, and motor-bikes!

  From his crag, all his faculties exhausted, Garang surveyed his world with a new serenity. Archimedes in his bath, and Newton beneath the apple tree, had both felt that same exhilaration when they had pierced the veil of transitory things, and alone among men first saw reality for what it was. Like Garang, they had experienced the serenity of the true philosopher. Compared with this final revelation, his identification of Oelrichs as Oburabu, and his successful testing of the Father of Nyikang were minor theorems, mere lemmas. Calling Naibiri to him, Garang made his way back to the village with the slow, deliberate steps of a prophet certain of his prophecy.

  Some days later, the Mission staff at Ungabunga were startled by a deputation from Laripa, eagerly demanding to be instructed in latrine building. Daubeny was more than restored to favor with Prout by this turn of events, and even Treadwell grudgingly conceded that Daubeny might have the makings of a useful citizen. For three days the men of Laripa were diligently instructed in the finer points of privy building, and Daubeny, throwing caution aside, even showed them the advanced techniques of the four-holer, though Prout had to give him a little fatherly advice about not letting his pupils run before they could walk.

  Just before they returned to Laripa, the men came to Daubeny and asked him when the filth would make riches for them. Taking the question to be a clumsy reference to the fertilising period of manure, he informed them that about eight months to a year would give excellent results. They seemed highly encouraged by this news and set off back to their village, laden with toilet rolls and lavatory chains to embellish their new Houses of Filth.

  Within a few days, Houses of Filth began springing up like toadstools all over the mountains. Some were tall and spindly, raised on piles and very draughty; some were dark and cavernous sheds, whose sepulchral gloom was designed to spare the blushes of the users; some were plain and bleak, while others were richly ornamented and bedecked with lewd motifs. Most had pink-handled lavatory chains hanging outside, like inn-signs, and users wrapped toilet paper round their heads to signify that they had recently contributed to the common weal. For a person to defecate alone in the bush was now regarded as highly anti-social, selfishly depriving the community of who knew how many tins of talcum powder, or motor-bikes, or bottles of lolly-water.

  Mothers brought their children to the nearest House of Filth at all hours of the day. Husbands now upbraided wives if they found them engaged in trivial household tasks. “Why are you not making riches for us in the House of Filth?” they shouted, hitting them with lumps of wood. The old men muttered cantankerously about the lack of public spirit nowadays among young people, who thought so little of their village that they could manage only one visit a day to the House of Filth. Tribal herbalists were pestered for simples to ease the bowels, and in one dreadful week, the villages of Mivana and Tolava were both blighted with constipation by the sorcerers of Niovoro, who were clearly intent on stealing the future wealth of their victims, since the Niovoro had been simultaneously blessed with dysentery. The great House of Filth at Niovoro was burnt to the ground as a reprisal, and a sorcerer lynched, and things gradually returned to normal.

  The Lavalava, whom all the Moroks agreed were a bit odd, decided to dig the deepest hole of any village in the mountains at Abuk’s instigation. For two months they toiled with buckets, picks, shovels, and crowbars supplied by the Mission. At the end of that time, they were down eighty feet, and without knowing it had built the mightiest throttling pit in the southern hemisphere. Its acoustic properties were remarkable, and even the tiniest child, held in its mother’s hands, could wake strange echoes, while full-bellied males released eruptions and reverberations of volcanic thunder that stunned the waiting queue outside. This great pit was named “Voice of Oburabu,” the great pig of Tikame, who, as well as being Mr. Oelrichs, was also believed to root and snort in the bowels of the earth. When Abuk felt irritable and out of sorts he would drive away the queue, and sit alone above the void, dreaming of grandeur.

  Chapter X

  After Christmas the rain settled heavily over the island. Even down at Ungabunga they awoke at dawn every day to the sound of water dripping from the roofs and bushes, and found themselves blanketed in cold drizzling mist that restricted visibility to twenty yards. The paths were noisome and slippery underfoot, and the streams that fed the station roared day and night, swirling away down the drainage ditches beside the airstrip. Rainfall that season was the heaviest it had been for twenty years, and the sun showed itself only every week or so for a few hours, usually in the forenoon, before the clouds came down again.

  In the high ranges behind the station, the rain was heavier, and the mists lay even thicker. The people were depressed, with many cases of flu and running noses, and as their spirits understandably drooped, they sought the release that tradition prescribed. A small party of warriors would slip away into the forest to seek a victim, perhaps wandering in search of a stray pig, and stalked him under the dripping trees until the moment came to loose their arrows and fall upon the outnumbered wretch. Seldom a week passed without an anguished scream of terror and agony suddenly breaking the silence of the valleys.

  The rains caused numerous landslides on the track, making it impassable to horses and motorbikes. Even foot travellers, in moments of carelessness when picking their way over these obstacles, might set them sliding again, and be carried shrieking into the depths in a welter of rocks and mud and tree-roots. Nothing was ever found of such wayfarers except an occasional arm or other bloody fragments. Even Fletcher’s patrols were reduced in the worst of the rainy season, unless there were specific reports of unusual mayhem, in which case he would dragoon the people and keep them busy clearing the slides. But this year he had every incentive to stay at home and allow the Moroks to do their worst.

  What deterred Fletcher was insurmountable to the Mission, who hardly stirred from Ungabunga during the first three months of the new year, except for brief trips to the group of villages at Ramanu near the station. As they looked up into the mists, hardly daring to think of what the rumours hinted at, they were quietly relieved at having been overwhelmed by the problems of their own internal organization. Their children needed a school, and a paediatrician, since the clerks alone now numbered forty-seven, divided among nine departments, not to mention the extra personnel of the Library, the Gas Works, the Sex Education Clinic, the Printing Shop, and Telecommunications. The houses had begun developing the problems of houses everywhere—blocked waste-pipes, drawers that wouldn’t shut, squeaking floorboards, and so on—and needed more and more attention.

  The Printing Shop was worked to capacity, sixteen hours a day since, as Prout had explained, the onset of the big rains had given them all the opportunity to gather their strength for the great leap forward of the coming dry season. A torrent of official forms, questionnaires, departmental stationery, receipt books and r
egisters streamed from the presses, and rapidly became the inflated currency of inter-departmental communication. By the beginning of March, the overworked clerks, many of whose wives acted as typists, were producing such a volume of correspondence, minutes, and memoranda that each department needed a full-time messenger to distribute the material to other departments, and by April, space had to be found in the largest store-shed for an archives section.

  Treadwell rather welcomed the rains, since they helped him concentrate his energies on the instruction of his apprentices in the workshop. Under the gaslight, which evoked the atmosphere of heroic nineteenth-century proletarian struggle, he took his lads through pipefitting, welding, brazing, soldering, the use of testing apparatus, and the maintenance of standard appliances. But the daemonic ambience of the Moroks, which permeated Ungabunga, made it impossible to confine his thoughts and energies within the narrow syllabus of the City and Guilds Certificate for gas fitters. Fleeting visions of priapic lust would stay his hand as he was about to demonstrate the swaging of a joint, or the setting of the dies for tapping a thread, and he would throw down the tool of the moment and pace to and fro by the window, gazing out on the mountains and forests, only half aware of the noise of the torrents that roared ceaselessly around the Mission.

  One evening, after demolishing half-a-dozen beers in morose isolation at the bar of the Cosmopolitan, he took his usual stroll through the mists which glowed at intervals from the new gaslights overhead, along the path that led him past the Puss-Puss shop, which Miss Gudrun Holmstrom had insisted be maintained as a therapeutic service for the Moroks. He was a familiar figure to the girls, who sensed the interest in his sly glances, and the tension that quivered in his squat body. Tonight the boss-girl, known to all the station as Tessie the Tub, had just stumped across the verandah to pitch the contents of a chamber-pot over the side. Something in the curve of her muscular forearm as she wielded the utensil fascinated Treadwell, and he turned with slow deliberation and made his way over to the steps.

  Tessie’s girls approached their job with the cheerful pragmatism of garage mechanics, and they were just about as handsome. The ponderous arrival of the distinguished white man consequently worked much the same transformation upon their demeanour as when the owner of a Rolls-Royce pulls into a rural gas station. Before Treadwell knew it, a dozen hands had smoothed his scanty hair, undone his tie and carefully folded it, and taken off his jacket. The proprietress of the service station herself led the guest to the only armchair, decorated with an ornamental rug thrown over the back and seat, and tossed some lumps of resinous gum onto the charcoal brazier in the centre of the room that sent up clouds of smoke, making Treadwell’s eyes smart and begin to run. Taking a stubby of beer from a dirty enamel bowl full of water, she removed the cap with the end of a broken bayonet and handed it to him, after rubbing her hand round its mouth to clean it.

  Now that he had broken the restraints of respectability, Treadwell felt rather at a loss and began swigging the sickly, tepid beer to hide his embarrassment.

  “What girl you want fuck-fuck?” said Tessie, brightly—she prided herself on her English—and several girls sidled towards him out of the smoke, and began to unbutton their cotton gowns. Treadwell decided that the Morok smile was, if anything, even more unnerving than the Morok scowl. But the incense, the evening’s liquor, and the carnal movements of the girls sufficiently inflamed his vital processes that he tore off his shirt and trousers, and finally attained his erotic goal, which was to grovel in his woollen underwear before the stalwart figure of Tessie the Tub.

  The girls, dumbfounded by his posture and not grasping his Pidgin, began to clutch each other and giggle, but Tessie had seen service on more distant battlefronts, and silenced them by her demand for fifty dollars for the service.

  On Treadwell’s eager acquiescence, she tore the leg off a table and began to belabour him like an old carpet, abusing him hideously the while, a refinement of her trade she had picked up from one of her gentlemen in Nouméa, a crazed French lepidopterist. The girls skipped aside as the two went to it, Treadwell writhing in delicious submission under the blows, his shrieks of lust mingling with Tessie’s oaths. The lovers’ first encounter was finally ended when they collided with a wardrobe, one of whose legs was missing, which toppled on top of them. Treadwell was the first to disentangle himself from the wreckage, and found himself draped in one of Tessie’s voluminous cotton print gowns. With porcine grunts he began pulling it over his head, groping with gnarled, spatulate fingers for the armholes.

  Meanwhile, in the barracks, Trooper Gumbo had been promoted to corporal and accordingly, in the natural order of things, had spent the evening drinking himself into a fit with his mates. He had just gone outside for a hurl, and was wiping his chin afterwards, when the orgiastic noises from the Puss-Puss shop dawned upon his reeling brain. Thinking that a visit there would be a fitting conclusion to his revels, he moved unsteadily across the grass, and clambered up the steps just as Treadwell pulled the hem of his frock around his ankles and was looking coyly around him in anticipation of further delights.

  Cpl Gumbo couldn’t believe his luck. Through the smoke, dimly lit by the glow from the brazier, a vision of opulent female charms beckoned to him, which in reality was Treadwell in his baggy dress, teetering in a pair of Tessie’s shoes, about to prostrate himself for the last time. The corporal, moustache bristling, in a few swift strides was at “her” side and, folding her in his arms had planted a lingering kiss on Treadwell’s beer-stained and equally hairy mouth.

  Astonished and horrified, the corporal flung Treadwell from him with a bellow of rage, while Treadwell kicked off his heels, gathered up his skirts, and made for the door. Cpl Gumbo was not far behind, determined to obliterate the monstrosity that had just shaken his simple world to its foundations, but Treadwell had a few seconds’ start, and, less drunk than Gumbo, legged it in fine style towards the Mission with the corporal lurching and braying for vengeance through the mists. By a process of blundering miscalculation Treadwell suddenly found himself outside the Prouts’ door, which he recognized by some dying hollyhocks that Phyllis had tried to grow. Battering on the door, he called for aid, and Prout let him in a few seconds before the arrival of the corporal, who promptly began kicking at the panels.

  The thunderous row attracted the notice of Fletcher, Oelrichs and Moncreif, who were strolling back from the Cosmopolitan, and out of curiosity rather than from any desire to be helpful, they wandered over to enjoy what looked to be a promising piece of entertainment.

  It took a swinging cuff to the head before Gumbo finally half-came to his senses and told Fletcher of the monstrous apparition that had attacked him in the Puss-Puss shop. Fletcher was about to put the drunken oaf on a charge for lying to a superior officer when Prout, hearing Fletcher’s voice, opened the door and querulously asked him to have the goodness to maintain better discipline among his men. Discomfited, Fletcher began hauling Gumbo away when Moncreif, who was standing at an angle so that he could see into the hall behind Prout, noticed a wisp of female garment protruding from a closet door.

  “Well Roger, whatever kind of Amazon it was that frightened the shit out of Gumbo, she’s in there all right—look at that!”

  “Strewth, yer right. Just what the hell have you got in there, Prout?” Rudely pushing past him, they entered the hall and wrenched open the closet door, to reveal Treadwell struggling to remove a suspender belt entangled round his knees.

  It was some time before the plane could get in, but on Friday morning the pilot said he’d give it a go. Treadwell, together with the loyal members of the Mission, including the Prouts, was sitting by the edge of the strip with his gear in readiness for the plane, when Fletcher and the sergeant-major walked by.

  “Cheer up, Obadiah,” said Fletcher. “When yer get ’ome the Poms’ll make yer a Sir—it’s all the rage over there.”

  Chapter XI

  Early in April Prout called his staff together to explain the ca
mpaign of liberation that was to begin as soon as the roads were passable.

  “We’ve all been feeling the strain during the past few months, so this is a good opportunity to reassure you that after all the solid team-work we’ve put into this job, we are about to reap the reward of our labours. The backbone of our programme is the new constitution, which will be ratified on Independence Day. I’ll ask Mr Moncreif to give us an outline of the constitution that he and I have drawn up, beginning with the Bill of Rights.”

  Moncreif tilted back his chair, and expatiated.

  “I’m sure we all want to give these admirable people their rightful deserts, so I can assure you that we have ransacked the world’s treasuries of political wisdom on their behalf. To begin with, let us consider the Bill of Rights. The Elephant Island Constitution is based on the self-evident principles that the inhabitants of have an inalienable right to aid from the over-privileged nations; to immunity from the provisions of international law, which has been developed by and for the benefit of those over-privileged nations; and to immunity from all insensitive and hostile criticisms of their internal affairs by those nations. I’m sure you will all agree that this is an essential foundation for the dignity and self-respect of the indigenes.”

  He paused, and sensed Prout’s suspicion, as well as the air of hostile uneasiness which pervaded the meeting. He pressed on, enjoying every minute of it.

  “The Bill of Rights itself assumes, of course, that the natural aims of all human life are the joys of creative endeavour, brotherly love, and self-sacrifice, and that all distinctions of race, tribe, sex, age, height, strength, and intelligence are the reactionary fantasies of an oppressive ideology, lacking any foundation in scientific fact. All laws violating these truths will naturally be unconstitutional and void. On this foundation we have erected the following institutional structure. There will be two Co-Presidents, without powers of veto, to hold office for a year, and to be elected at half-yearly intervals, so that each Co-President will only hold office for six months with any other. There will be elected assemblies for the village, the catchment area, and the Island, with a two-chamber legislature at the apex of the hierarchy, comprising a House of Deputies and a Senate, each of which will be able to veto the legislation of the other. The constituency of the House of Deputies will be the catchment area, which will also be the constituency of the Senate, but in the case of the Senate voters will cast their ballots for a single national slate. All voting will naturally be by proportional representation. There will be no qualifications of any kind for voters or the members of any elected body, since that would create invidious and unconstitutional distinctions. Elephant Island will thus be in advance of every other democracy in the world, since an infant’s drool on the ballot paper will be, in every respect, the equal of an adult’s dirty thumbprint. Thus age discrimination and the historical oppression of babies is ended at a stroke.”