To the Islands

by Randolph Stow

  ‘I won’t be one of these people,’ Heriot protested hoarsely. ‘I won’t be so wretched. I’m not dead yet, I’m still strong, I can’t—I can’t—stop—now.’ He turned away, shaking his head, and tears rolled down the cracks of his face. ‘Ah, God—’

  ‘You go and be down now,’ Justin said gently.

  ‘Yes,’ Heriot sobbed, ‘yes.’ He went back to his place under the rock and lay there and wept to himself at intervals through the whole day. At other times he slept, or lay stiff and still, his head swirling with meaningless and unconnected memories. Occasionally the silence of the valley would be broken by a shot in the hills above it, and once an aeroplane flew low over, heading west, and filled the whole place with its roar. Then there were a few shouts of alarm from the natives, but Heriot was neither startled nor curious. He registered only sounds outside and feelings inside himself. He was as simple as a child first come to light, and as bare.

  The two stout women stopped by the hospital and leaned over the fence. On the veranda Rex sat propped up on a bed, reading a comic book. The women looked at him and at each other. Then one shouted: ‘Gari!’

  He raised his head and considered them, unhappily.

  ‘Gari! Na gari!’ screamed the other woman.

  ‘Bui!’ he returned to them. ‘Walea! Lewa!’ They were whores, they were bitches, in his opinion; he invited them to retire. ‘Bui! Na gari, na!’

  When the women became abruptly silent he thought he had vanquished them, but in fact Helen had come out on the veranda and was watching the scene. ‘What are they shouting?’ she asked him. ‘I keep hearing women screaming at you all morning. What does gari mean?’

  He kept his eyes down and muttered after a moment: ‘It mean: “You no-good.”’

  ‘That’s unkind of them,’ she said lightly.

  ‘They say—’ he began, and broke off.

  ‘Well, what do they say?’

  ‘They say Brother Heriot go away because I here. They reckon I make him sad and make him hate mission and he not coming back.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said softly. ‘That’s very hard.’

  ‘And, sister, they reckon God hit me on the head that day because what I done to brother.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Might be that true, sister. Nobody know what hit me then.’

  ‘No. Nobody knows.’

  ‘Sister—i’n’t somebody going looking for brother?’

  ‘Yes, soon. The plane’s looking for him now.’

  ‘I go, sister?’ He searched her eyes, pleadingly. ‘I go?’

  ‘No, Rex. You’re not well enough.’

  ‘I good now, sister. I got hard head on me, I not sick now.’

  ‘You can’t go,’ she said, and turned her eyes away from the desperate resentment in his.

  When she came into the room she was struck by the pallor of their faces, as she always was coming suddenly upon her fellow-Europeans. What a loathsome colour we are, she thought. All pink and disgusting. Why weren’t we all made black?

  She looked them over. Harris, wizened and balding, desperately thin, with his sudden, warm grin. Mrs Way, who might have been a grey-haired mistress in a girls’ school, there was something so firm and widowlike about her. Way, rather shorter, rather heavier, with his sensible, dutiful face and tight mouth. Dixon, long, thin, and a little bent, with his sandy hair and narrow sunburned nose, his eyes that were abstracted or nervous. And the darker, finer, more compact Gunn, uneasy in his movements but stubborn in his expressions, eternally watchful.

  ‘Well,’ Way said, ‘as we’re all here, let’s begin. I haven’t much to say, I thought this would be more an opportunity for you to advise me. You all know the situation. Mr Heriot and Justin have gone, and we have to assume they went west through the hills; it’s the most likely way. There aren’t any tracks and we don’t even know exactly when they left; only that it was on the day of the wind. The search plane went over this morning and may go again tomorrow. And the police have told me to send out a land party. That’s the lot.’

  ‘Who takes the land party?’ Gunn asked.

  ‘Looks like me,’ said Dixon. ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Cut it out, Bob. We talked this over before.’

  Harris said: ‘We haven’t heard. Talk it over again.’

  Way tapped the table thoughtfully with a pencil. ‘Since we had this out two weeks ago,’ he said, ‘I’ve been wondering more and more about it. I think I’m coming round to your point of view, Bob. Fact is that with things as they are I don’t think I could carry on without Terry.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve influenced him,’ Mrs Way said. ‘But you know, don’t you, that I’m quite capable of coping with the school? I had two years with a small church school in India before we came to this country. So there’s really no reason why Bob shouldn’t go, if he’ll trust me with his children.’

  ‘But Bob’s no bushman,’ Dixon pointed out. ‘What if you have to send me out to find him?’

  ‘You’re going too far,’ Gunn said. ‘Cut out these underhand gibes.’

  Harris said: ‘He doesn’t need to be a bushman. All he needs to do is take Naldia with him and he’d be safe to go to Melbourne.’

  ‘Who’s Naldia?’ Dixon asked.

  ‘He’s a bloke about fifty, one of the first children we ever took in here. But he went bush again when he was older. He knows that country better than anyone else his age. Talks a bit of English as well. You couldn’t go wrong with him. He’s up at the camp now.’

  Gunn was beaming. ‘Well,’ said Dixon, ‘that was short and sweet. Good luck, Bob.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Who’re you taking with you?’

  ‘Well, Naldia. I don’t know about the rest. Paul might be a good man.’

  ‘Take Stephen. He’s busting to go. Seems to think it’s partly his fault Heriot went off.’

  ‘Rex thinks the same,’ Helen said. ‘Funny, isn’t it? I think it’s the first time they’ve seen a white man in bad trouble and they’re all rallying round like anything.’

  ‘I can’t take Rex,’ Gunn said, ‘but Stephen’s okay. We could go in the morning, if Harry’ll fix us up with stores and Terry’ll work out about the horses.’

  Harris and Dixon murmured assurances, and a silence fell on the Ways’ bare little living-room, to be broken at last by the hostess. ‘Well,’ she said, with pleasure, ‘everything seems to have worked out very comfortably. And I must say I’m looking forward to having the school for a little while. I’ve often envied you, Bob, such dear children you have. Shall we have supper now?’

  ‘I think we may,’ Way said. ‘Nobody wants to say anything else?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harris said, ‘I want to wish you good luck with this superintendent job. I’ve seen them come and go and I can pick a good one.’

  ‘Second that,’ Dixon said, and the others murmured.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t fishing for it,’ Way said, with embarrassment, ‘but thank you very much. It’s only temporary, of course.’

  ‘Heriot was only temporary,’ Harris said. ‘He had the job ten years.’

  ‘Speech,’ requested Gunn.

  ‘I’m not used to making speeches—’

  ‘Sermon, then.’

  ‘Well, you know, I pledge myself to do the usual things as far as I possibly can. And I hope that in my time and in my successor’s time we’ll see some development in—well, in the relations between ourselves and the people. I hope we’ll come closer and have the time and the staff eventually to make ourselves understood to them, teach them something of their own position in society, and their obligations, and their future. We’re coming to a very bad time in the history of their development, and if we don’t succeed in making contact with them and giving them some—orientation, the results could be unhappy for everyone. But with faith in them I think we’ll come through. I ought to say that these ideas are as much Heriot’s as mine, and when he spoke to me he was more or
less handing over the problem to us. So if we succeed, we can feel that we’re carrying out the plans that he hadn’t the—opportunity of putting into action. That’s really all I have to say.’

  Now we feel happy, Helen thought, watching the faces. And hopeful. We know what we’re doing. Is this very unkind of us, to feel so—relieved, now that Mr Heriot has gone?

  Dixon grinned at her. Why is he watching me? she thought. And why have I been watching him, all through Father’s speech?

  There was Rex, lying awake on a dark veranda, crying in his mind: ‘Ah, brother, where you now, eh? Where you now?’

  And there was Heriot, asleep below his rock. ‘Oh no, no, I couldn’t take a life. An old, weak man like me? And such a strong young life, Rex’s.’

  And between them plain and hill, rock and grass and tree, mildly shining in the warm dark.

  ‘I did wrong, the worst wrong a man can do. Who could have foreseen this, who could have thought this of me?’

  ‘And might be I done wrong. Might be that girl dead ’cause of me. Ah, brother. Might be I ought to be dead.’

  At Onmalmeri a dingo slunk out of shadow, hungry, scanning the valley with eye and ear and nostril for a hint of prey. And if it should kill, or, more conveniently, if it should come upon the putrid victim of a rival and steal it, what morality was infringed? How should that impede an easy sleep among the warm rocks?

  ‘Ah, brother—They hating me now—’

  ‘Oh, Rex, Rex, Rex. You will never go out of my mind.’

  The sky was still grey when Heriot woke on the next morning, and he lay and watched the trees on the cliff top grow gradually sharper in outline against it, and the pool turn from gunmetal to deep green, and the sun stretch out its light along the valley to set the cliffs burning red and to waken glints of gold in the stems of canegrass. Nothing moved in the camp, and for once Justin had not wakened, but lay in a grey sheath of blanket at his side. Heriot reached out and touched him.

  The figure shivered, waking. Then the head turned and the eyes were open, looking out from under the broad forehead. He had a beard now, with spikes of grey in it, and his hair was tangled. ‘Good day, old man,’ he said, yawning.

  ‘Let’s go soon. Now. Please.’

  ‘Pretty soon we be going. You want tucker first.’

  Heriot pushed away his blanket. ‘Come with me,’ he said, in his drained voice. His eyes were curiously empty, like those of the blind woman in the camp, and his mouth loose in the new beard. ‘Come with me.’

  Justin stood up, sighing resignedly. ‘All right, old man. First I going to wash myself. You come down to pool.’ He stepped out of the rock shelter and went down to the water’s edge, Heriot slowly following like a stupid dog, and they stood in the pool and washed, while the birds woke in the leaves around them and the sun swelled red at the end of the valley.

  They had come back and were dressed, and Justin was rolling the blankets, when he grew suddenly still and said in a voice of hopelessness: ‘Old man, they pinch our tucker-bag.’

  ‘Ah,’ murmured Heriot.

  ‘What we going to do now? We got no flour for damper and no tea and no sugar, old man. We going to starve.’ His voice shook a little with self-pity, since damper and tea were the basis of his diet. ‘Going to starve.’

  The mad voice of Heriot broke into its wild keening.

  ‘If ever thou gavest meat or drink,

  Every night and all,

  The fire shall never make thee shrink;

  And Christ receive thy soul.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Justin shouted. He picked up the rifle and turned away, walking with angry determination into the camp. Then the bushes hid him.

  Heriot sat down on the blankets and wailed to the echoing valley:

  ‘If meat and drink thou ne’er gav’st nane,

  Every night and all,

  The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;

  And Christ receive thy soul.’

  Across the valley came sounds of argument, Justin’s voice raised in accusation, and Alunggu’s angry and protesting. Silence followed, then a dog barked and a woman burst into a flood of invective or denial. Later Justin reappeared, a few tins piled in the crook of his arm and a scowl on his face, the outraged voices pursuing him like wasps.

  ‘I get these tins,’ he said curtly. ‘That all they give me. Come on now. You carry them blanket, old man. I sick of carrying things all the time.’

  They made their way back in silence along the valley, skirting the camp, Heriot stumbling a little on the rocks, for the rest of a day had worsened the stiffness in his body, though he was no longer as tired as he had been, filled instead with a restive and undirected energy. As he was dealing with the horses Justin let out a sudden shout and ran towards a cranny in the rock. When he returned he was grinning broadly, all his depression lost in the pride of a hunter. A long, yellow lizard with intricate brown marking hung limp from his raised hand, the red tongue curling out of the tapered snout.

  ‘Beautiful, heraldic beast,’ said Heriot, with deep sadness, reaching out to touch it.

  They rode out of the valley and found a place where the horses could climb into the hills and pick their way clumsily and nervously over the rocks. Justin was now cheerful and talkative, with the sun lying clear but not yet burning on the surfaces of rocks and leaves, and the backward view of green plains and blue hills. ‘They say there ’nother white man in this country,’ he said. ‘Might be we meet him.’

  But Heriot’s silence was unbreakable. They pushed on past the head of the valley and looked down on the bough-shelters of the natives, barely distinguishable from that height. And as they pulled up there to look for some sign of life, Justin said, weighing the rifle: ‘Old man, this my gun, eh?’

  They were horse by horse, and Heriot put out his hand and tore the rifle from the dark man, and threw it. It should have gone over the cliff, but it landed far short of the edge and lay on a clump of spinifex.

  Justin jumped down to retrieve it, and stood on the ground with it in his hands, and stared widely at the wooden face of the white man.

  ‘What for you do that, old man?’

  ‘I want nothing,’ Heriot said. ‘When we all have nothing, then we can be equal.’

  Weary after long travelling over the rocky tableland, Justin and Heriot came in mid-afternoon on a watercourse flowing shallowly over solid rock, and followed it, with the roar of water growing in their ears, until they reached a deep fold where the widened creek became a cataract and crashed over strata of rock to feed a larger stream below. The place was a horseshoe of stone, with crannied walls on either side, but the head of it was a vast, blackened staircase, each step flat and separate, over which the white water tore down to a boulder-dammed pool below.

  Seeing this Heriot wakened a little from the dream which had enveloped him all day, and dismounted, and walked into the stream. Justin shouted: ‘Old man, where you going?’ but he did not answer. He took off his clothes and walked down the broad steps and lay under the white water, letting it beat and bludgeon his aching bones and drench his hair until in defence his strength came back and he grew hard under the assault. Reaching out, he could touch dry rock, and it was hot, but under the water he was cooled and renewed, and its sound and force shut out his aimless thoughts.

  He did not hear Justin shout to him, and when at last he left the waterfall the man was gone. So he lay down on hot flat rock to dry and was half-asleep when Justin returned, wide-eyed with discovery.

  ‘Old man,’ he said urgently, ‘there ’nother white man there.’

  ‘He can’t stop us,’ said Heriot dreamily. ‘I won’t have it.’

  ‘He camping down there in the creek. He got three horse, old man. We going down there, eh?’

  ‘He can’t stop me,’ Heriot muttered defiantly. ‘How did he find me? I wanted to be alone now. Tell him to go back.’

  ‘You coming, old man?’

  ‘No. Send him away.’

  ‘I going,’ J
ustin said, with a flash of irritation. ‘You get you clothes on and come, too.’ He went back to his horse and mounted, knowing that he had only to act decisively and Heriot would follow like a child. Presently the old man pulled on boots and trousers and came after him.

  From the edge of the fold they could see three horses beside the creek, and as their own horses crashed and rattled down the slope a man got up from the shadow of a baobab and stood watching. A short man whose red hair showed clearly in the afternoon light.

  He did not move, and they came up to him without a greeting, and he stared, a man of about forty, weatherbeaten, with a tangled red beard and shy at the eyes.

  When their silence was becoming absurd: ‘Didn’t expect to meet anyone here,’ he said diffidently to Heriot. ‘Where you heading?’

  Heriot said nothing. ‘We going to coast,’ Justin offered at last.

  ‘Name’s Rusty,’ the man said, still to Heriot.

  ‘His name Mr Heriot.’

  ‘What’s up with him? He dumb or something?’

  ‘He sick in his head.’

  ‘Too old for this country,’ Rusty considered. ‘You camping here?’

  ‘You don’t mind, eh?’

  ‘No, go ahead. Better put your boss to bed, he looks buggered.’

  ‘He all right,’ Justin said, dismounting. ‘Get down now, old man. We stay here now.’

  With the stranger’s eyes curiously and apprehensively on him Heriot slid off, still silent, his eyes, after a brief glance at the new face, returning to their state of far-sighted emptiness. Justin led him to the tree and sat him down there, and soon he turned on his side and went to sleep.

  ‘Christ,’ said the stranger, ‘that’s a queer boss you got, Jacky.’

  He was quite a small man; wiry, hairy. And he was undisguisably furtive and uneasy in all his movements, even to the false casualness and muted tones of his voice, so that Justin was drawn into his mood and could think of no loyal denial to make. And they stood in silence, in a mutual retreat, and looked remotely down on the old man who lay fondling the earth in his wooden sleep.