‘And they march in the dark again and they come to village in the dark.
‘But Wyeer, he been reach village first. He say to his people, “They are here, the fighters of Tutu. There will be killing.” Then Wyeer, he tell his people, “Hide women and children in mangroves—best hiding place.”
‘And he tell men, “Wait till little daylight.”
‘The Tutu men, they come through village. They kill all dog and pig and fowl. And they kill one old man, he lame and he die.
‘Then Tutu men wait. Then little daylight here. One Tutu man, he call out, “Come out here. This good place, good for fighting, no trees.” And the men of Badu, they say, “Right.”
‘They make two sides and two men champions of Badu, they dance in front. And Wyeer hold his men back while they dance. And the two champions, they leap and dance and they cry out, “Where you Tutu people leave your boats? We fight you back to where your canoes are. This our place, Badu.”
‘And they start.
‘The Badu men, they fight and they no go back. The Tutu men go back. And the Badu men they kill them in the trees and they kill them on the road. All the way they kill them. They kill them lots. On the beach now. They fight now on the beach. They kill them on the beach and over the water they throw their spears.
‘And in canoes are two Badu men. They been married Eastern Island women and they live in Tutu and they been left watch canoe. And now Tutu men back, but only few back. And the few kill the two Badu men in canoe and they put their heads, make fast with ropes, on poles. They stand the poles in the mud and the heads they look at Badu.
‘And the bodies, they come up and down on the beach and there are no heads. And the Badu men, they see them lift with the sea and they cry out and they fight in the water. They go in water to chest, to neck. No grip there. They spear up and Tutu men in canoe spear down. And Badu men kill and kill. In the canoes they kill. Everyone die. Everyone killed. No Tutu men live.
‘And the Tutu men come in and go out, loose in the water, dead in the water, red in the water. All die.
‘It is the end.’
Out of the Way, Mug
The entries in the diary had been written in strange places—in a plane flying over Indo-China, in a Rangoon cafe, on a Chinese junk off Hong Kong.
He wished he had taken more care with his writing. The pencil entries had rubbed and were almost illegible. He should have written them with a pen. But he had lost his pen somewhere or other.
He pushed aside a dictionary and a date pad and rested his elbow on the desk. He ran his fingers through his hair in a restless, frustrated fashion.
All he had to do was to pick out the bright spots for the article he had been commissioned to write. It shouldn’t take long. He could hear his wife setting the table in the next room. He must get an opening before dinner. If he could just break its back he would be right. All he wanted was a good lead, something colourful and romantic.
A little girl knelt on the carpet beside his chair. She was four years old and had round cheeks and blue eyes. She knelt with her knees tucked beneath her and her elbows on the floor. This position brought her face quite close to the piece of paper on which she was drawing with crayons. She frequently changed her position with swift, impetuous movements, studying her own comfort rather than seeking a posture more suitable for drawing.
She was drawing cows and talked to herself continually as she made vigorous, undisciplined strokes with a blue crayon.
‘Cows, cows, cows, cows. Two cows. This is a fence.’
She suddenly rose to her feet, impelled by a necessity for reassurance on some problem that was troubling her but which her drawing had made her temporarily forget. She came to her father and rested her chest against the arm of his chair. In this position she could balance and kick her legs in the air as she talked.
‘Dad,’ she said, ‘you know at kindergarten?’
‘Yes, dear,’ he said absently. ‘Yes. What is it?’
‘When I was at kindergarten this morning, you know what?’
‘No, I don’t,’ said the father. He marked a paragraph in the diary with a red pencil.
‘Well, I wanted a little bit of the see-saw, not much. I wanted to get on the end bit—only a little bit. Margaret and Jean were on a little bit and I got there. And then I hung on there and I was slipping. And a girl on the see-saw—Grace, she is—she said, “Out of the way, mug.” That’s what she said.’
The father turned quickly round and faced her.
‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘What did she say?’
‘“Out of the way, mug,” she said.’
The little girl was pleased at her father’s reaction. She had felt herself the victim of a great injustice. Now it was being suitably recognized.
‘Well! What do you know about that!’ the father said softly to himself.
He looked steadily at the door, feeling tired and old under the sudden envelopment of sadness. He had felt himself a shield to protect her, now something ugly had slipped past him and touched her.
He turned his head and called to his wife in the next room. ‘Hey! Did you hear that?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘she told me. You’d never think she’d meet that sort of thing at a church kindergarten, would you?’
The father grunted.
‘Dad,’ said the little girl, ‘should I have hit her? She was naughty, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes, she was, but you shouldn’t hit her. You should never hit other little girls. Only naughty girls do that. She was a very naughty girl to say that to you. She deserved a good smack.’
‘Smacking’s hitting, isn’t it, Dad?’
The question nonplussed her father. He rubbed his hand across his face. ‘Yes,’ he said lamely. ‘I suppose it is.’
‘What should I have done, Dad?’
‘Always do what I told you, dear,’ called the mother. ‘Just turn your back and walk away. When little girls talk to you like that, don’t take any notice of them. Let them have the see-saw.’
The little girl had already rejected this solution as being most unsatisfactory but her mother’s voice was firm and her father remained silent.
She returned to her crayons. The father bent his head over the diary.
You had only been in Hong Kong a few hours when the Englishman said that to you. He was a civil servant and was wearing a Palm Beach suit, remember? The pilot introduced you.
‘You are new to the East,’ he told you over a glass of beer. ‘I hope you don’t mind me giving you a few tips. I’ve lived most of my life in the East, you know.’
You murmured a recognition of his right to advise you.
‘It is important you mix with the right people, of course,’ he went on. ‘You will not be accepted if you associate with the wrong types at the beginning. As for the Chinese, treat them politely but firmly. You will find many of them insolent. Always make them give way to you. They respect strength above everything. They are filthy in their habits and generally untrustworthy.
‘You will find coolies lying stretched across the street. Some of them will not move out of the way for you. Push them aside. Remember you are a white man and our prestige is important.’
Then the hotel and the woman with the thin lips and hard eyes who had played bridge and was married to a colonel.
‘You can’t interview rickshaw boys. They are animals, incapable of expressing themselves. Besides, it is not done.’
And that night, in the hot dark, you hailed him and he ran towards you with his tired, sweating face questioning. You sat in the rickshaw feeling humiliated somehow, ashamed. . . .
He was old for a rickshaw boy—thirty, maybe—and his jog-trot was almost a shuffle compared with that of the younger boys who passed him striding freely.
He didn’t shout to clear a path. His punctured lungs supplied him with barely enough breath to run. He kept his head down in an intense rallying of his last strength, the last ten cents’ worth of all that he ever had to sell. Dow
n the narrow street with its overhanging signs, through pockets of perfume and stench till he staggered and plunged forward and went down.
But you saw him sag and you clung to the hood-stays and kept your seat. When you stepped out he was lying with his head in the gutter and blood was coming from his mouth.
You placed an arm round his shoulders and looked up, confident of help from those on the street. But no one stopped. They only glanced at you and passed on. And the white man with the linen suit, striding by, averted his eyes and went on.
You were new to the East. They nearly all died that way, with blood on their lips.
‘They die like flies here.’ you were told. ‘Death is nothing to these people.’
The dead baby in the harbour, floating with its arms and legs gently waving. You, looking down from the ferry beside the ironed, white suits that moved back from the rail.
Oh, the horror! the horror!
Babies in the gutter, babies strapped to labouring backs, babies gasping. . . . With scrofulous skin, running eyes, festering sores. . . .
‘Hong Kong is a city blessed of God,’ announced the visiting Cardinal, inspired by the fertility of the poor.
‘Dad, if I turned my back I’d never get on the see-saw, would I?’
The little girl had left her crayons and stood beside her father’s chair again.
The father lifted his head and looked at her, his mind preoccupied with other things. Her earnest expression penetrated his musing so that her question suddenly clarified in his mind and stood alone.
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ he said firmly. ‘You would never get on the see-saw.’
He pulled a packet of tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette while the little girl watched him.
‘Was this girl bigger than you?’ he asked.
‘Oo, yes! She was bigger’n me. She was real big.’
‘H’m!’ he said. Then added, as if to himself, ‘It wouldn’t do to hit her!’
‘No,’ said the little girl complacently. ‘It wouldn’t, would it!’
‘Hitting’s wrong, anyway.’
‘Yes, hitting is wrong, isn’t it, Dad?’
‘Were there any other little girls on the see-saw?’
‘Yes, there were. She pushed them along where there are splinters and she sat on the good part.’
The little girl thought for a moment, then said, ‘There was plenty of room on the good part, Dad. I only wanted a little bit.’
‘She was a naughty girl,’ said the father. ‘If I’d been there I wouldn’t have let her push you off.’
‘No,’ said the little girl, finding pleasure in the thought. ‘You wouldn’t let her, would you?’
Her voice grew importunate again. ‘What should I have done, Dad?’
‘Don’t worry your father, dear,’ called the mother. ‘He wants to work. I told you the little girl was naughty. If she does it again, keep away from the see-saw. Turn your back and walk away. Now, draw Mummy a picture of a dog.’
The little girl moved reluctantly back to her crayons. The father slowly turned the pages of his diary then stopped.
That night in Rangoon the American wore moghra blossoms in her hair and, from her seat at the sidewalk cafe table in Mogul Street, she fed the beggars. Her slender fingers, encircled with rings, dipped into the curry and the rice and the kakab, transferring the remains of your dishes to the rusty tins of mothers carrying babies.
‘No more,’ she said with a gesture of distaste as they surged towards her. ‘Be off, now.’
Her husband brooding there, and you a captive in a circle that restricted your association with the people to the touch of a beggar’s hand.
‘I saw an advertisement in the paper today,’ you said. ‘A small group of Burmese are meeting to discuss ancient Burmese music. It starts at eight and is being held in some street—I have the address here,’ and you took a piece of paper from your pocket and read the address it contained. ‘I’m going.’
‘You can’t go there,’ said the husband. ‘It’s in a bad area. Besides, it is purely a native show.’
‘That’s why I’m going.’
She had watched him speculatively, then, seized by a whim, said decisively, ‘We’ll all go.’
It was a little room and the surprised faces of Burmese turned towards you as you entered. And she, wearing her sex like regalia, ungraciously pushing her way through courteous people.
The chairman approached you. He was delighted to have you there. It was good to meet Europeans interested in the culture of his country. He would translate for you as they went along. The speakers were authorities on the Saung Geuk, an ancient Burmese harp. Burmese songs of long ago would be sung.
And round you crowded the people. Youth and Age, eager to know.
The bars across the open windows were gripped by the thin hands of those on the street. Eyes and teeth gleamed from the outside darkness.
You were excited with this merging of your need with the need of a people you had imagined were different. The silence of their listening was round you, a silence that spoke a language you knew.
Then the old, old woman, wrinkled with years, who, accompanied by the harp, sang a song in a high-pitched, wailing voice.
Behind you, a youth bent forward and began speaking softly just above your shoulder.
‘She sings of an ancient Burmese princess who awaits her lover. He does not come to her and she is left crying alone.’
The lament pierced you like a genuine expression of grief.
Then the American seized your knee and hissed, ‘I can’t bear this. Let’s get out of here. The screeching of that old hag will drive me mad.’
And the husband, pushing his way out for you both to follow, people rising with contemptuous expressions, the singing stopped, the accusing silence, the damnable humiliation of it.
Then you were on the street.
‘These people are nuts,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Another minute in there and I’d have screamed. Let’s go have a drink.’
The father suddenly thrust the diary to one side and stood up. He stretched and gave an exaggerated shudder as if to free himself from contact with unpleasant things.
He looked down at the little girl on the floor.
‘So she said, “Out of the way, mug.” She said that, did she?’
The little girl dropped her crayons and rose quickly to her feet. The change in her father’s tone promised her a more agreeable solution to her problem than that demanded by her mother, so she took his hand and looked up at him enquiringly.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to turn my back and walk away, because I like see-saws.’
He lifted her in his arms.
‘Darling,’ he said, ‘never turn your back and walk away. The see-saw is for you and for all the other little girls, too. And not the splintery part, either, the good part. When that naughty girl says, “Out of the way, mug,” to you, she is saying “Out of the way, mug,” to all the little girls not as strong or as big as she is. So you get all the other girls on your side and you tell the naughty girl that you are all going to get on the see-saw whether she likes it or not. And there’ll be so many of you she’ll have to let you get on, see?’
‘Yes,’ said the little girl smiling.
Trees Can Speak
I heard footsteps and I looked up. A man carrying a prospector’s dish was clambering down the bank.
‘This man never speaks,’ the store-keeper in the town three miles away had told me. ‘A few people have heard him say one word like “Hullo” or something. He makes himself understood by shaking or nodding his head.’
‘Is there something wrong with him?’ I asked.
‘No. He can talk if he wants to. Silent Joe, they call him.’
When the man reached a spot where the creek widened into a pool he squatted on his heels and scooped some water into the dish. He stood up and, bending over the dish, began to wash the dirt it contained by swinging it in a circular motion
.
I lifted my crutches from the ground and hopped along the pebbles till I stood opposite him across the pool.
‘Good day,’ I said. ‘Great day.’
He raised his head and looked at me. His eyes were grey, the greenish grey of the bush. There was no hostility in his look, just a searching.
They suddenly changed their expression and said, as plainly as if he had spoken, ‘Yes.’
I sat down and watched him. He poured the muddy water into the clear pool.
It rolled along the sandy bottom, twisting and turning in whirls and convolutions until it faded into a faint cloud, moving swiftly with the current.
He washed the residue many times.
I crossed over above the pool and walked down to him.
‘Get anything?’
He held the dish towards me and pointed to three specks of gold resting on the outer edge of a layer of sand.
‘So that’s gold,’ I said. ‘Three specks, eh! Half the troubles of this world come from collections of specks like those.’
He smiled. It took a long time to develop. It moved over his face slowly and somehow I thought of an egret in flight, as if wings had come and gone.
He looked at me with kindliness and, for a moment, I saw the bush, not remote and pitying, but beckoning like a friend. He was akin to trees and they spoke through him.
If I could only understand him I would understand the bush, I thought.
But he turned away and, like the gums, was remote again, removed from contact by his silence which was not the silence of absent speech, but the eloquent silence of trees.
‘I am coming with you,’ I said.
We walked side by side. He studied the track for my benefit. He kicked limbs aside, broke the branches of wattles drooping over the pad that skirted the foot of the hill.
We moved into thicker timber. The sun pierced the canopy of branches and spangled our shoulders with leaf patterns. A cool, leaf-mould breath of earth rose from the foot-printed moss. The track dipped sharply down into a gully and ended in a small clearing.
Thin grass, spent with seeding, quivered hopelessly in a circle of trees.
The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall Page 21