To the Islands

by Randolph Stow

  *

  Outside the store, sitting or standing in the dust in their usual after-work groups, the men and Dixon looked at one another and laughed.

  ‘Brother,’ shouted Stephen, bent in the middle with histrionic amusement, ‘I go right over your head, brother!’

  ‘Well, I went right over Gregory’s head,’ Dixon said, ‘and landed on mine.’

  Gregory laughed deeply from his fat chest. ‘I thought I were going to sit on you, brother. But then I thought I pretty heavy for Brother Terry, and I don’t do that then.’

  ‘Good on you, Gregory. I’d be thinner now if you had.’

  On the way to collect a load of sand the trailer had become uncoupled from the tractor, catapulting its passengers in a long arc to the ground; and part of their amusement was the thought that if the tractor had been travelling more slowly it might now be decorated with several sets of brains. ‘Ah, brother,’ said Michael, in a deep burst of laughter, ‘you looked funny. You flying down like a duck, brother.’

  Matthew, the most serious of them, looked up from tracing designs in the dust. ‘Mary’s husband, he was working in town and trailer tipped over. Killed him. Reckon Mary would get money, but she didn’t get much. Not like white man’s wife.’

  Dixon moved uneasily. ‘That was bad luck.’

  ‘Like they say, brother, one law for white man and one law for black man. You reckon,’ on an inquiring inflexion, ‘eh, brother?’

  Dixon hesitated, unhappy at the question, knowing a flat disagreement would alienate them, agreement only foster their resentments. He muttered: ‘I don’t know, Matthew. That was a long time ago, was it?’

  ‘Yeah, long time.’

  ‘It wouldn’t happen now. That bloke who lost his leg got a lot of money. I forget how much, but a white man wouldn’t have got any more.’

  Michael said: ‘Someday we all be citizens, eh, brother?’

  ‘Yeah, some day you will. You got to work for it.’ But I can’t preach, he thought, no good me trying to talk to them. Nobody tries to talk to them, nobody tells them the whole thing. That’s what Heriot ought to be doing, or Bob, not me, I don’t know anything.

  ‘I better go for my tucker,’ he said, turning away. ‘See you in church, some of you.’

  They watched him silently, with expressionless faces, while every word he had said and every opinion he had betrayed was sorted and weighed and stored for the future in the tribal archives, their disoriented and searching minds.

  In his office, still but for the continual flutter of moths about the light globe, Heriot sat drafting his letter. He would stay, he said with humility, he would stay, since he seemed to have no choice in the matter. But he must have, he needed, he could not go on without more staff. Please, he said, do not ignore this most serious request, or the people and the place will suffer for it; old men cannot hope to deal with all problems, not in this uneasy time.

  As he sat there looking over his letter, his face glowing red-brown in the yellow light or eroded with great shadows, a knock very faintly sounded through the door, and he sighed, recognizing the timidity of a black hand and fearing some crisis in the village. He rose, trod heavily to the door, and opened it. A rough wind was punishing the trees, and a swirl of leaves and dust followed the swing of the door into the room. The light fell on dark, waiting faces.

  ‘Gregory, is it? Michael? Richard? Something wrong?’

  Gregory hitched up his shorts, a gesture of nervousness. ‘Nothing wrong, brother. We want to talk with you, please.’

  ‘I see. Well, come in,’ Heriot invited, standing away from the door. ‘Sit down.’

  They sat, stiffly, on the chairs in front of his table, and he went, also stiffly, to his own. Eyes questioned across the littered desk.

  ‘Well,’ he said, with vitreous geniality, ‘here you are, my three counsellors, my village politicians. What have you come to talk about?’

  Their silence lay in front of him like a black cloud. ‘Come on, now, Gregory,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  Gregory moved tensely in his chair. ‘It Rex, brother.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Heriot softly, ‘Rex.’ He played with a pencil, rolling it under his broad-tipped fingers. ‘Well, what about Rex?’

  ‘We don’t reckon you ought to send him away, brother.’

  ‘And why,’ asked Heriot woodenly, ‘do you reckon that?’

  Richard said suddenly and with released anger: ‘You not fair, brother. He not a bad man, Rex. You don’t give him no chance. He just want to live here, in his own country, and work for mission, get married might be. What for you want to send him away now?’

  ‘For exactly the reason you came here tonight. He makes trouble. He’s been talking to you, hasn’t he? He told you to come and see me.’

  Michael murmured: ‘He real sad, brother, leaving his country.’

  ‘The first time he left it, it was because he wanted to. I told him not to take that girl, his wife, away from here. I got angry with him. But he wouldn’t listen, he left, and the girl, too. What does he want here—to find another girl and take her away and kill her?’

  ‘That girl die, brother,’ Gregory protested. ‘No one kill her.’

  ‘I won’t argue about that.’

  In the silence that fell again Heriot struggled with his anger and his uncertainty, thinking: But I am not unfair, no, I’m simply the one person who can see through Rex and has learned to distrust him. And look, here; already he has set my people against me.

  ‘You hard man, brother,’ Richard said.

  Was hard, yes, when there was need for it; but not now, no, they’re hard on me now.

  Michael said indifferently: ‘Some people in the village pretty angry.’

  Oh yes, I can see them, the young ones, sitting outside the firelight discussing my sins, growing angry, and laughing, and growing angry again. And Rex playing the oracle, and Stephen playing the guitar. I can see them.

  ‘What does Justin say?’ he demanded.

  ‘Justin?’ asked Gregory uncertainly. ‘He don’t say nothing, brother.’

  Richard said with faint contempt: ‘Justin, he real old man. He don’t listen to Rex.’

  Good Justin, most conservative, most loyal friend, resisting change. But I am not. I’m not shutting out the future, there is no future in Rex. Rex is only anarchy. Justin knows this, but how could he side with me against all his people? He’s waiting for me, he wants me to be strong. Many of them must want it, many women especially would rather see Rex away.

  ‘Rex is leaving on Sunday,’ he said.

  Michael and Gregory said nothing. But Richard, with angry eyes, burst out: ‘Might be all the people hate you now, brother. Might be no one working for you tomorrow.’

  Still rolling the pencil under his fingers, Heriot said very quietly: ‘I’ve heard that in other arguments, Richard, but you know nothing comes of it. You haven’t a card to play against me. That’s the only thing that worries me, I’ve every opportunity to be unjust. But I don’t think I am. I pray to God,’ he said, in a curious, empty voice, ‘to guide me, and I couldn’t go on unless I thought He did. I hope this is the last I’ll hear of Rex.’

  He looked down at his fingers. After a pause, ‘Brother,’ Gregory said, tautly and uneasily.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘If Rex go away, we going too, and our wives, and our little kids.’

  In silence Heriot stared at them, the three of them, who for several years had met with him there, sat in the same chairs, and discussed problems of the settlement, problems of people, ideals and desires and needs and amusements of black and white, always with trust, courtesy, and keenness, always deeply serious. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘We got to go, brother, if you do this.’

  ‘I won’t be bluffed,’ Heriot said. ‘Do you hear that? I won’t be blackmailed. I’m not a child or a fool.’ From his tiredness and his indecision he was raised, burning with anger. ‘I’ve given more than thirty years to serving you people, almost hal
f my life. Do you think I can be discouraged so easily?’

  They said nothing.

  ‘Do you see that photograph, there, on the wall? Who is it?’

  Gregory muttered: ‘That you wife, brother.’

  ‘Yes, my wife, you remember her. Sister Margaret. She had beautiful hands. You remember her hands, don’t you, tying up your sores and bathing your eyes and playing with you when you were children. You haven’t forgotten that. And when you were young men, you remember her getting thinner and thinner and not smiling much and going to bed and dying, and your mothers going up and down outside the house, crying and wailing all night and all day, while I sat there beside her, trying not to hear them, trying to believe I couldn’t have saved her by taking her away from this country. No, you haven’t forgotten that.’

  He glared at them with his ancient eyes. ‘You see that other photograph, those children. Who are they?’

  Out of his rigid silence Michael half-whispered: ‘That Stephen.’

  ‘Stephen, and Esther. Esther Margaret, my daughter. Rex’s wife. You remember her, too, how graceful she was and how much she laughed always, in that husky voice, and her singing, and that little gold chain she wore round her neck, my wife’s chain, and played with when she was talking to you. And her beautiful writing, and the way she’d read stories to your children and teach them to draw. And you remember how she began to meet Rex, at night, hiding behind trees down by the river, until she was past escaping. And how he married her and took her away, and how he killed the child in her, and killed her with it. But you must have forgotten that, or you couldn’t be wanting him to stay here.’

  Their eyes stayed blankly on him.

  ‘I’ve given half my life,’ he said softly. ‘My wife gave all of hers. I’ve lived in poverty, half-starved at times, been lonely, been overworked, been forgotten by everyone in the world except you. For twenty years the only happiness I’ve had has been when, for a day or a moment, you and I have come suddenly together, in friendship. You must believe, when I say that, that I wouldn’t part with your friendship for anything in the world less than your own good.’

  But I have done wrong, he thought, to boast of my sacrifices, bludgeon them for their gratitude. Now surely I’ve grown old. There was never, never before, such self-pity in me; I am ashamed.

  Richard said in a hard, flat voice: ‘Brother, we didn’t choose you.’

  But Gregory and Michael, moving uncomfortably on their chairs, dissociated themselves from him. ‘You always been our friend, brother,’ Gregory murmured.

  Weariness, and a desire to smile, even, irrationally, to laugh at them, overcame Heriot now that his tirade was over. He pushed away the pencil.

  ‘I think you should go,’ he said. ‘You know what I’m going to do. There’s no point in talking about it now.’

  He stood up, and they, irresolutely, followed suit. He opened the door and watched them step down to the rectangle of light on the dust, and turn there and murmur automatic good nights from the edge of darkness.

  What they were thinking mattered suddenly very little to him. Standing there in his doorway he was concerned with the wind and with the lightning that from time to time cracked the dark-clouded sky. As he watched it his hands grew calm again, he found peace in its purpose, in the remote and unfathomable justice of its occasions.

  4

  In the morning lightning struck the grass behind the store, causing a small fire. The men beat it out, shouting and laughing to one another against the wind. Dust blew down the road and moved across the plain, looking white and solid in the cloudy light. The air was suddenly cool.

  ‘There’s been a cyclone warning,’ Heriot said, treading grit on the office floor, ‘but we should be out of it if it goes the way they think.’

  ‘We seem to be getting the edge of it,’ Way considered, looking at the dust.

  ‘We’ve never been hit in the time I’ve been here. Hope our luck’s still in. If a bad one came, I’m afraid we’d have to rebuild the whole place.’

  Way said: ‘Don’t say that, brother,’ mimicking the superstitious uneasiness of a native. ‘Myself, I feel much the same as the people do when it comes to tempting providence.’

  Heriot reached out after some straying papers and tucked them away, listening to the uncertain wind, hearing outside dry poinciana pods fall down rattling to the ground. ‘You could,’ he said, without interest, ‘have a service in the church and pray for the cyclone, if it is one, to go somewhere else. Into that country out there, where it can’t hurt anyone.’

  ‘I could,’ Way agreed. He watched Heriot sit down and begin to roll a cigarette. ‘You don’t seem very worried.’

  Heriot’s fingers, against the white paper, were stained darkly with nicotine, the nails black-rimmed. ‘Fatalism,’ he said. ‘And I’m tired.’

  ‘Would you like—?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Surely today, though, you can rest.’

  ‘It’s not rest I want,’ Heriot said flatly. ‘I don’t know what I want.’

  ‘I can cope, you know.’

  ‘This morning I woke up—grieved that I wasn’t dead—’

  ‘So there’s really no need—’

  ‘Ninety or a hundred years old, and very cynical, very bored—’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear.’

  Dust blew in. ‘I was talking nonsense,’ Heriot droned, ‘for my own entertainment. Old as Tiresias, but very stupid. When is my spring coming?’

  ‘Classical allusions?’

  ‘I’m a very small fraction of a scholar,’ Heriot said, rasping in his dry throat. ‘Why do you stay here listening to me? I’ve got nothing to say. I can sit here all day happily complaining to myself about unhappiness.’

  How can I deal with this? Way thought, keeping his face turned with some firmness away from the eyes of Heriot unreasonably glaring at him. At times I can believe what the children say, he’s terrible. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he demanded, with brave sharpness.

  The confronting eyes kindled with a kind of amusement. ‘I’m a wicked man who wants to be dead. And hates everyone.’

  ‘Or enjoys pretending he does.’

  ‘There’s no pretence. I discovered that last night. For years I set myself up as a philanthropist and was really a misanthrope all the time. Ironic.’

  ‘I suppose there’s no reason why a constructive misanthropy shouldn’t achieve as much as philanthropy. There’s a bold modern view for you.’

  ‘What would you say,’ Heriot asked softly, the sour laughter still in his eyes, ‘if I said I thoroughly disliked you, and your bold modern views?’

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ Way confessed, ‘faint with surprise. It’s been obvious for a long time.’

  ‘I don’t think it has. Not to me.’

  ‘Perhaps the rest of us were more observant.’

  ‘You,’ Heriot accused gently, ‘are beginning to be angry.’

  ‘Not I.’

  ‘The polite charity is peeling off in strips.’

  Way’s pink face had grown red, and the slight bald patch in his hair also, and his fingers were unnecessarily concerned with the papers he was carrying. But ‘Nonsense,’ he said, in a firm ecclesiastical voice.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m being very annoying, I don’t know why.’

  Dust lodged in Way’s throat, and he coughed, and said in a choked voice: ‘As a matter of fact I know—know about your outburst to the counsellors last night.’

  ‘Do you, indeed?’

  ‘I can’t see any need to brood over it, which is obviously what you’re doing. It will probably do them good to be reminded of some of the things the white man has done for them.’

  ‘I’m glad to have your opinion,’ Heriot said, smoke wreathing his wooden face, his wooden eyes.

  ‘You’re not, but perhaps you need it.’

  ‘Does it sometimes occur to you that I’m a lonely old man who needs someone to discuss his problems with him?’

  ‘Yes, it doe
s.’

  Heriot ground out his cigarette. ‘It’s like your smug impudence,’ he said viciously. ‘I need no one.’

  Way, angry-mouthed, tightened his hands around the papers he was holding, clutching to himself his good temper, his charity.

  ‘Will you listen,’ Heriot demanded, the toneless voice suddenly broken, uneven, rising to cracked notes of spleen and weariness. ‘I’m dying. When my friend, Stephen’s father, was well and strong and quite young, he told me he knew he was going to die. And he died. And now I know. And after all these years of being forgotten and ignored, I suddenly find that I resent it. I don’t want to pass piously to a quiet grave. I’ve built something nobody wanted, and now the thing I think would give my life its full meaninglessness would be to smash it down and take it with me. Let them regret it when it’s not there if they won’t appreciate it when it is.’

  ‘But it’s not yours to smash,’ Way said evenly.

  ‘I’m the only one of the builders left. All the others are dead. They had my ideas, they made my mistakes, they used the whip sometimes, they were Bible-bashers and humourless clods, they were forgotten while they were alive and attacked when they were dead. You don’t like the work we did—very well, we’ll take it back.’

  ‘You were founders, you were like coral insects. You can’t smash what you’ve started because you yourself belong to your successors—’

  But Heriot halted him, holding up his hand. On the palm lay a small ivory crucifix which he had picked up from the table.

  ‘Do you see this?’ he asked, in his new straining voice. ‘This.’ The uneven teeth showed. ‘A little Popish thing from the bad old days of Walton.’

  His hand came down sharply on the edge of the table, and he brought it back and flung the pieces towards Way; whose eyes, torn at last from tormented, detruncated head, the outstretched arms of the fragment lying in his lap, lifted again and met his across the table with an expression of incredulous shock.

  ‘I believe in nothing,’ Heriot said softly. ‘I can pull down the world.’