by Morris West
Again they repeated the chemist’s story of the girl-student who had passed their way, making the short hops between the islands in an open skiff with a puttering outboard-motor. I was sorry to tell them I had never met her. I was happy in the private thought that I never would.
Then, mercifully, the meal was over. We had no errands to run. We had only to hoist the crates on board the Wahine, up anchor and head north by east for the Island of the Twin Horns. I smiled my way through the small ceremonies of farewell, passed some banal back-chat with the tourists who came down to cheer us off . . . and then we were free again, with a freshening breeze to gladden the heart of Johnny Akimoto, and a bellying jib that gave us two knots better than the steady, chugging diesel.
Johnny nursed the Wahine onto the wind like a lover. He held her on the tack like a master. He stood at the wheel, strong legs straddled against the buck, head thrown back, eyes shining and white teeth grinning in triumph. He shouted to me, “She’s a beauty, my Wahine, eh, Renboss?”
“She’s a beauty, Johnny. What time do we raise the island?”
“Hour and a half. Two, maybe.”
“Nice work, Johnny. That gives us daylight to unload and make camp.”
He nodded, grinning still, and twitched the wheel a fraction, to follow the faint shift of the wind. Then he began to sing, a warm, crooning island song in the language of his mother’s people. The words were a mystery to me, but the melody caught at my heart and I was glad for him and sad with him and very grateful that Johnny Akimoto had made me his friend.
It was three in the afternoon when we raised the island. I stood in the forepeak braced against the stays, and watched it grow from a grey smudge to a green blur and then to a homed island with a crescent of beach. In a little while I could trace the contours of the rocks and distinguish the separate trunks of the great pisonia-trees. There was the group of pandanus that marked the spring. There was the surf-line on the outer reef and the shifting green of calm water inside the lagoon. I watched it grow and grow, filling our horizon, and I felt like a man coming home from the wars to his father’s house.
I turned and shouted to Johnny, “You know the channel, Johnny?”
He raised a hand in acknowledgment and shouted back, “I know him, Renboss !”
“You going to take her in with the engine? It’s fast and narrow.’’
He shook his head. His eyes were full of bright challenge.
“I sail her in, Renboss . . . I sail her.”
And sail her he did. With every stitch of canvas she could carry. A hundred yards from the reef he brought her round on a short tack. He lined her up with the western horn and the single beach-oak, and set at the reef like a horse to a hurdle. I felt her leap as she hit the first roller, then Johnny laid her hard over and drove her like a racer through the rip, while I watched open mouthed and waited for the coral-trees to rake the bottom out of her and strip her to the kelson.
A minute later we were through, sliding with way on through glassy water, with the white beach in front and fear and uncertainty and Manny Mannix a thousand miles behind.
I shouted and cheered and danced the deck for sheer happiness, while Johnny nosed the Wahine into anchorage.
We dropped the hook and stowed the canvas and were just preparing to take the dinghy ashore on the first run when I saw something that killed my happiness with one stroke and set me cursing obscenely in a cold fury.
At the head of the beach, where the trees began, a small tent had been pitched—and below it, careened above the tide-mark, was a small skiff with an outboard-motor.
Chapter 7
“EASY, Renboss . . . take it easy now.”
Johnny Akimoto was at my elbow, his warm voice chiding gently, talking me from madness to anger, from anger to common sense.
“It’s only the girl, Renboss. You know—the one they told us about at the guest-house.”
“I know! I know!” I shouted the words at him. “The bloody little naturalist with her putt-putt and her collection of bloody sea-slugs. Why the hell did she have to come here? Doesn’t she know this is my island?”
“No, Renboss, she doesn’t know that,” said Johnny quietly.
“Then she damned soon will. Come on, Johnny, get the dinghy. I’ll have her off the beach in twenty minutes.”
“You can’t do that, Renboss.”
There was that in Johnny’s voice which gave me pause. He laid his hand on my arm in a gesture of restraint.
“Why can’t I? She doesn’t have to stay here, does she?”
“Yes, she does. For tonight, at least. Look, Renboss !”
He pointed back to the reef and the channel we had just passed.
“You see? The tide is running in now. In the channel it makes five, six knots. With a boat like that, and a toy motor like that, how would she get through? And if she did, she could not reach the nearest island for three hours. By that time, it is dark and dangerous.”
I had no answer to that. I stared moodily across the water to the beach and wondered vaguely why the girl didn’t show up. She must have seen us coming.
Johnny spoke again.
“Renboss?”
“Yes?”
“In a minute or two we go ashore. We meet this girl. We tell her who we are. We tell her that she must leave as soon as possible. But we do it gently.”
“Why?”
“Because she is young. Because she will be a little afraid. Because it is easier to be kind to someone than hard. Because it would be bad to have her spread the story that you are an unpleasant man who does not understand the manners of the reef. . . . And because we are both gentlemen, Renboss.”
I looked up at him. His mild, wise eyes pleaded with me not to disappoint him. I gulped down my anger and gave him a crooked smile of apology.
“All right, Johnny. Be damned to you. We’ll be kind to little blue-stocking. But I tell you now, I’ll have her off this island tomorrow or my name’s not Renn Lundigan.”
His face broke into a wide smile of approval. He clapped me on the shoulder and walked aft to haul in the dinghy for the first load of stores.
We were half-way to the beach when I gave voice to the thought that had been plaguing me for the last ten minutes.
“Funny thing, Johnny, the tent’s there . . . the boat’s beached . . . Where’s the girl!”
“Round the other side, perhaps, in the rock-pools.”
“She’s a damn fool if she is, with the tide running in. There’s a sheer wall round there. If she’s not careful she’ll be spending the night on a ledge.”
“Maybe she’s sleeping.”
“Maybe.”
Johnny grinned at my ill humour and bent to the oars again. Nothing more was said until we had beached the dinghy and were striding up towards the tent. The flaps were open and the guys were slack. A careless job. She’d be lucky if it didn’t tumble about her ears at the first puff of the night-wind. I hailed her.
“Hullo, there! Anybody home?”
My voice was flung back at me from the circling ridge, but there was no answer from the tent. I was two strides ahead of Johnny when we reached it; so I was the first to see her.
At first glance I thought she was dead. Her dark hair was lank and matted about her cheeks and temples. Her face was the colour of old ivory. Her cotton blouse was torn open exposing her small round breasts. One hand trailed limply on the sandy floor, the other lay slackly across her belly. She wore a pair of faded denim shorts. One leg was outflung on the stretcher. The other dangled over the side. It was swollen and blue from knee to instep.
Then I saw that she was alive. Her breathing was shallow, laboured. I felt her pulse. It was thready and flickering. There were beads and runnels of perspiration on her face and neck and breast. She looked like a limp rag doll left by little girls at playtime.
I looked up at Johnny Akimoto. He said nothing, but bent and examined the swollen limb. He flexed the ankle-joint so that the sole of the foot tilted upwards. T
he girl stirred in a sudden spasm of pain but did not waken. Johnny motioned to me to look. Then he traced with his finger the small line of punctures stretching from the ball of the toes to the ridge of the heel. Seven of them. He shook his head gravely and said two words, “Stone-fish.”
The stone-fish is the ugliest fish in the world. Its grey brown body is a mass of wart-like growths. It is coated with thick foul slime. Its mouth is a gaping semicircle, opening upwards and livid-green inside. Along the ridge of its spine are thirteen needle-sharp quills, each with its own poison-sac. Its sting can kill a man or cripple him with racking agonies for weeks. There is no known antidote to its poison. The natives of the north dance the stone-fish dance in their initiation ceremonies so that young bucks may know the danger that lies in wait in the crevices of the coral reef.
I questioned Johnny Akimoto.
“Will she die, Johnny?”
“I don’t think so, Renboss. She is very sick. She has fever, as you see. She sleeps because she is worn out with that and the pain. But she will not die, I think, unless the poison in the leg gets worse.”
“We shall have to get her to a doctor, Johnny.”
Johnny shrugged. “I have seen what the doctors do with this sort of thing. They know as little as we do about the poison of the stone-fish.”
“But, damn it all, Johnny, she can’t stay here! We can’t look after her.”
“Why not? We have the medicine-chest. We have sulpha and the other drugs. We know what to do. Besides, if we take her to the mainland we lose two days. A day there . . . a day back.”
A wise fellow, Johnny. A shrewd, secret man from the old islands. He knew better than I did, myself, what would bend me to his wishes. I resigned myself to the situation.
“All right, Johnny, have it your way. Get back to the Wahine and bring the medicine-chest—and a couple of clean sheets while you’re about it.”
“Yes, Renboss,” said Johnny. He gave me a small ironic smile and walked swiftly out of the tent.
When he had gone I settled the girl more comfortably on the stretcher and looked around. There was a small folding table loaded with stoppered jars of marine specimens. There were bottles of acetone and formaldehyde. There were scalpels and tweezers and scissors and a good microscope. There was a canvas chair and a bucket and a collapsible canvas basin. There was a rucksack with clothes and towels and a small cosmetic case. On the face of it, the girl was a genuine student who knew her job and worked at it.
Against this was the fact that she had walked the reef in bare feet. . . an intolerable folly that had nearly killed her and might well wreck my plans for the raising of the treasure-ship.
I settled her more comfortably on the narrow stretcher, then took the bucket and walked up to the spring under the pandanus-tree. Had I come to the island as I had hoped to come, I might have gone running and singing. Now I was full of the fiat taste of disappointment. I filled the bucket with fresh, cool water and as I walked back I saw Johnny Akimoto casting off the loaded dinghy for the pull back to shore.
He waved to me and I waved back, but in spite of the comradely gesture I was irritated with Johnny Akimoto. All very well for him to be bland and logical about the situation. This was my island, as the Wahine was his boat. This was . . . . Then I saw the humour of it, saw what a cross-grained creature disappointed greed can make of a frustrated don. I began to chuckle, and by the time I reached the tent I was in reasonable humour again.
I poured water into the canvas basin. I rummaged in the rucksack for clean clothing. I found a fresh towel and a face-washer. Then, turning back to the girl on the bed, I began to bathe her. I stripped off the dank clothing and sponged the fever sweat from her body.
She groaned and opened her eyes as the cold water flowed over her. But her expression was blank and she mumbled unintelligibly, then fell limply back against the sodden pillow.
Sickness is never beautiful. The service of a sick body provokes pity but not desire. The girl, cradled in my arms, was beautiful, there was no doubt of that; but fever and shock and the wrenching pains of the poison had marred her beauty and left her like a wax image, without pulse or passion, almost without life.
I had just finished dressing her in the fresh clothes when Johnny Akimoto came back. He nodded approval, then set the medicine-chest on the table and took out the scalpel, which he sterilized carefully in the flame of a cigarette-lighter. There was a delicacy and precision about his movements that made me wonder what education and opportunity might have done for this calm, deep man, whose alien blood had condemned him to isolation among his white brothers.
“Let her lie back,” said Johnny. “I want you to help me.”
We knelt at the foot of the stretcher and I took the girl’s foot in my hands, tilting it and holding it firm, while Johnny made a deep incision along the line of the spine-marks. The girl groaned and writhed, while a great gush of fetid matter spurted from the puffy flesh. Johnny drained the wound, washed it, dressed it generously with sulpha powder and bound it with clean gauze. I watched, gaping, while he took a syringe and injected a careful measure of penicillin into the girl’s arm.
“Where did you learn all this, Johnny?” I could not keep the surprise from my voice.
“In the army, Renboss,” said Johnny calmly. “I was a medical orderly at Salamaua field-hospital.”
He took the ampoule out of the syringe and laid it carefully back in its container.
“We sterilize these things later, when we have hot water.”
I agreed meekly. “Yes, Johnny.”
The girl was moaning now, fighting her slow way back to consciousness. I lifted her and held her in my arms while Johnny stripped the stretcher and remade it again with one of our palliasses and a pair of clean sheets. Then we laid her down again, drew the sheet over her and watched a . little till the moaning subsided and she slept again, breathing more regularly and deeply. Then we left her. We had work of our own to do.
We pitched our tent in an angle of rocks a few paces from the spring. It was out of the wind and sheltered from the heat by the spreading green of an ancient pisonia. We dug a drain round it to carry off water if the rain should come. We built an oven of stones against a rock wall. We unrolled sleeping-bags on the framed stretchers and disposed our few personal belongings out of the reach of ants and spiders.
We filed our big canvas water-bag and hung it, dripping, on the tent-pole to cool. We slung a tarpaulin between four tree-trunks and stacked our crates of equipment underneath it, draining the ground round them as we had drained the tent. Only fools like to rough it. The secret of a working camp is to keep it tidy, clean and dry.
Now at last we were at home. Johnny Akimoto lit a fire while I brought a billy of water from the spring and set it on to boil. We lit cigarettes and sat down to smoke while the dry wood sputtered and crackled and the small flames rose round the blackened sides of the billy.
It was a placid moment, a good moment. Had it not been for the girl in the tent on the beach-head, it would have been a perfect moment. I turned to Johnny Akimoto.
“Now, Johnny, suppose you tell me.”
“About what, Renboss?”
“About tomorrow, Johnny.”
“Tomorrow?” said Johnny calmly. “Tomorrow we start work.”
“But the girl, Johnny. What about the girl?” “The girl is ill, Renboss. She will not be able to move for days yet.”
“But she’ll be able to talk, won’t she, Johnny? She’ll be curious, won’t she, Johnny? All women are, Johnny. What do we tell her when she asks questions.
“We tell her the truth, Renboss. We tell her that you are learning to be a skin-diver and to use the apparatus for breathing under water. That is what you will be doing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose it is. But I’ll be doing more than just training.”
Johnny flicked the butt of his cigarette into the flames.
“If you are wise, Renboss, you will do nothing more than that. You will find
from the first moment that you put on the mask and make your dive into deep water that you are like a child learning his first steps. You will be uncertain. You will be afraid. You will be surrounded by monsters. You will have to learn to live and move among them like one of themselves. You will have to learn which of them are enemies to be feared. You will have to learn to manage your own body in the simplest exercises of going down and coming up and moving yourself from one place to another. I tell you now, that none of the time you give to this will be wasted. You will need all your courage and all your skill when you come to dive for the treasureship.”
Try as I might I could not shake the logic of this calm-voiced islander. I might defy it; but that could mean my own destruction and the end of all my hopes. I shrugged in wry resignation.
“All right, Johnny. We practise, we practise for days—a week, maybe. By then the girl’s moving around. She’s bored. She wants company. She’s curious about what is going on. She’s a scientist, remember, Johnny. She won’t buy the fairy-tales we sold the others.”
“Then,” said Johnny, simply, “I load her stores on the Wahine, take her boat in tow and deliver her to the mainland.”
I was beaten and I knew it, but I was irritable and refused to let the matter drop so easily.
“She’s ill, Johnny. We’ve still got to feed her and nurse her.”
“We have to feed ourselves, too, so that is nothing. As for the nursing, it is a matter of changing the dressing, morning and night. Medicine she can take herself. We make her comfortable, then leave her till meal-time.’’
The water was bubbling in the billy. I heaved myself up to make the tea, but Johnny Akimoto laid a hand on my shoulder and drew me down again. His eyes were steady. His voice was firm.
“Renboss, there is something that must be said. I will say it and then perhaps you will tell me to take my boat and the girl and leave the island. If not, then I will stay and we will never mention it again between us. I know what you want to do. I know how much and why you want to do it. It is a good thing for a man to want something at the limit of his strength. It can also be a very bad thing. When I was diving for the pearling masters there were those we hated and feared. They would go out to a new bed in the deep waters. They would find good pearls—enough to pay the divers and the crew and the expenses of the boat, and still leave a fine profit for the master, but they would not be satisfied. They would send the boys down again and again, deeper and deeper, until their ear-drums burst and blood spurted out of their mouths and nostrils, and the bends knotted them up so that they could never work again. It is a bad thing, Renboss, when a man is so hungry for money that he can spare neither thought nor pity for anyone else in the world. . . . Now it is said. If you want, I will leave in the morning.”