The Four Beauties

by H. E. Bates

  Riding back to the hotel the American, less oppressed by the guilt and irritations of inefficiency now that he had expressed his thoughts about it, found himself sometimes glancing from side to side. Beyond the masses of bright yellow and carmine crotons, with their twisted elegance that he was so fond of photographing, and beyond the rampant hedges of hibiscus and ginger-lily and creeper and the trees of tiare and jasmine that would smell more and more exquisitely as dusk came on, lay the stilted huts of palm-thatch that he knew so well. Above the huts spread the palms; and below the palms ran the little streams, open sewers, crossed here and there by crumbling bridges, that did not smell so exquisitely in the heat of noon. Under the palms, with their fallen coconuts, ran the rats, eating at the coconuts. Into the half-eaten nuts fell the rain and in the cups of rain bred the mosquitoes. That was his constant, evil cycle. With a revulsion that never lessened with each experience of it he longed to sweep it all away.

  From one of the huts a half-Chinese woman, seeing the two doctors bicycling past, rattled with a length of bamboo on the edge of a tin roof, attracting their attention, calling something at the same time.

  ‘What does she say?’ the American said.

  The Frenchman alighted from the bicycle and stood listening.

  ‘Something about someone being ill there.’

  ‘Did we call there already?’

  ‘We called there yesterday. But there was no answer. We thought they were out. Fishing.’

  It did not seem to the American worth the bother of getting off the bicycle. The pattern was one, he thought, he knew too well.

  ‘Getting sick in readiness for us,’ he said. ‘Sickness is better than cure. We know that one.’

  ‘Ought I perhaps to go in?’

  The woman again shouted something as the American bicycled on.

  ‘Come back after lunch. It’s only five minutes,’ he said. ‘Tell her you’ll be back in an hour. Tell her to stay there.’

  At lunch the American was pleased to see the melon, a sugary-golden variety, with black frosty seeds, that the boy had told Ginette to get for him. Edison’s coffee was again quite beyond praise and the only trace of the doctor’s irritations of the morning arose from the fact that the coffee was too hot to drink as quickly as he wanted.

  ‘I’ll be back in a few days,’ he said to Edison. ‘At the most a week. Was there something you wanted?’

  ‘Hell, no,’ Edison said. ‘I keep telling you. We’ve got everything here.’

  ‘Including yaws, TB, three sorts of—’ the doctor started thinking and then checked himself abruptly. There was no time, even for the sake of candour, he told himself, to get himself involved in newer, further irritations. He would even decline, he thought, to take too much notice of how drunk Edison was, much drunker than at noon the previous day; or that on the face of the girl the sense of rift that had troubled him so sorely at yesterday’s lunch had grown more pressing and more mystifying, a sharper pain.

  ‘Do you wish me to ride the other bicycle to the plane with you?’ Longuemart said, ‘or could someone else perhaps ride it? I ought to get back to that woman. I think I ought to see what’s the trouble there.’

  ‘Timi can ride the bicycle,’ the American said. ‘The boy can ride it. If that’s OK with Eddo?’

  ‘Everything’s OK,’ Edison said.

  ‘I’ll come down to the plane with you,’ the girl said suddenly, ‘I’d like to. I’ll ride the bicycle.’

  Riding the bicycle along the water-front to the air-strip beyond the belt of palms the doctor noticed that the girl hardly spoke at all. He could not help admiring, once again, as he always did, her sumptuous strength as she helped him load the bicycles into the little plane; but he was inexplicably touched too by the brooding rift in her face, by the emotion in the broad, quivering nose, and he said, just before preparing to climb into the cockpit:

  ‘Like to come to Papeete? Room for you if you cared to come.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Would do you good. Nice for you.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  Before speaking again the doctor performed once again his sudden trick of sniffing at air. He looked instinctively along the water-front in the direction of the crumbling hotel and thought that, once more, as yesterday, he caught a sudden smell of corruption in the air.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ he said.

  From the cavernous mass of her dark hair, turning her face away, she looked down at the dust of the air-strip, not answering.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ he said. He was moved to put his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I know something’s wrong because you laughed too much yesterday.’

  ‘He is taking another vahini,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

  Half an hour later she was still standing on the air-strip, gazing across the empty sky above the lagoon, as if half-hoping that the Rapide would for some reason appear and come back, when Dr Longuemart suddenly came running along the water-front at an agitated trot.

  ‘Has it gone? Has Gregory gone?’

  The stupidity of the question, aimed at an air-strip quite empty except for herself, made him stop short, white as his own shirt with exhaustion, panting self-reproaches.

  ‘I might have caught him if I’d had another bicycle,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t find Eddo. I might have caught him—’

  She stared at him with sudden bitterness.

  ‘I could have told you where Eddo is,’ she said. ‘Why do you want the doctor? What’s wrong?’

  With difficulty the young Frenchman pulled his words together.

  ‘There are three cases of typhoid in that house,’ he said. ‘And two in another.’

  On the floor of the shed, in the stifling heat of the afternoon, Fat Uncle slept like a tired ape. The machine had stopped. The boy was dozing too.

  Half dreaming, he could hear nothing but the sound of the Pacific beating against the reef. Of all the sounds in his life it was the one he heard least consciously. It simply beat through the days without rest, so that he heard it only as he might have heard the constant and ceaseless tick of a clock on a wall.

  It occurred to him suddenly in this half-dream that the sea had begun to speak to him with several voices. Across the hot air these voices were arguing with complexity about something, uplifted.

  He listened for several minutes, slowly waking, and then got up. It was not until he reached the door of the hut that he realised that the sea, or the envelope of hot dead air enclosing the sea, had played on him the oddest of tricks. The voices were real voices. He could in fact already hear Edison’s voice among them, louder than the rest, and they came from inside the hotel.

  He walked across the yard. Between the yard and the cubicles that faced on to the water-front was a kitchen where cockroaches as large as mice ran for cover when the evening lamp was lit and where a lean and almost hairless Chinaman prepared fish and vegetables, cooked and washed up dishes. This Chinaman too was asleep, his head resting on the comparatively cool edge of the sink, one yellow hand on a tap, as if in the act of turning it.

  The boy remembered then that it was another of his tasks to pump water. If he forgot to work the rotary pump that pushed water up to the tank in the roof then the Chinaman turned his taps in vain and consequently came out into the yard and beat him, as Fat Uncle sometimes did, with a thin, spearlike length of bamboo.

  He was only too well aware of the significance of the hand on the tap and he slipped through the kitchen swiftly and soundlessly, bringing himself up sharply beyond the door that led into the front saloon, where the first figure he saw was that of Edison, who was waving a drumstick, and the first voice he heard was that of the young French doctor:

  ‘I simply ask you this – is the schooner seaworthy? That’s all. And you answer me neither one way nor the other.’

  With a gesture of expansive sarcasm Edison waved the drumstick.

  ‘Seaworthy? Seaworthy? Of course she’s seaworthy. Take a l
ook at her before she falls in half.’

  Cane blinds drawn against the heat across the openings beyond the cubicles made the interior of the hotel shadowy and it was some moments before the boy could make out the figures of both Edison and the doctor, sitting in one of the cubicles, and the face of a girl he thought at first was Ginette.

  As his eyes became used to the shadows he saw presently that it was not Ginette. The hair of the girl who sat in the cubicle was less dense and was plaited. Her body was feline, compact and rather small and sometimes she sucked at a long glass, through a straw.

  ‘You don’t seem to be able to get it into your head that the schooner is the only means of communication we’ve got,’ the young doctor said. His voice was restless with urgency. ‘Can’t you see that? Don’t you understand?’

  ‘Communication?’

  Edison said, ‘God, there’s bags of communication.’ He waved the drumstick. ‘Walk along the water-front. You’ll find twenty canoes. They’ll take you.’

  ‘A hundred and thirty miles?’ the doctor said. ‘It would take a week. I want someone there tonight. Tomorrow morning anyway. That’s why it’s got to be the schooner.’

  ‘Got to be? Got to be? Hark at that,’ Edison said. ‘Hark at that.’

  There was hardly more than a word or two in this conversation that the boy could fully understand. He watched with fascination the sarcastic swings of Edison’s drumstick and the upraised restless hands of the doctor, fingers up-stretched in protest or appeal.

  ‘Will you take her?’ the young doctor said. ‘That’s all I’m asking. Will you take her?’

  ‘Not on your life.’

  ‘I’m not asking you on your life,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m asking you on the lives of the people on the island. Perhaps all of you. God man, in three days we’ll have a ramping, raging epidemic here!’

  ‘Will we?’ Edison said. ‘If I’m going to snuff it I’ll snuff it here in the hotel. In comfort. Not in that bloody colander out there.’

  ‘I don’t believe you even half grasp what the situation is,’ the doctor said. ‘Not a quarter—’

  ‘Hell, it’s probably only bellyache.’ Edison, picking up a whisky bottle, poured out half a tumbler and pushed the bottle across the table towards the doctor. ‘Help yourself. Give ’em all a shot of bug-killer.’

  Before the doctor could move or speak again the boy saw Ginette, for the first time, as she moved across the cane blind beyond the cubicle. Half encased in her mass of black hair she had been so much part of the shadow that he had never noticed her there.

  Now she simply came forward, halted a foot or two from the table and looked at Edison.

  ‘If you won’t take her, Fat Uncle will take her.’

  ‘Fat Uncle. That fat idiot? My God, Fat Uncle?’

  ‘And if Fat Uncle won’t take her I’ll take her myself.’

  ‘You. Fat Uncle. Fat Uncle. You.’

  With contempt Edison threw away the drumstick. It landed among the drums and cymbals on the little dais where Edison and Fat Uncle sat on Saturdays to play for dancing. In the silence that followed Edison drank again. The doctor did not speak and the girl sucked at her straw.

  In fascination the boy stood watching Ginette. He saw her put her hands, palms outspread, on the flanks of her big hips. He watched her throw back her head, tossing the thick mass of hair from her shoulders. On her face was a look he had never seen there before. It struck him as being a look of calm, proud loathing.

  A moment later she started to move towards the door where the boy stood watching. She still did not speak. As she moved away from the cubicle, Edison, in a further gesture of contempt, put one arm round the waist and under the naked arms of the girl beside him and the girl, in the act of sucking at her glass, laughed suddenly so that she seemed to spit down the straw.

  ‘I’m going to ask Fat Uncle. Even Fat Uncle has grown up from being a sucking-pig.’

  The boy saw Edison seize the bottle as if it were a hammer and a moment later he himself was through the kitchen, running, afraid the crash of the bottle would wake the Chinaman, who in turn would start yelling for water. But the crash, for some reason, never came and he was beyond the kitchen and across the yard and inside the shed, waking Fat Uncle, before he recovered from fear and astonishment.

  In the shed he had a further moment of astonishment when the girl arrived. In a few seconds it rose to a strange elation. Suddenly, and for the first time, as the girl began to speak to Fat Uncle, now pulling himself lethargically and still only half awake to sit on a soda-water crate, he began to understand what had been going on between Edison, Ginette and the young French doctor in the front part of the hotel.

  He surmised, with exultation, that the schooner might, at last, be going to sea. The boat that went like a bird and in which Fat Uncle had splendidly roved the world, in the fashion of a sea-king, was about to sail, miraculously and unbelievably, beyond the reef again.

  ‘There is great danger,’ the girl said. ‘I mean not with the boat. From the epidemic. We have to be in Papeete tomorrow morning and pick up things for the doctor and then come back quickly. Does the engine work?’

  Ape-like and groping, Fat Uncle sat shaking his head.

  ‘It’s not my boat. It’s Edison’s boat.’

  ‘He’ll come. He’s drunk now. But he’ll come.’

  ‘Will the doctor come too?’

  ‘No: the doctor won’t come. He’ll stay here, with the sick ones. But I’ll come.’

  It did not seem to the boy that there was either fear or reluctance on the face of Fat Uncle, scratching his head as he pored, eyes groping, over the soda-bottling machine. It was altogether impossible for Fat Uncle, the man of great voyages, the creator of infinite legends, to show fear or reluctance. Fat Uncle was the man who had never been afraid. He interpreted it merely as the uncertainty of a man suddenly waking from sleep and finding himself momentarily stunned by the shattering import of news he had long wanted to hear.

  ‘Does the engine work, I asked you?’

  ‘I can’t do it. I could never do it. It’s Edison’s boat.’

  ‘You’ve got to do it. The whole island may die if you don’t do it. All of us. You too.’

  The shattered, crumbling figure of Fat Uncle stood up. The boy looked up at him with sensations of rising, exultant pride. He felt too that he suddenly loved the gross, simple, bloated mass of flesh in a way quite unexperienced, quite unknown, before.

  ‘It’s Edison’s boat. He’ll never let me.’

  ‘He’ll let you. I’ll see to it. He’ll let you.’

  ‘And what if he won’t? What then?’

  ‘He’ll come,’ she said. ‘You didn’t see him when I called him sucking-pig.’

  In another moment a sensation of exorbitant impossible hope ran through the boy. In a dazzling second of revelation he realised that he was within reach of becoming one with Fat Uncle, with the girl and perhaps with Edison, on the schooner. He too might be able to go.

  ‘Fat Uncle, Fat Uncle,’ he started to say and touched the arm of the quaking mass of flesh still groping about the centre of the hut.

  The shock of his touch on the nervous flesh of the man was so great that Fat Uncle swung the elephantine arm that so often hit him when the soda-bottling machine became jammed. But now the arm trembled so much that it did not strike him and a moment later the Chinaman was yelling across the yard:

  ‘No water! No water! I kill you one of these days!’

  The voice seemed to give Fat Uncle a remarkable burst of courage. The boy, caught between the stumbling sweating figure and the menace of the Chinaman in the yard, darted to one side, trying to escape, only to be caught this time by a lumbering backhander that knocked him off his feet.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ he shouted. ‘I got things to do – I got things on my mind! Can’t you see? Things on my mind!’

  For the rest of the afternoon the boy pumped water. Sometimes on days when he forgot to fill the tank he heard
a distinct sharp snarl of steam as water hit scalding metal on the exposed roof-top, but today he did not listen for the sound. His ears were on the sea.

  From time to time the Chinaman, who did not take his pills either, came out of the kitchen to squeak thin admonitions across the yard:

  ‘I keep you pumping till midnight! See! I teach you to forget to pump! Keep you pumping till midnight!’

  When darkness fell with sudden swiftness the boy was still pumping. At intervals he paused to listen, looking across the yard with solemn eyes in the direction of the hotel, but there was never a sound that would tell him what was going on there or if anything was going on at all.

  Some time later darkness filled him with a new fear: the fear that Edison, the girl and Fat Uncle might have already manned the schooner, crept beyond the lagoon without his knowing it and disappeared. He could not bear this thought. He instinctively stopped pumping and ran out of the yard and across the water-front without stopping to think of the Chinaman or what he would do when he found he was no longer pumping.

  To his great surprise and delight the schooner was still moored at the jetty. He ran on and stood at the water-side, looking at her. A great change, he thought, had come over her. Someone had left a lighted hurricane lamp hanging on the side of the deck-house and the light gave to the entire scabby structure of the boat a golden, ethereal glow.

  He had never seen her looking like that; it made him catch his breath to see her bathed in light, mysterious and glowing. Across shallow parts of the lagoon beyond her a few men were already fishing, wading waist-deep in water, carrying their flares above their heads, or in canoes that carried flares on poles.

  A moment later he actually felt a flame run through his body as he saw Fat Uncle and the girl appear on deck. He wanted to run forward. Fat Uncle had an oil drum in one hand. He swung the drum lightly as he crossed the deck and the boy knew that it was empty.

  In his excitement he was ready to run forward to meet them when he heard, from behind him, the sound of other figures crossing the water-front. He instinctively turned and darted away, as he so often did, from the menace of approaching men, hiding himself behind a palm-roofed structure of three sheets of corrugated iron that formed a stall where, in the day time, a woman sold fruit, green coconuts and slices of water-melon.