by Owen Stanley
“Would you believe it?” said Noreen, “Aren’t they sweet?”
“Yes, when you hear all that’s said about them, and you see something like this, it’s just wonderful, and heartwarming!”
“I remember last Christmas in Sydney, before we came here, Cyril and I went down to David Jones, to buy some prezzies for our two youngest, it was just the same, just the same.”
The two women beamed at the Morok men as they trailed out of the store with their boxes of toys. Erny came over to serve them, mopping his brow.
“Strewth, I dunno what’s got into ’em, Phyllis. Cleaned me flamin’ stock right out! Never thought I’d be cablin’ for a ton o’ clockwork toys. Still, it’s good for business. Now, what can I get yer?”
Prout was equally delighted by the news.
“What’s so remarkable is that the conception of toys for children is a very sophisticated idea. Of course, children everywhere make playthings of natural materials, but in this case their parents are actually spending hard-earned money in buying these toys. That’s what is so encouraging. It shows that even our most advanced ideas can be communicated across the barriers of culture and education. Did you know that a number of villages have actually asked Schultz to build them village halls?”
“That’s just wonderful, dear. But Erny’s having trouble getting all the toys they need. It seems a shame that we can’t help airlift toys and sweeties to the kiddies.”
Prout put his mind to work on this, and it was arranged that the Mission would give Erny a guaranteed price for his entire stock of toys, and would undertake distribution themselves. And it was fortunate that such arrangements were being made, since up in the mountains, events were moving rapidly. At Lavalava several yielding gardens were uprooted, and the men planted their first crop of bakers’ vans, steam-rollers, double-decker buses, fire-engines, petrol-tankers, Mercedes, and Lincoln Continentals. Around the men’s house, Abuk had planted a private herbaceous border of fork-lift trucks and bulldozers. It was held that only men could plant the new crop, which counted as yams in their cosmology, and were therefore taboo to women.
The news of Lavalava’s discovery spread rapidly in the mountains. Their neighbours, who shared their resentment of the overweening claims of Laripa, were delighted that men of the Tolava valley should have evened the score with the inflated pigs’ bladders inhabiting the Loma valley, and it was seriously debated if the Houses of Filth might not be a completely bogus revelation. After all, could something that violated every canon of decency truly be a means of insight? The practical replied that these philosophical quibbles were all very well, but since Lavalava had what was indisputably the finest House of Filth in the land of the Moroks, it would be absurd not to continue using it. Moreover, since the red men obviously had many means of obtaining their wealth, both Revelations might be true.
Garang and the men of Laripa treated the Revelation of the Lavalava with the contempt of a Cathedral Dean and Chapter for the home-made prophecies of a Welsh tabernacle. But while most of the villages in the Laripa area publicly shared this contempt, numerous men planted secret plots of toys in the forest, tying them in yam vines, and muttering their private spells upon them.
The huge consignment of toys chartered by Erny also proved fortunate for the Mission, since toys and tobacco were the only currency that the Moroks would accept now for clearing the landslides. Fletcher would have refused to let his police enforce road clearing even if he had been asked, and in the absence of any other means of coercion, bribery, of oriental proportions, the terms of which increased daily, was the only course open to the Mission.
The end of the rains produced a fine crop of respiratory diseases, and Smith was anxious to take a medical patrol on the newly-opened roads. Prout gave permission for the natives to be allowed to carry as volunteers, since this was a medical patrol. Smith persuaded a few surly men from Ramanu to carry the boxes of penicillin, distilled water vials, and syringes and other equipment in exchange for a pound of tobacco a day. When Prout heard of this, he indignantly insisted that they be given free blankets, hurricane lamps, shirts and trousers, as well as chits for a case of bully-beef, redeemable at the store, and told Smith that even a medical patrol must be careful not to take the indigenes’ help for granted.
On the patrol, the carriers flung many of the cartons over the side of the track before the eyes of Smith, but presented themselves empty-handed at the end of the day to demand their tobacco, with expressions of insufferable insolence. The slightest delay in meeting their rancorous demands for payment was received with abuse and threatening gestures. The chiefs of every village through which the patrol passed demanded further payments of tobacco for the privilege of using the road, and their men pillaged many of the remaining cartons to extract aluminum foil, which they rolled up and stuck through their noses, and tubes of ointment, which they used for greasing their skins.
In spite of this harassment, the patrol treated several hundred people, and Smith returned after three weeks with a sense of considerable achievement. He then discovered that the station had been besieged by angry Moroks demanding compensation for their injuries at the hands of the doctor, when he stuck the needle into them, and the Mission had been obliged to make a distribution of cooking pots to send them away peacefully. When Smith protested that the people were not only conspicuously ungrateful for having their sickness cured, but had done their best to make the patrol downright impossible, Prout replied, with a smile.
“Why should they be grateful? They have a right to free medical attention. Gratitude belongs to the era of exploitation when they grovelled to their white masters for every scrap they condescended to toss them. It’s clear from what you say that they’re only showing a healthy spirit of self-assertion.”
“But to pay them, to give them cooking pots for being injected, for having their lives saved? It’s madness, madness!”
“Not madness, Dr. Smith, but the utilization of a slight misunderstanding, a mistranslation of categories between two cultures, to spread the use of modern kitchen equipment among the people.”
Smith showed a healthy spirit of self-assertion by losing his temper for the first time since coming to Elephant Island and resigning on the spot. The Moroks had, by now, all caught the scent of fear and weakness that exuded from the Mission, and it became great sport for each village to send down a party of extortioners to Ungabunga to cajole or intimidate the red men there into disgorging more of their wealth.
Delighted by their tactics in getting compensation for their injections, and finding that every ailment was treated with injections by the incompetent native orderlies flown in at short notice from other parts of the Pacific to take Smith’s place, the Moroks poured in to the clinic groaning, rolling their eyes, hopping, staggering, and clutching various parts of their anatomy, all demanding succour. Some, more histrionically gifted than their fellows, caused themselves to be plastered with leaves and mud, and carried the last mile slung under poles, to be deposited outside the clinic, groaning and comatose. This always caused a rush of Mission wives, helping in the clinic, to ease their sufferings, and the sight of the red women gathered in pathetic distress around their patients was the source of endless hilarity back in the mountains, as they mimicked their fluttering concern.
Other natives favored a more direct approach, stalking grim-faced into the clinic and pointing to where they wished for the injection, menacing the orderlies horridly with their glittering axes.
From the clinic the Moroks streamed over to the warehouses to demand compensation for the pain of the injections, and for the injury to their dignity sustained thereby. The supply of cooking pots ran out after a fortnight, and the harassed clerks were driven to opening the first crates that came to hand, barely able to drag them out and get the lids off before the shouts and screams became deafening, and the Moroks flooded over the counter, to haul out the contents and spread them all over the floor in a debris of wood-shavings and shredded paper. Those who
had had injections demanded twice as much as those who had simply come for what they could pick up, and some furious fights developed between the clinic patients and the casual scroungers.
One morning, shortly after the last of the book-binding kits had been given away, the duty clerk, one Terry Woodford, opened a crate of Japanese plastic clarinets, and was so incautious as to fit a reed to one and blow a few notes upon it. The Moroks, who had always made bamboo flutes, were astounded by these sweet notes, which, far from soothing their savage breasts, awoke in them a frenzy of avarice. Vaulting the counter, they fell upon the crate, whereupon Terry, a young lad who only wanted to oblige, opened two more. Some Scroungers, who had been first in the queue, tried to slip out with an armful of clarinets each, but were quickly spotted by the Patients, who pursued them across the station.
Fletcher was taking morning parade as usual, and had just completed his inspection when the mob burst onto the airstrip, where the Scroungers were finally outrun by the Patients and brought to bay. Surrounded, the Scroungers flung down their surplus instruments, and, swinging the remainder over their heads, tried to batter their way out of the encircling ring. The yells and thuds of battle grew louder as the laggards of both factions caught up, and soon the airstrip was filled with furiously angry little men thrashing one another with their new clarinets. The metal furniture proved an admirable reinforcement to the tough plastic, and capable of inflicting some gory wounds, though the instruments had the disconcerting habit of flying apart at the joints before the quietus could be given. Fletcher and his men sat on their horses, helpless with laughter, until Prout arrived in great agitation, hurrying down from a conference on the demographic characteristics of the Elephant Island population. He stared at the scene in uncomprehending dismay.
At this point the warriors were joined by reinforcements with flutes and cor anglais on the flanks, preceded by a heavy brigade in the van equipped with bassoons. One humourist had found some cymbals, and was prancing up and down the side of the strip with elephantine gaiety, clashing them furiously, and every now and then catching a straggler a dreadful slashing blow with an edge.
Fletcher rode over to Prout.
“What’s this, then? The Ungabunga Philharmonic ’aving their first rehearsal?”
“Good God, Fletcher, it’s appalling! I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What about the day yer first came here, then?”
“That was different. You’d encouraged them, given them weapons of war, but we’re their friends, we’ve given them these beautiful instruments. They have some musical tradition, so how can they behave like this?”
“Don’t ask me, mate. I’m just a kiap. Ye’re the expert.”
“You’ll have to take your men down and make them see reason,” said Prout, who realised that this was beyond even his powers of conciliation.
“I will, will I? Get stuffed!”
“Surely you will agree, Fletcher, that it’s in everybody’s interests to stop this! I can’t order you to do so–”
Five frenzied Moroks, trundling a harp, now made their appearance. As the great instrument on its trolley gathered speed down the strip, which was hard and dry after several weeks of sun, it took on a momentum of its own, and leaving its keepers floundering in the rear it cut a swathe through the heaving mob, thrumming and jangling. The plangent chords blended harmoniously with the startled cries of pain, and several Moroks looked up vacantly, as though summoned by angels, in which rapturous posture they were felled by the bassoons of the heavy brigade.
Prout was wringing his hands like a pair of wet socks.
“Do something, Fletcher, do something, for Heaven’s sake,” he cried, distracted with grief and mortification. “You can’t just stand by and watch these people kill each other.”
“Can’t I? Anyway, the killing hasn’t started yet. They’ll wear ’emselves out first. They usually do.”
“You must be mad, Fletcher. You must stop them, by force, if necessary!”
“Ye’re not tellin’ me to bash yer brown brothers, are yer?”
“For Heaven’s sake, don’t sit there tormenting me, get on with it!” shrieked Prout.
Without more ado Fletcher formed up his men for a charge, and they fell on the combatants, firing over their heads with shotguns and laying about them with batons, and dispersed the mob in a few minutes with minor casualties. The Moroks were so exhausted that the sudden shock of the charge totally demoralised them, and they could offer little resistance. Fletcher dismissed his men, and rode back to where Prout was standing.
“Reckon yer learnin’! I told yer bayonets and a belt round the ear was what they understood.”
Prout glared at him and walked off without saying another word.
Chapter XIII
Chief Justice Robinson leaned forward across the mahogany desk and cupped his ear towards the witness in the box. He was a deliberately Dickensian figure, all whiskers, gold chains and seals, macassar oil, flashes of silk kerchief, and pince-nez, with a large hooked nose and heavy rumpled jowls, ruminating suspiciously on every proposition advanced by witness or by counsel as though tasting it for some hidden poison.
His legal abilities were mediocre, and until only a month before he had been an aging barrister in Australia, something of a joke to his colleagues, and with no hope of ever becoming a judge. Perhaps his flamboyant dress and affectations were gestures of defiance to hide his professional disappointment; they certainly attracted the attention of those who were trying to find a temporary Chief Justice for Elephant Island. When they also heard of his moral fervour for black men they decided he was the obvious man for the job.
Being entirely humourless, he naturally assumed that his powers of mind and heart had finally been recognised, and until an indigene could be found to take his place, was determined to use his new position “to stamp out colonialism with a firm hand,” as he put it. So it was much to his distress that the first case to come up before him, under the old Criminal Code of Elephant Island, which remained in force until the new constitution was ratified on Independence Day, was that of Ajang of Niovoro.
He was charged with the murder of three young girls in a hut behind the Cosmopolitan Hotel. They worked for Madame Negretti, and one Saturday afternoon while they were dozing in their little hut, Ajang surprised them and subdued them into silent, shrinking terror with his axe, raped them, hacked them to death, and then set fire to the hut, where their charred bodies were discovered after the blaze had been extinguished.
Running from the flames with his blood-stained axe, he had been intercepted by some of Fletcher’s police who had engaged him in conversation about his recent relationship with the three girls, and the possibly psychological motivations of his pyromania, though naturally their language was not quite as sophisticated as this. At the end of their conversation they had taken him, unharmed, to Prout’s residence and handed him over to the Commissioner and his wife. Sydney and Phyllis were consternated by the fellow’s open admission of his guilt, since he had insisted on giving them a detailed description of how he had spent the gory afternoon.
Prout had put him on his honour to remain on the station until the Chief Justice’s arrival, and Ajang promised faithfully that he would be as Father of Nyikang’s little dog, following him everywhere. On the following afternoon, as he made his escape up the track from the station to go home to Niovoro, he had been ambushed by men from the girls’ village and fled for his life, pelting back to the station with the avengers at his heels and only eluding them by suddenly veering off the track and bounding down a precipitous short cut of bare clay and slippery short grass that ended at the station.
And now, in the fine new Palace of Justice, he was to answer for his atrocious crimes. He had, with the rest of the Moroks, watched its recent completion, with its pentagonal glass tower that rose nearly as high as the Gas Works, and naturally believed it was the new and grander calaboose to replace the one destroyed on Prout’s orders. If the red me
n were so anxious to build this great calaboose, what would they do to those they put inside it? The Moroks who saw it shrank inwardly with the fear of nameless imaginings.
The slate tablet above the tall bronze doors was intended to depict one of the major themes of modern justice. According to the UNESCO brochure, it depicted Justice redistributing wealth according to the Principle of Affirmative Action; unfortunately, to the artistically uninstructed, it appeared that a female with all the angular charm of a praying mantis had just snatched a cluster of objets d’art from a whimpering aesthete, and was about to bestow them on a clamorous horde of retarded delinquents.
The whole of the Mission’s personnel, except a few mothers and children, had assembled in the main courtroom and were seated on the padded red cushions along the benches of fumed oak. Although they had been joined by a number of Moroks, anxious to see what peculiar torments the building was intended to provide, the court was still only three-quarters full.
The great room was acoustically perfect, sound-proof and double-glazed, with a ceiling lined with sound-absorbent tiles, and the dimensions computer-calculated to allow the mumblings of the most repressed or cleft-palated witness to reach the Judge’s desk, which was raised above the floor by several steps. Naturally, the court was fully air-conditioned, and equipped with the latest sound-recording devices, with microphones at every strategic point. Connected by sound-proof doors was the Law Library, with a compendious selection of legal authorities from the English-speaking world, and especially strong in Admiralty and commercial law.
Sgt Oala was in the witness box, concluding his evidence on the flight of Ajang from the burning hut, and his subsequent confession to the police. Since the Chief Justice did not understand Pidgin, an interpreter from the Mission was necessary.