by Morris West
‘I suggested they both came down here for a while,’ said Thorkild. ‘Lorillard wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘And I don’t blame him.’ Eva was stout in her defence. ‘He loves it up there, like we do. He’s planting and grubbing and opening up new ground, and collecting orchids, and now this pig-breeding. When I look out and see him and my Willy and that Simon talking away and laughing and singing, I start singing too…But not Martha! If the moon was all gold and you gave her a slice of it she’d still be unhappy.’
‘Why don’t we invite her down by herself?’ asked Sally – ‘Just for a week or so.’
‘No!’ Thorkild was harsh. ‘I don’t want her down here until…’
‘Until what?’
‘Until I’ve made some more progress with Mark. I’m just getting him licked into shape; and the last thing I need is a mother clucking round him at every step.’
‘Calm down, my love! It was just a suggestion.’
‘The Chief’s right, Sally.’ Eva was placid as the earth-mother. ‘You mend the things you can and let time take care of the rest. That’s what I like about Barbara. If today’s good she’s glad. If it’s not, tomorrow is just round the corner. Sad to say, Charlie never knew how to handle her.’
‘And Cohen does?’
‘Well…I think it’s the other way round. Except he doesn’t see it. I’m beginning to like him now: and it’s good to have the music at night…’
‘I think you and Willy make some of it, Eva.’
‘There’s music down here too,’ said Sally with quiet pride. ‘I’m beginning to hear the harmonies…Oh, I almost forgot. Carl wants to see you darling. He’s resting in his hut. I told him I’d send you along later.’
‘Anything wrong?’
‘I don’t think so. Something to do with the luau tonight.’
‘Fine. I’ll trot over and talk to him…See you girls later.’
‘Gunnar, are you sure they’re all right in that boat?’
‘If they’re not my love, I’ll personally feed them, member by member, to the sharks.’
‘Listen to him!’ laughed Eva Kuhio. ‘You’d think he was like the old ones: Lord of life and death. Don’t you worry Sally, my man will bring ’em home.’
Carl Magnusson was lying on his bed. Molly Kaapu was sitting beside him, fanning his face and grumbling at his perversity.
‘… Will you look at him! This stupid old lōlō thinks he’s twenty again! All morning he was trotting about, husking coconuts, chopping fire-sticks. Now look at him!…Flat on his back and grey as a goose!’
‘Woman! You talk too much!’
‘Okay! So I let the Chief talk to you. Maybe he can beat some sense into that thick haole skull!’
She waddled out, a vast mountain of indignation. Thorkild sat down on the stool and picked up the fan.
‘You wanted to see me Carl?’
‘Yes. The luau tonight…’
‘What about it?’
‘With everyone together and the boat launched, I think it’s a good time to speak my farewells. In the morning you’ll take me up the mountain.’
‘Carl, are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. And this would be the right time for the boy too.’
‘We’ll leave at sunrise.’
‘No, we’ll go straight from the luau. The track’s clear enough to follow at night. We’ll rest on the terrace and push on from there at sunrise. No arguments, Thorkild. I want a clean exit, with a full belly and flowers round my neck.’
‘What can I say, Carl?’
‘Nothing. Save it for the supper. Then say it loud and clear, so they’ll remember it for a lifetime…For the rest, keep Molly out of my hair; and wake me when you see the boat coming. I want to be on the beach to welcome young Mark.’
An hour before sunset, they were all on the beach, waiting for the first sight of the home-coming craft. An hour after, they were still there with torches lit and a beacon fire blazing to lead the voyagers in through the narrow passage, turbulent now with the tide rush. They were garlanded, because Thorkild had so commanded. The pit was stoked with coals. The meat was roasting. Anxious voices were raised; but Thorkild silenced them with a shout. This is the way of the sea. They had best get used to it. They could sing if they wanted, but murmur and complain, no! They began to sing, raggedly at first and then in stronger chorus until Thorkild silenced them again.
‘I see them!’
‘Where?’
‘There – as they ride on top of the roller, the sail blacks out the stars.’
‘I’ve got ’em,’ said Lorillard.
‘And I,’ called Franz Harsanyi.
Then they were silent again, a long time, watching the tiny craft, surfing the near rollers, clawing its way up towards the tricky entrance.
‘He’s too far down,’ muttered Lorillard.
‘He’s just right,’ said Thorkild. ‘If he can hold that course, the swell will steer him in.’
They slipped off it, they clawed back on to it and held and held until the last moment, when they dropped sail and paddled like demons, through the tide-rip, with the boy shouting crazily over their heads.
‘We made it! Oh you beautiful bastards! We made it!’
A great shout went up, as they drove the canoe straight on to the sand; but Thorkild held the tribe back and walked down alone to meet the boy. He asked coldly:
‘What kept you?’
‘We lost the wind, Chief,’ said Mark Gilman respectfully. ‘We had to paddle for two hours to find it again.’
‘Did you follow the course I laid?’
‘No Chief. I changed it to find the wind.’
‘He’s a good navigator Chief,’ said Willy Kuhio. ‘I’ll sail with him any time.’
‘Me, too,’ said Tioto. ‘In the dark and on that sea; he brought us home right on the nose.’
‘Something important Chief.’
‘Yes, Mark?’
‘That beacon fire’s too far to the left. It’s dangerous. We’ll have to get it exact.’
‘We’ll do that Mister Gilman.’ He lifted the garland from his own neck and placed it on the boy. ‘Good work! You’ve earned your feast.’
He put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and led him up the beach, and the people stood aside to let them pass and settle themselves, first, at the fire-pit.
10
This feast, they all agreed, was different from the other. The food was better for one thing; the liquor was two notches above the first fire-water. The company had improved too; more educated, more in tune with the times, which also were better because the land was yielding its fruits and the sea was now a measurable risk, and, come to think of it, for a mixed bag of nobodies, they hadn’t done too badly on Thorkild’s Island…That’s right, Chief! That’s what it was: Thorkild’s island – god-forgotten, man-forgotten in the ever-loving middle of nowhere!
At which high and clamorous point, Franz Harsanyi asserted himself. He wanted to deliver declaim and specify that if you didn’t have a Hungarian, you didn’t have a script; and without a script you could not impose a form on the material, the magma, the incandescent – see, he wasn’t drunk! – the incandescent lava of their lives. He, Franz Harsanyi, was Hungarian. He spoke, wrote, lived and breathed American, because his own language was unintelligible. He had learned Polynesian because what the American language expressed was an obscenity, from which they should all thank God to have escaped.
To celebrate that escape he, Franz Harsanyi, son of the puszta, had begun to write a poem, an epic, a saga of the castaways from the Frigate Bird. This saga he was about to recite, and would continue from feast to feast. Objections? None. He now sought the permission of the chief to present his humble – no, by Christ! – his noble work. Thank you Chief. With gratitude and good heart he would now begin. And if his colleague, Simon Cohen, cared to embellish the text with melody and rhythm, he would welcome it. If the people, the profane but beloved vulgus, would care to repeat the choruses,
he would be happy to hear them.
‘Praise God,
Brothers and sisters,
Wives, sons and lovers!…
Once upon a time,
Long out of our time,
There was a man,
Who had a dream.
Men who have dreams
Are mad and dangerous.
They deny the great truths
Of news at twelve,
And commentary at one
And blah-blah-blah
And cornflake ads
And colonels chomping chicken,
Licking their fingers afterwards,
Because,
To lick a sticky finger
Is already, paradise!
Are you with me, brothers and sisters?
Brother, we’re with you!
This man – Professor yet! –
Haphaole nobody,
Said “Come with me!
Come sail away
And find this nowhere island.”
So we sailed.
He didn’t even own
The ship we sailed in;
Wrecked it, nonetheless,
And dumped us here,
On Thorkild’s Island.
Castaways together.
Oh God help us,
Brothers all and sisters all!
He mated us,
Berated us,
Put us together.
Pulled us apart,
Fought us,
Besought us,
Hammered and clamoured
And generally fraught us
And finally brought us –
To love and to cherish
– You like it or perish! –
This granular speck,
This great lump of dreck,
Dredged up from the drink
The bottomless sink,
Now let’s be specific
Of the goddam Pacific …
And nobody knows that we’re here!
God rot Gunnar Thorkild!’
There was more, pages more, he protested. But they dragged him down, and gagged him with a banana, and promised that they would hear him again – but not yet, Hungarian scribbler, not yet! Music they would have; and Simon Cohen played while they sang and danced. Then, when the songs had tailed away, Carl Magnusson rose, painfully, to his feet. Molly Kaapu held out her hand to steady him. He drew her up to stand beside him. Then he began:
‘I liked Franz Harsanyi’s poem. I once put twenty thousand dollars in a musical by a Hungarian. I lost the lot; but I had a wonderful time with his girl-friend who came from Bolivia! I’m sure Franz is a better writer and a better lover than he was!’ He let them laugh awhile and then hushed them with a gesture. ‘My dear friends – and you, Molly who are much more than a friend to me – I beg you to hear me out. I’m leaving you tonight. My friends, Gunnar Thorkild and Mister Mark Gilman are going to walk me out of here. We’re going to rest in your house, Willy, if you’ll allow us. At sunrise, we’re going up to the high place where Kaloni Kienga and his ancestors sit, looking out at the sea. I’m going to stay there and sleep quietly with great men until judgement day – whatever and wherever that may be. Before I go, I want to embrace each one of you, and tell you that because of you, because of the things we have done together, I go a happy man…Nothing in my life pleases me so much as this moment. Nothing you can do or say will give me so much joy as a last kiss, a last handshake – and no words at all. I am proud that it was my Frigate Bird that brought us here. I am proud that Mark Gilman who came, a child, is now almost a man. I am honoured that Gunnar Thorkild, who once came to me for help, is now my chief and will walk with me on this last journey. He will speak to you now. Then, I beg you, let us go quickly and quietly.’
They were all silent, caught in a syncope of grief and foreboding. Gunnar Thorkild rose in his place. It was the moment he had dreaded, the exalted, open moment when, with the right word, he could bind them to him forever and with the wrong one lose them utterly. He closed his eyes, gathering himself, a blind man stepping out into blackness. Then he flung out his arms in a hieratic gesture and his voice rolled out, solemn and sonorous over the assembly:
‘Carl Magnusson, our friend, is about to leave us. He wants no tears, no eulogy. We will respect his wishes. Like my grandfather and all the others on the high place, he passes out of our lives and into our common memory. I could not prepare you for this, because he had charged me to hold it secret until the final moment. Neither could I prepare you for another moment, another passing, which is now upon us…Stand up, Mark Gilman!’
The boy rose, slowly, and stood rigid before them, the light of the torches and the pit shining on his naked breast and shoulders.
‘Look well at this boy! You will never see him again; because, when he comes back to you he will be a man. You men will receive him into your fellowship. You women will acknowledge him, treat with him as you do with other men. Today, you saw him go out in a frail boat, to meet the great sea. You saw him bring it home, with its crew, safe through a dangerous passage. Tonight he goes out with me and with Carl Magnusson to the encounter that will make him a man. He will see life. He will see death. He will hear and he will recognize that which we call the voice of God – the rumbling at the deep foundation of all things. He is afraid now; but when he returns he will be at peace. You will wait for him here, all of you; and you will receive him with joy and with respect. This is the nature of life, my friends; a man – a great man – leaves us; a young man comes to us, with the seeds of greatness in him…Now, it is time to go!’
On the way to the terrace they spoke little. Carl Magnusson pressed on, eager and breathless, as though afraid that death might escape him before he recognized it. When Thorkild remonstrated the old man rebuffed him angrily. He knew his own heart-beat and the sound of the hammer in his skull; he would not waste himself on argument. By the time they reached Willy Kuhio’s hut he was tottering with exhaustion. When they laid him on the bed he collapsed silently into a deep sleep. Thorkild sat with him until his pulse steadied and his breathing became more regular, then he walked outside to join Mark Gilman.
The air was damp and heavy with scent of pikake and ginger flowers. The moonlight lay silver on the rows of plantation trees, sugar-cane, banana, papaya, and on the beds of wild pineapple and pepper plant and husk-tomatoes. In the shadows they could hear the grunting and scuffling of the penned animals, and the stirring of night birds in the jungle. The boy said:
‘My mother was crying when I left. I didn’t know what to say to her.’
‘All mothers cry when their children grow up. She’ll get over it.’
‘Peter Lorillard isn’t so bad, is he?’
‘No…He’s done a good job up here.’
‘He said he was sorry we weren’t staying in his house.’
‘People change.’
‘You’ve changed too.’
‘Have I?’
‘Tonight, when you were making your speech, it was as if you were another man, older and bigger. Even your voice was different. The people were afraid of you. They drew back as you passed. They kept looking at you, behind your back. I thought about the story you told: Moses coming down from the mountain.’
‘Let’s talk about you: How did it feel out there today?’
‘Oh brother! At first I was so scared I wanted to jump overboard and swim home. Even the sharks seemed less dangerous than what I was doing. Then, suddenly, it was like switching on a light. I knew what to do. I knew that I knew. That was the big thing: I knew that I knew. After that everything was easy – even coming through the channel!… Oh, I meant to say, thank you. I was excited. I forgot.’
‘I understood.’
‘Chief?’
‘Yes?’
‘When you said I would hear the voice of God, what did you mean?’
‘Just what I said.’
‘Have you heard it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you still hear it? For instan
ce, when you were speaking tonight, were you hearing it then?’
‘Listen a moment, Mark…Tell me what you hear now.’
‘The birds, the pigs…the wind, blowing in the trees.’
‘Is it the wind you hear, or the trees?’
‘I don’t know. Both, I suppose.’
‘I don’t know either Mark…And that’s the terror of the high place, and the high man. Is it God he hears or the echo of his own mad shouting? There is a moment when he knows and he knows that he knows, as you did today. There are all the other moments when he does not know – but he still must speak and still must act, and bear the consequence until he dies…When I sent you out this morning, I knew it was a risk – a big one. Suppose you hadn’t made the channel and piled up on the reef. I would have been answerable to all the people for all your lives. What was I, when I sent you out, Mark? A vain teacher, showing off a star pupil – or a wise chief leading a son of the tribe to manhood?’
‘I never thought of that.’
‘You will now, Mark…Let’s get some sleep. It’s only a few hours to sunrise.’
The walk to the crater rim was a long, slow, purgatory. Magnusson’s strength was failing, fast. Every hundred paces they had to stop and rest him – while he gulped down the thin air of the summit, and battled to control the spasms of coughing that threatened to tear him apart. More than once, Thorkild offered to carry him; but he refused. He would walk, every goddam step! He would die, by Christ! on his own two feet. When they came to the mouth of the tunnel, Thorkild propped him against the rock wall and gave him a mouthful of water from the gourd. He gagged and spat it out, then leaned back, trembling and gasping. Thorkild urged him desperately to hold on. Magnusson gave him a pale twisted grin.
‘Don’t…don’t kiss me off yet, Thorkild.’
They put his arms around their shoulders, heaved him off the rock face and half-dragged, half-carried him down the tunnel to the platform of the navigators. When the sunlight hit him he screamed in pure terror. He was blind – blind! They held him, rocking and writhing between them until he was calm again. They set him on his feet, and let him stand, alone. Thorkild said softly: