Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  “Wednesday,” he said. “It’s not more than a two-day trip, provided that they’re ready to start when I arrive.”

  She drank a little of the milk. “Sit down and talk to me for a minute, Nigger, till I go to sleep,” she said. He sat down on the bed, and took one of her hands, and so they sat in silence for a time.

  “You’re very tired,” he said quietly. “Will you stay in bed tomorrow, too, if I’m away?”

  She smiled. “It’s the reaction. But I’m nothing like so tired as she is, Nigger. I don’t believe that she’s slept properly for the last month.”

  “I know,” he replied. “But two wrongs don’t make a right. If she’s as tired as that she’ll need a rest, and she won’t need you in the office.”

  “She needs a rest all right,” the girl said. “But this is the climax of it, and from now onwards both the Queen and England will be in calm water.”

  He stroked her hand, “Would you be able to leave, and marry me?”

  She nodded. “I think so. I think when we’ve all recovered from this thing a bit I could have a talk with Macmahon, and then perhaps start training up the Menzies girl.”

  “Will she be staying here some time?” he asked.

  She nodded. “She won’t go back to England until England’s settled down, and probably not till they’ve had a general election under the new franchise. She’s got to go to Ceylon for a fortnight pretty soon, and I know she wants to go to Borneo. But this will be her home and her main base until the autumn, or your spring. It’s not a bad time for a change of staff, if there’s to be one.”

  He smiled slowly. “I think that’s a good idea,” he said.

  She smiled with him. “I think that, too.” She drank the last of the milk and put the glass down, and sat holding his hand. Presently her eyelids dropped, and she jerked herself awake.

  He bent and kissed her. “Go to sleep now,” he said softly. “If I have to go to Kenya or across the world before you wake again, you know that I’ll be thinking of you all the way, and counting the hours till I can get back here again.”

  She clung to him for a minute. “Dear Nigger. Don’t be away too long.”

  He kissed her again, and put her down sleepily upon the pillow, and she turned on her side and sighed with the relief of relaxation from strain. He got up from her side and went to the window and pulled down the Venetian blind to darken the room, adjusting it carefully to let the air blow through. In the half light he paused by the bed on his way to the door but she was already breathing evenly and deeply, already practically asleep. He moved to the door and opened it gently, and went out, and closed it carefully and silently behind him.

  He was tired with the strain himself, and now he knew for certain that a new flight was close at hand, when he would have to stay awake for many hours. He went back to his bedroom and pulled his own blind down, and lay down on the unmade bed again for an hour’s sleep before the ardours of the day.

  He knew as he drifted into sleep that he was one with Rosemary. Together they would make one splendid person; apart both had been incomplete. He would wake presently and go away and leave her, and while he was away he would be thinking of her all the time, as she would be of him. He would go thousands of miles away from her in a few hours so that a quarter of the world would lie between them, but he would come back again and find that other half of his new self, and they would be complete.

  He slept very deeply. In his sleep he seemed to be drifting further and further away from her, and growing weaker and weaker. The time of separation grew immensely; it was no longer two days as he had thought it would be, or three days at the most. She was receding from him in time as he slept; he struggled to wake, but he was now too weak. She would be there for him to find again, and love, but many years away. As he grew weaker she receded further; when first he slept he knew that she was only a few yards away, and if he needed her she would come. But now he needed her, needed her infinitely badly, and she could not come to him, and with the agony and disappointment he heard himself sobbing, and he felt the tears as they streamed down his face.

  He needed Rosemary, and she could not come for thirty years or more. Only the animals had come, standing outside in the rain among the floods to watch him die. Only the animals and a dazed, delirious old Bush Brother who sat holding his hand while he sweated with malaria, touching him with a hand that shook from time to time with fever chills.

  He did not need the parson or the animals; he needed only Rosemary, and she was now too far away in time for her to be able to help him. There was a steady drumming sound, incessant, like a low kettledrum, drumming him out of life. He knew that he was finished and that Rosemary was very far away; he would find her again some day, but she could not come to help him now. His lips moved once again, and muttered, “Rosemary.”

  “She’ll come,” I said wearily. It seemed I had been saying that all night.

  Sister Finlay moved beside me, and she took his hand from mine, and held the pulse while she looked at her wrist watch in the grey light of the dawn. I sat there in the chair beside the bed trying to focus my eyes upon the scene, utterly exhausted.

  “He’s practically gone now,” she said softly.

  She stood holding his wrist, motionless. I got up stiffly and she made a movement to assist me, but I put her aside, and she turned back to Stevie. I stood there in the doorway looking out into the clearing, and it was still raining. The wild dogs and the wild pigs, and the cattle, and the wallabies stood in a circle round the house in the grey, rainy dawn, their heads all turned to us in adoration, watching the majesty of his passing.

  10

  SERGEANT DONOVAN ARRIVED about midday, with Hugh McIntyre, the manager of Dorset Downs, and one of his native stockmen. They came in a boat from the station homestead, a flat bottomed skiff that they had poled through the channels and the floods. Donovan had left Landsborough at dawn on horseback and had tried to ride to us, but the horse would not cross the deeper channels, probably because of the crocodiles, so he had gone round by the station track to Dorset Downs to get help, and the boat.

  It was only a small boat, and it was leaking rather badly; moreover, the rain still poured down and added to the water in the bottom. Liang Shih flatly refused to leave his home, and I think perhaps this was a relief to Sergeant Donovan, because when the five of us got into the boat we only had three inches freeboard, so that we had to sit very still and bale a good deal with an old cigarette tin. Hugh McIntyre promised to send the black boy back next day with a few gallons of kerosene for Liang, and I believe he sent some flour and sugar too.

  Before leaving, we buried Stevie on the far side of the clearing, where the animals had been. The Sergeant wanted to leave that till the next day because they were all rather foolishly concerned about my health. But I knew that once I got to Dorset Downs they would put me to bed, and nobody would read a burial service over the man. So I insisted that we should bury him before we left, and in fact, it didn’t take very long because the grave began to fill with water when it was little more than two feet deep. We had to let it go at that and bury him so, and I repeated the essential parts of the service while the sister held me by the elbow and the men stood by bareheaded in the rain. We put a little cross of branches up to mark the spot and blazed a couple of the trees in case the cross got washed away, and then they made me get into the boat and we started back towards the homestead.

  Last month, at the May races in Landsborough, the first race meeting of the year after the wet, I took up a collection for a headstone for the grave. I took it up each evening in the bars of the hotels at about seven o’clock, because men drinking in a bar are free with their money at that time of night and everyone remembered Stevie. I had to drink more beer than I enjoyed but I went on till I had collected sixty pounds by the third night, because headstones are rather expensive in a place like Landsborough, on account of the high cost of transport. I sent the order off to Cairns immediately, and I hope that it will be here
in a month or two, and we can take it out to Dorset Downs and set it up.

  I had this matter of a proper headstone very much in mind from the first, and even in the boat on the way back to Dorset Downs, feverish as I was, I was troubling myself about the inscription. The surname was Anderson, of course, but I had difficulty in sorting out in my confused mind whether it was Stephen or David, or Stephen David, or David Stephen. In the long journey down the channels and the floods I tried to ask Hugh McIntyre and Sergeant Donovan about this, but I was really rather ill by that time, I suppose, and I couldn’t make them understand what it was that I wanted to know. I think they thought that I was wandering, because they kept saying things like, “You’ll be right,” and “Not so long, now,” and presently I gave up the attempt.

  Dorset Downs homestead stands on a little hill, and we had to disembark from the boat about a mile from the house. I should have had difficulty in walking so far, but the men were most kind; they sent the black boy running to fetch down a quiet old horse for me, and when this came they put me up on it and so I came to the house on the hill. Hugh McIntyre is a bachelor and there is normally no woman there except the gins, but they put me to bed with Sister Finlay in the next room to me, and there I stayed for the next four days till I was quite recovered.

  They have a radio transmitter worked from batteries at Dorset Downs, so they were able to talk to Landsborough after the morning and the evening schedule from Cloncurry. Sergeant Donovan left on horseback for the town the morning after we arrived, but there was nothing urgent in the hospital to require the sister, and so she stayed with me at the station for the whole four days. By that time I was very anxious to get back to Landsborough. I had missed one Sunday through my infirmity, which worried me a good deal, and I had left my parish magazine half written and so missed the weekly aeroplane that takes it into Cairns each month to be printed. I was most anxious to get back to my work, and when we had some sunshine on the morning of the fifth day I insisted that I must return.

  We went on horseback, of course, Sister Finlay and myself, with John Collins and Harpo, both stockmen from the station, to ride with us and bring the horses back. The water was not more than a foot deep on any part of the track so that we had quite an easy ride, but it took us about three hours and though we walked the horses the whole way I was rather tired when we got to Landsborough. Sister Finlay refused point blank to let me go back to my vicarage and insisted that I should go in to hospital for a few days, and as at any rate I had got back to town I let her have her way.

  Sergeant Donovan came up to the hospital the day after we arrived. I was still in bed because the sister had taken away my clothes, a gesture that was kindly meant but really quite unnecessary. I was anxious to get something organized about the headstone, because a grave out in the bush is very apt to become obliterated and forgotten, whereas I have noticed that if it has a headstone stockmen sometimes stop there as they pass by in the course of their work, and dismount and leave a flower or two upon the grave, or even say a prayer if they are quite sure that nobody is looking, which is very good for the stockmen. So I talked to Sergeant Donovan about the headstone and the inscription.

  “I am most anxious that he should not be forgotten,” I told him. “There was a great deal of good in Stevie.”

  “Aye,” said the sergeant non-committally. “He was all right.”

  “I had a great respect for him,” I said. The sergeant was looking at me a little curiously. “There’s a verse from the Wisdom of Solomon that I should like to see upon the stone.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Hargreaves?”

  I said, “ ’Having been a little chastised they shall be greatly rewarded, for God proved them and found them worthy for Himself.’ ”

  There was a pause. “Aye,” he said at last, “that might do.”

  I was a little disappointed that he did not display more enthusiasm, but mounted policemen in North Queensland are not noted for their lyrical outbursts. “There’s one thing that I’m not clear about,” I said, “and that’s his name. The surname was Anderson, of course, but was he Stephen or David?”

  The sergeant stared at me. “You’ve got that all mixed up, Mr. Hargreaves,” he said slowly. “He wasn’t Anderson. We haven’t got an Anderson in Landsborough. His name was Stevie Figgins.”

  “But he told me that his name was Anderson!” I exclaimed. “Nigger Anderson. They called him Nigger, because he was a quadroon.”

  He shook his head. “Stevie Figgins,” he repeated. “I can show you on his pension papers, in his own handwriting. Did he tell you that his name was Anderson?”

  I nodded. “Most definitely.”

  “A bloke like that, he’d say anything when he’d a skinful, Mr. Hargreaves. When did he tell you that?”

  “In Liang Shih’s hut, before he died,” I said.

  He smiled. “He wouldn’t be himself then,” he said gently. “Maybe you weren’t quite yourself then either, Mr. Hargreaves, with the fever and that. I can tell you, Stevie Figgins was the only name he had, and he wasn’t a quadroon, either.”

  I was silent for a long time, re-arranging my ideas. At last I said, “Do you know anything about his wife?”

  “I know a little bit,” he said. “They used to fight like cat and dog twenty-five years ago, when he was manager of Wonamboola station. It was probably that that started him upon the booze and lost him the job. She left him then, and later she got run over by a truck in Sydney, and died. That might have been in 1930 or soon after.”

  “They didn’t live in Canberra?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Canberra? Never come within a mile of it. They weren’t that sort of people, Mr. Hargreaves.”

  “Did they have any children?”

  “Not that I ever heard of. They might have done, but if there were any they never showed up here. Far as I know there weren’t any relations. It doesn’t matter, because he’d nothing to leave.”

  He went away presently, and I was left to try to reconcile what he had told me with my memories. I found it better to cling to the sheet anchor of reality. Sergeant Donovan was a competent and level-headed young man, and I was forced to accept that what he had said about Stevie was almost certainly correct. It tallied, moreover, with my own experience of Stevie up to the night when he had died on Dorset Downs. And as regards that night, I had to admit that for most of it I was running a very high fever, myself.

  I took the matter a stage further with Sister Finlay when she brought me a cup of tea that evening. “Sister,” I said, “I want to ask you something. Did you hear any of that long story Stevie told me before he died?”

  She stared at me. “What story? I didn’t hear any story.”

  “After we put the light out, to save the torch,” I said. “I asked him about his relations, and he began telling me about . . . all sorts of things.”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t say anything. I’m sure of that, Mr. Hargreaves.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “I don’t think so. You were sitting there holding his hand, but neither of you said a thing.”

  “Are you quite sure of that?”

  “I’m quite certain,” she said, smiling. “I was much more worried about you than I was about Stevie, because he was going to die in any case. You went to sleep, Mr. Hargreaves, and I didn’t wake you because I thought it was such a very good thing for you. You slept the whole night through.”

  It was fantastic, because I had seen her asleep. “You’re sure you didn’t go to sleep yourself?”

  She was affronted. “Mr. Hargreaves! I’ve never slept upon a night case yet, and I hope I never shall!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t make it out, because I thought he told me a long story, all about himself.”

  “You were very ill,” she said. “I should forget about it, if I were you. I may have dozed a little once or twice, but I was up and walking about every half hour, having a good look at you and at those wretched animals. Liang and
I gave Stevie a couple more of those pipes at about two in the morning, right under your nose, but you never woke.”

  That seemed conclusive, anyway. “The animals were there?”

  “Oh yes, they were there. Liang said he’s seen them do that before when they’re all stranded together on an island, in the wet.”

  “Do what?”

  “Stand looking at the house. It didn’t seem to worry him, but if I’d had a gun I’d have soon driven them away. I don’t like wild animals as much as that.”

  I was silent.

  Presently she said, “Whatever you think he told you, I should forget about it, Mr. Hargreaves. People often think funny things when they’re running a high temperature, and it doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s part of the clinical condition, part of the disease, that you get mild delusions. When the body’s sick it can’t help affecting the mind sometimes, just a little, and when the body gets well the mind gets well again too, and much more quickly.”

  “I see that, Sister,” I said. “It was a very odd experience and I hope I don’t have another one like it.”

  “I’m sure you won’t,” she said. “You’re getting on splendidly. We’ll have you up next week.”

  In spite of my protests, she kept me in bed for five or six days longer, partly, I think, because she knew that I would want to go back to my vicarage as soon as I was well. When finally I got back there I found that a transformation had been made. There was glass in all the windows of the one room that I occupy, and a coat of colour wash had been put upon the walls, and there was a proper bedstead out of one hotel and a cane easy chair out of the other, and a brand new kerosene stove that gives out a tremendous heat and keeps me very warm and cosy in the wet. The people had done all this for me completely of their own initiative, and I must say that I was very much affected.

  I settled down then for a very comfortable and lazy couple of months. It is usually April before one can get motor vehicles about again in the Gulf Country, and although when I was a younger man I used to go on travelling on horseback all through the wet I now feel that I am getting a bit old for that. I settled down instead to write a series of articles for my parish magazine, so that I could issue it each month throughout the dry without wasting too much time in writing during the season when the roads are fit for travelling.