Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  Thing is, Vivien, when I ditched that Sabre I knew I hadn’t long to live. About the time your letter came I got bad news from the M.O. Myeloid leukemia. Par for the course apparently—thyroid, gonads, then everything goes pear-shaped. He gave me three to four months. I’m beating the odds a bit, but I won’t walk away from this. You must understand there isn’t time for me to get home from here—certainly not in a state you’d want to see. Or the girls. I don’t want Lottie and Livvy to watch their father die. So I think it best to stick to what you were told by the War Office. Missing in action. Let’s tell them their old Dad went down in a good cause, helping to make a better world for little girls.

  Nobody here knows who I am. (Except Teraupoo now, and he’s given his word.) They think I’m a shipwrecked yachtsman. It’s rather fun—the odd thing about playing someone else is that you become someone else. I’m sure you know all about this from your acting days, but it’s a revelation to me. It’s how I made friends with Livvy’s father. Couldn’t miss him in this place—a big brown chap with a stoop and the Henderson nose. He’s everything you say he is, but he hadn’t a clue who I was. Not till last week.

  I can see why he lives here. Tahiti sounds too busy, too many reminders of the war and who’s in charge. This is the most breathtaking spot on Earth. Wild, insanely mountainous, nothing like the Marshalls. (I’d give a lot to have my Leica.) The people are silent and brooding till you get to know them. You’ve seen them in every Gauguin painting. The girls make one ache. The men look like they’d eat you at the drop of a hat. But really it’s like any English village—some people are tight as peas in a pod, others haven’t spoken to their next-door neighbour in years.

  The storekeeper’s lent me a hut of his by the beach. In return I keep his fridges going (always playing up). He’s Chinese—sometimes he lets me have a whiff of poppy, which makes me feel right as rain. I’m still pretty good, still getting out for walks.

  A week ago Teraupoo and I got squiffed on the hooch he makes with his medical kit. Began exchanging confidences. He’s none too well himself, though he’ll outrun me by miles. I got a bit carried away—got the notion that since I wouldn’t make it back to Hitchin, he should go in my place. Husband for you and a father for both girls. So I told him who I was. Didn’t think he’d turn a hair. Women used to have several husbands at once on these islands.

  Evidently that’s not how they do things nowadays. Never seen a man so frightened. Thought I was playing cat and mouse with him. He’s like all those poor devils who went through the camps, always watching from the corner of his eye. Suddenly this mild-mannered chap, none too fit but heavy enough, is on me like a sumo wrestler. Luckily Tang hears the rumpus. He and a couple of his customers pull us apart.

  Two days later we’re pals again. Faraniki understands now that my suggestion’s serious. (I told him everything—he’s even examined me and I’m afraid his opinion is the same as the M.O.’s.) From what he’s said about his own family, I gather he’s a sort of last of the Mohicans. So for him to learn he has a three-year-old is immensely good news. He became ecstatic, hugging me, weeping and moaning.

  When he calmed down he told me about Frank and Tiurai. Same as he told you. Then he brought out Franks old cigarette case. A lovely thing, inscribed to “Jackdaw” Henderson. He absolutely insisted I take it—that I be the one to give it to Livvy, or I should send it if I wasn’t going back. I said he should keep it and give it her himself, when time’s ripe. Good calling card. He balked at that. Perhaps he …

  There Jon stopped, in the middle of a page. I turned the sheet over in disbelief. I stood up and sat down, read the whole letter again and again, as if I could somehow extend its length by repetition. I got nowhere with Mother’s. Every time I tried to peel it open, the damp wad threatened to disintegrate. It needed drying, tweezers, a steady hand.

  When I couldn’t read any longer, I wrote up what Tari Kautai had told me. Then I lay awake until just before dawn, speculations tunnelling in my mind like worms. Perhaps Faraniki what? Felt guilty? Didn’t want to see my mother? Didn’t think he could face Europe again, not even Hitchin? Or was it that he knew more about the state of his own health than he was letting on, had decided to stay in Taiohae for the rest of a short life, like Jon?

  Most of all I thought about Jon’s fall from Vaiahu. It can’t have been his first trip behind Muake, not if he was walking so much. He would have known that ground. Perhaps familiarity made him careless, made him peer from a slippery cornice after a storm, as I did. Perhaps he was frailer than he admits. Or it really might have been a centipede. Or was it the same demon that made him forget his fuel gauge, a reckless invitation for death to take him whole instead of piecemeal? All this I still don’t know, and never will.

  But why not finish the line? Schooners don’t move that fast. Why not end the paragraph and write I love you?

  Rain woke me mid-morning, loud as hail on the metal roof. Through the window came a smell of earth and wet ashes. I didn’t feel like a tourist or a filmmaker anymore. I had a claim on this corner of the world, and it on me: a blood-and-soil thing. If you work it out, I’m three-eighths Polynesian, which makes you three-sixteenths. (Unless Lumley also had some warm blood in his veins, but I doubt that very much.)

  I sat on Madame Kekela’s verandah, rereading the fragile blue pages by daylight, thinking over the trace of that wheel trundling down upon our lives through a century. Because Frank Henderson took a lover in 1881, my mother takes a lover in 1949. Because of this, I exist. Obvious yet indigestible. But does Jon also crash because of this? Am I prone to seduction in 1966 because of his disappearance in 1953? Is that why I abandoned you?

  • • •

  About noon the sun came out, and we heard the helicopter. I worried I’d overtaxed old Kautai, sent him back to hospital. But it landed in a small field beside Madame Kekela’s, scattering her goats. It had come for me.

  For some time I stayed put, obstinately smoking. Eventually the pilot came and helped me pack. Then I heard voices. It was Martine, breathless from running, speaking quickly in Marquesan.

  “She has something for you,” said Madame Kekela. Martine pressed Henderson’s cigarette case into my hand and kissed me on both cheeks.

  “She thanks you but she can’t keep it. It has many ghosts. The ghosts are yours.”

  Sixteen

  THERE’S ONE MORE DOCUMENT in the Henderson papers from my father’s darkroom. (I can’t break the habit of a lifetime: Jon is still my father, though I haven’t a drop of his blood. I tell you this even if it cooks my goose with you. The woman who raised you is your mother. I gave birth like a turtle who drops her eggs in the sand and swims away. No illusions there.)

  If Frank wrote more about Bacchante’s voyage or his later life, nothing else remains. This letter was tucked into his last notebook.

  Whitehall. May 24th, 1918

  Mr. G. D. Samuels,

  Samuels and Fraser, Solicitors,

  27 Harrington Street,

  London S.W.

  My Dear Gerald,

  Our schooldays are long ago now, and our paths have crossed too seldom since. I very much regret that misfortune should be the occasion of my writing to you after being so long out of touch. Only yesterday I learnt that you too are a victim of the air raids. With the greatest relief I heard you weren’t in the building at the time, but I am deeply distressed a young employee lost his life. I don’t know his name, but if you judge the sentiment appropriate, please pass on my condolences to his family, from a fellow sufferer in this foul roulette.

  I trust that all your family and the rest of the staff are safe, and that this will be forwarded promptly. Where will you be living and working until your premises can be rebuilt?

  Our own loss—not three months ago—is so painful that I’ve been unable to let many people know. I shall come to it later in this letter. Forgive me for waiting until now. Allow me first to address something that will strike you as utterly trivial by comparison. I refer t
o the sealed papers I left with you many years ago, which I now fear may be blasted over half of Chelsea, if they weren’t destroyed in the hit. (If they were, well and good, so long as the destruction is total.)

  I realize there must be a great many things demanding your attention at this dreadful time, but I’m afraid it is urgent that these old writings of mine not fall into the wrong hands (onlookers, looters, members of the press, police, etc.), indeed, into any hands but yours or mine, even in a fragmentary state. Since, if memory serves, I never divulged their contents when I left them with you, I should do so briefly now in order that they may be recognized if they turn up in the rubble.

  About twenty years ago, when I was still a young man (though at the time I felt old and spent, and my health was far from robust) I fell prey to certain fears about what struck me as a sinister pattern of events. I was unwise enough—this was in the years 1899 and 1900, whilst home on sick leave from the Gold Coast—to set down a rambling narrative in several notebooks which, as you may recall, were to remain sealed until my death. In my feverish condition, I believed certain persons might want me out of the way; indeed, I thought attempts on my life had already been made, either by poison or through agents colluding with anti-British forces against whom I fought a disastrous engagement in West Africa. I prefer not to go into the ultimate source of this obsession, except to say that it sprang from much earlier events to which I was privy as a young naval officer, during a period of high imperial tension between us and the French in the South Seas.

  I need hardly make the trite observation that those Victorian manoeuvrings belong to another world—remote as the War of Jenkins’ Ear from the suicidal catastrophe in which Mankind has now embroiled itself. In those days France was our eternal foe; now she is our friend, and the fount of evil isn’t Paris but Berlin. In those days we counted losses in thousands; now they are reckoned in millions. In those days men of arms fought one another in more or less chivalrous engagements; now cowards hurl down death from on high, neither knowing nor caring upon whom it lands. These attackers who drone across our skies on moonlit nights may not be cowardly in themselves, but this new form of warfare, waged against women, children and the old, is inherently dishonourable. We did right to try to ban it before it could take wing. (I had a small part in that initiative at The Hague about ten years ago.) Would that we’d succeeded!

  I have served this country all my life, and serve it still, in a capacity of which I can say nothing except that it touches on security. If my youthful imaginings had any substance to them, I doubt I’d be entrusted with my present duties. Yet it could be very serious—not merely for myself but for public morale—if my old papers fell into the wrong hands. A prominent figure was involved, and the enemy might find my indiscretions grist for propaganda.

  To have said even this much is indiscreet. When you’ve read this note, please be so good as to destroy it at once (or secure it with my notebooks to the same end). Long before the War, I meant to retrieve these old papers from you and make a bonfire of them. I kept putting it off. After the Entente Cordiale and the shift in our alliances the whole business seemed so outdated. Other things were always more pressing, and I was abroad much of the time.

  I suppose there may also have been a reluctance to confront my younger self. What man wants to revisit himself as he was during dark hours of instability and weakness? Yet what man can be sure he would resist such an opportunity were it presented? Perhaps I feared that the resolve needed to throw those books into the flames unopened might elude me. Curiosity is the downfall of men as well as cats. In short, my old nonsense was safer with you than with me, and I am anxious about it now only because of the bombing. Who could have foreseen this war of Zeppelins and Gothas, the first invasion in nine centuries carried to the very bedrooms of our nation? It seems (to one who trod teak decks and learnt his gunnery with muzzle-loading cannon) a hellish vision from the pen of Mr. Wells.

  Were I to be charitable towards my callow self, I would say that the mania to which I fell prey stemmed from an inability to accept that much of the suffering in life has no logic, no trajectory of cause and effect; that it is mere random misfortune, the common lot of mankind, stemming from our imperfect, grasping, violent natures. How thoroughly we have all learnt that lesson now!

  In the far-off days before this unending and perhaps unendable war, we believed that reason governed human events, more or less; that the domain of reason was enlarged by the march of science; and that when things went wrong, a rational explanation was there to be discovered. Now we have only to open a newspaper, or talk to our many bereaved friends and relations, to know that Man is not a rational being but an unfinished and rather nasty piece of work: clever enough to get himself in trouble, but not clever enough to get himself out. In short, we know ourselves to be doomed by our own hand and cursed by whatever gods there may be, peering down on us from their corrupt heaven like schoolboys pouring acid onto an ants’ nest.

  I’ve tossed my religion on the dust heap. How can one keep faith with a Prince of Peace who has brought us to this? But I hope the Lord has not forsaken you. The world is a lonely place without Him—a frightening place once one begins to think that Man, not God, is in charge.

  Most of my life has been spent serving the Empire. When the World War ends, if ever it does, how will we look our colonies in the face? What can we say to those we told, in the sunny afternoon of our arrogance, that we knew best? How can they possibly look up to us now, when our civilization tears at itself with a barbarity that makes the savageries of Africa appear like a village brawl? How shall our churchmen persuade the heathen we bring the True God, when ten million have died in whirlwinds of steel, each side having called upon His name?

  We had a daughter, Ivry and I—our only child, for we married late. When my dear wife revealed she was a mother-to-be, I worried, above all, that I might lose her to childbirth. Now we have both outlived our offspring.

  We christened her Olivia, because Ivry took Olivias part in a family reading of Twelfth Night at the time she gave me her news. I can’t remember whether you ever met our daughter; if you did she must have been quite small. She grew into a lovely, vivacious, intelligent girl, with her mother’s poise, sagacity, good humour and good looks, tempered by a moody introspection inherited from me. In short, she enjoyed life but also took it seriously—especially in what she saw as her duty towards fellow creatures.

  Last year she left school, determined to do something for the war effort. There was no stopping her. I had to admire the Henderson blood coming out in one so young, and the wrong sex, but I admired much more the fact that she did not endorse the slaughter. She was not among those silly girls who sent white feathers to sensible young men. She did not exult over enemy dead. She saw that this war can have no winners, that we are all immeasurably ruined by it, no matter where ultimate victory may fall.

  So Olivia would not work in munitions or other furtherance of the carnage. Had she been medically inclined she might have taken up nursing, at Home or the Front. (I thank heaven she never saw the trenches.) But her one shyness of character, since a young child, was a dislike of things medical. I doubt she could have endured the lot of a nurse, watching men die slowly of terrible mutilations, seeing even the lucky ones traverse great seas of pain.

  Olivia was particularly outraged by the onrush of death from the air. This started the summer before last, when she turned sixteen and grew up very quickly, faint lines appearing on her brow. That June a school was hit in Poplar, killing twenty children. A hundred rail passengers died at Liverpool Street in the same raid. She had been at that station only a few days before, and naturally she asked herself, Why them, not me? It was the victims’ innocence that especially appalled her. I remember the fury of her tears when a bomb fell into the Serpentine, killing all the fish. Children, housewives, pets, even fish: why should they suffer for the madness of men?

  So Olivia found an original way in which to make a contribution. She had m
e teach her how to drive a motor, and when still seventeen became an auxiliary driver of a fire engine. There is a great shortage of drivers everywhere, of course, but especially in London around each full moon, when German bombing squadrons take advantage of the light. Obstacles were thrown in her way by petty officialdom, but she overcame them all. (I prodded the pen-pushers a little, but Olivia never knew of that.) I’m very proud of how she served, but nothing can console us for her loss. Now I’d give anything in the world to have locked my daughter away for the duration and have her still alive.

  Olivias work began last January, when the Germans started sending over their new Giant machines with three-hundred-kilogram bombs. She went up to stay at my sisters in Warrington Crescent, five minutes from a fire station. She was called to Long Acre, where many died in a direct hit on an air-raid shelter, and I’m told she did her duties well. She wasn’t needed again until the next full moon, when houses were razed near Chelsea Hospital.

  A cruel irony, Gerald, is that our daughter did not die in the thick of her brave war work, though she died because of it. She was sleeping at her aunt’s when a surprise raid began on March 7th, the only time, so far, that London has been attacked without a moon. That night the aurora borealis was so bright and constant that the enemy found their way by its spectral light. Most of the houses in Warrington Crescent were wrecked. My sister Gertrude escaped without a scratch, but a bomb fragment pierced Olivia in the stomach. She developed peritonitis, and died three days later. Ivry and I were at her bedside, though she did not know us at the end.

  Forgive this ramble, Gerald. I’d meant to write a few lines, no more. But your own misfortune has loosed a flood of sorrow and outrage which I have contained, though scarcely been able to express, until now. I can’t speak of this to Ivry, nor she to me. She is unconsolable. But I feel I can speak to you. You and I—tho’ we have seen so little of each other as grown men—had much in common in our younger years. Now we are both stricken by this new kind of war in which evil falls from heaven upon innocents.