To the Islands (16 page)

‘When thou from hence away art past,

Every night and all,

To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last,

And Christ receive thy soul.’

‘You go sleep now,’ Justin pleaded. The valley was silent again, the invisible dark singers quelled. But there was no stopping the terrible voice of the naked white man.

‘If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,

Every night and all,

Sit thee down and put them on:

And Christ receive thy soul.’

‘Don’t do that, old man.’

‘I’ve given hosen and shoon.’ Heriot said. ‘Haven’t I? And meat and drink. And a wife. And many years of my life.’

‘You done that, old man.’

‘I will pass,’ Heriot muttered. ‘Yes, I’ll pass.’ He went to sleep just as he lay. It was like the dying away of flame around a log.

Heriot dreamed, under his dark rock, of a surge of light pursuing him over the plains, crests and combers of flowing light reaching for him as he fled, in astonishment and terror, over the bare earth.

Oh God, cried Heriot, running for the hills, Oh God, preserve me.

A cliff rose out of the ground in front of him, he fell against it, seizing it with his hands. My hands, cried Heriot, looking at them. My quick, malicious hands. He would have stayed to stare at them, so intricately boned and veined, so subtly meshed; but the tide was coming and there was no time to stand, he clawed at the cliffs and climbed, his hands shaking, his feet slipping, beyond the boiling light.

Against the rock the waves broke in a brilliant surf, smashed into violet, indigo, green, yellow, orange, and red. All pure light, flowing and fractious, hungry for Heriot.

Give me strength, he cried, give me strength against the ravenous light. I am old and weak, too weak to bear annihilation. But his strength was gone and there could be no more climbing, he could only cling and pray as the breakers rose towards his feet.

The sun was blinded with the spray of them, time died, there was nothing but the light and the agony of waiting.

Now I become nothing, whispered Heriot, now and forever, for ever and ever, I am no more. He closed his eyes, waiting, clinging to the rock. No more, no more.

Then the intolerable sweetness washed over him. His hands slackened as he cried out, in astonishment and joy.

I am all light, cried Heriot, I am torn, I am torn apart, all light, all glorious light.

All elements and colours in him were resolved, each to return to its source below the enormous swell. And under the surf and into annihilation sank the last of Heriot’s wild white hair.

Below the dark rock the sleeping Heriot waited for the ebb. It was a dream, he remembered, half-awake; a tired dream. But when the tide goes back, will there be nothing left, nothing but the bare earth under the cliff?

The tide began slowly to turn. But because of his dread Heriot could not wait for the uncovering of the ground, he began to shout: ‘No! No!’ and woke, shouting ‘No!’ under the black rock.

‘Old man,’ whispered Justin in the darkness, his voice strained with fear of the spirit that cried out in Heriot’s body, ‘what you got?’

‘Nothing,’ said Heriot. He put his hands across his eyes and sobbed like a child. ‘Nothing. Nothing.’

When he woke again there was the rock hanging above his head, and he remembered all his journeying past cliffs rising out of their ruins, the huge size of the boulders that strewed the valleys, and the debris of vast and ancient landslides. Because of this his eyes fastened apprehensively on the cliff overhanging his sleeping-place; he saw the cracks in it, thought he saw them widen, thought he heard the grating of moving surfaces and sharp sounds of fission. He hauled himself upright on his aching bones and ran out into the camp area, shouting: ‘Justin!’

Justin appeared, looking agile and young among the derelicts surrounding him, and very important with the rifle in his hand. ‘What that, old man?’

‘Let’s go,’ Heriot begged, ‘before these cliffs fall. Let’s go quickly, Justin.’

‘Those cliff not going to fall, old man.’

‘I want to go!’

‘Hey, you look now,’ Justin reasoned, ‘these horse properly tired out now, you let them stay there where all that grass. Then we go tomorrow.’

Suddenly old and tremulous: ‘I’m afraid,’ Heriot said.

‘Nothing going to hurt you, old man.’

‘Justin,’ Heriot pleaded, ‘listen to me. Don’t forget me now because I’m old and dying.’

‘I listen to you all the time, old man. But I reckon better we stay here now and I go away getting tucker with my gun for this old people. You not dying, old man. You better go put your clothes on now, eh?’ Embarrassment at the absurd appearance of the white man broke through the tolerant voice. ‘It not right you walking round like that. You lie down sleeping all day, you feel good then.’

‘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.