by Nevil Shute
Nadezna said, “We’re going to take you back to hospital in Karachi.” She told him about the specialist from Paris and the arrangements that had been made. “It’s going to be much better if you have it all done there.”
He smiled. “If I’ve got to get out of Bali I might as well go there. The only thing is this, and it’s quite definite. I’m not going to Europe.”
Nadezna said, “It may be that the best treatment is there, Connie. There’s something about X-ray therapy.”
He said, “They can keep it. I belong in these countries, not in France or England.”
There didn’t seem to be much point in arguing about it there and then. “In any case,” I said, “the first thing is Karachi. Will you be all ready to start tomorrow morning?”
He nodded. “I’m all ready now.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now look, about these ruddy pilgrims. I’ll have to go into town and see the Governor and smooth things over with him, Connie. I heard about two Dakotas coming here. Has anything else happened?”
“Three,” he said. “It was two when Arjan Singh was down here ten days ago. One came in from Bangalore after that. It had a lot of people from the Hindustan Aircraft Company.”
“Any more coming?”
“Not that I know of,” he said. “But then I didn’t know those were coming, either.”
“I don’t suppose that there’ll be any more,” I said. “They won’t clear pilgrim aircraft at Kallang, because the Dutch don’t like it.”
I left them to get on with the refuelling and transfer of the load, after warning Connie not to do any physical work himself, and I drove into Den Pasar to see the Dutch authorities. I went first to see Bergen. He was quite polite, though somewhat distant. He said that the policy in Indonesia was to interfere as little as possible with the indigenous religion of the peoples in Dutch territory, and that they had naturally assumed that this policy was known to me and that they would have my co-operation. They had nothing against Shak Lin except that he appeared to represent a new creed of some sort, and that aeroplane loads of people from all over the East had started coming to see him. It was quite impossible for that to be allowed. They understood that this man had been expelled from British territory in the Persian Gulf for similar activities, and they considered it a little underhand of me to have introduced him into Bali without disclosing his record. In any case, I must remove him now, and I must understand that no activities of a religious nature by my staff would be tolerated in the future.
There was nothing to be gained by quarrelling with them. I said I was exceedingly sorry this had happened. It seemed to me that this was hardly a religious matter; Shak Lin had done no missionary work among the natives, and had not, in fact, infected any Balinese men or women with his ideas. All that had happened was that visitors had come to see him from considerable distances, and had left again without troubling anybody or making any contact with the Balinese. I told him that Shak Lin in any case was a sick man and would have to be removed to hospital immediately, outside Dutch territory; I proposed to promote Phinit to be chief in his place, and send down a young Chinese called Pak Sza San to work with him. I said that I hoped there would be no further trouble.
We went in to see the Governor then and Bergen explained all this to him in Dutch, and he delivered a rocket in Dutch which Bergen translated to me, and then we all smiled and shook hands, and it was over. I said good-bye to Bergen and went out to my taxi to drive back to the airstrip. The young Dutchman, Andel, was waiting for me by the car; he was the man who had first taken us to Pekendang, in the jeep.
He said, “Is it true that Shak Lin has to go?” I suppose he was too junior in the administration to have been told.
I said, “Yes. He’s a sick man, anyway. I shall be sending down a young Chinese to work with Phinit.”
He said quietly, “I am very, very sorry, Mr. Cutter. It may not be my place to say so, but I think it is a great mistake.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Why do you say that?”
“I think he is a very great man,” he said simply. “Perhaps the greatest that has ever visited Bali.” And then he said, “I am interested in all that has to do with aeroplanes. I served in the war with the R.A.F. in Bomber Command; I was the rear gunner in a Halifax. I have been to Pekendang several evenings, to be with Shak Lin and to listen to him talking. He is the greatest man that I have ever known.”
It was nearly dark when I got back to the airstrip. The Dakota had come in and both lots of passengers had gone up to the Bali Hotel. Refuelling was just finished but the loads had not been changed; we would do that in the morning. I knocked everybody off for the night, because I knew that if anybody worked late on the aircraft Connie would insist on working too, and I wasn’t going to have that. We shut up the machines when the bowser had driven away, and then I asked Connie if there was room for us at Pekendang.
“I think so,” he replied. “There’s only three—you and Hosein and Nadezna?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Hosein usually goes with Phinit. There’s the hut you had before—that’s ready for you. Are you sleeping with Nadezna yet?”
She was in hearing, but I didn’t dare to look at her. “No, I’m not,” I said. “We haven’t got as far as that.”
“Pity,” he said. “Well, she can come in with me. We’ve shared a room often enough before.”
We all walked over to the village carrying our small overnight bags. It was dark and shadowy when we got there, a friendly darkness with brown people moving about in it and welcoming us, in the light of a few coconut oil wicks and a hurricane lamp or two. Connie took Nadezna to his room and sent Madé Jasmi to organize an extra bed. I dropped my haversack down in the hut that I had occupied before and went to find Phinit to talk over the new organization with him.
I sat with him on the steps of his house in the dim light, telling him what I wanted him to do; he knew Pak Sza San and said he would fit in all right in Bali. I had chosen Pak Sza San because he came from Singapore and so his home was geographically close to Indonesia, and he might be expected to know the customs and the ways of the Balinese by hearsay, anyway, better than, say, an Iraqui engineer from Basra. We sat there talking for about a quarter of an hour, and then a girl, bare to the waist, came up and spoke to him. I peered at her in the dim light, and it was Madé Jasmi.
Phinit said in English, “She wants to ask you something, Mr. Cutter.”
“Of course.” I said. “Ask her what I can do for her.”
There was an exchange in Balinese. “She says, is it true that Shak Lin has to go away to a hospital in a far country?”
“Tell her, I’m afraid that’s true enough.”
They spoke again. “She says, may she go with him to the hospital to cook his food and wash his clothes.”
I sat in silence for a minute. That’s usual in rural hospitals in the East, of course. A man’s wife always goes with him to hospital and sleeps on the floor beside him. They think it is a very cruel custom of the West to separate husband and wife when one is ill. They think that in the great distress of a bad illness husband and wife need each other most.
“Tell her,” I said gently, “that she can’t do that. She’s not his wife.”
They spoke. “She says that Shak Lin has no wife, and he will never have one. She says that he will be unhappy if he is alone, and that she knows what he likes to eat, and when, and she knows all his clothes and how he likes them washed. She says he cannot look after himself when he is tired and ill.”
I replied, “Tell her that he is going to a fine large hospital, larger than the Bali Hotel, a hospital such as Europeans go to when they are ill. Tell her that every person there has two or three servants that the hospital provides, and these are taught to do everything in the way the doctor says. Tell her that it is better that those servants should look after him, because he will get well more quickly, because they know everything about this illness.”
She said so
mething a little scornfully.
“She says, if they know everything about this illness, then they know that he is going to die.”
I didn’t know what to say to that one. Presently she said something again, and all the scorn was gone out of her voice.
“She says, Shak Lin will not stay in hospital for very long, because he is only going there to please you and his sister. She says that presently he will become too weak to travel, and he will go then to a quiet place beside an airstrip, and live there until he dies. She says, when he goes to that quiet place, may she get into your aeroplane to go to him, to be with him, to cook his food and wash his clothes.”
She had a simple faith, apparently, that my aircraft would always fly direct from Bali to Shak Lin, wherever he might be.
“Yes,” I said. “Tell her she may do that.”
CHAPTER TEN
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death.
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.
A. C. SWINBURNE
FOR A NUMBER of reasons, I worked to a slower schedule than normal on the homeward flight. Work upon the aircraft was not finished, for one thing, so that a dawn start was out of the question, and for another I had promised Nadezna that she and Connie should revisit the scenes of their childhood in Penang, so that I planned to get there early in the afternoon and stop there for the night. Accordingly, we took off from Bali about ten o’clock in the morning and made a short day of it to Diento, arriving there about three o’clock in the afternoon and stopping over for the night; next morning we went on at dawn and stopped for the night at Penang at about midday, to the surprise and delight of our passengers who had no objection to an afternoon in Penang at their company’s expense.
I had sent a cable from Diento to reserve accommodation for my passengers and crew, and since the passengers were all European I had reserved it at the best hotel in the town, the European and Oriental. Penang is a bit of a holiday place that planters come to when their isolation becomes unbearable, and everything in this hotel was of the best. It suited my passengers down to the ground but it didn’t suit Connie or Nadezna half so well, and I was out of tune with its luxury myself. They were going down to the Chinese quarter together. They suggested that I should join them down there later for a Chinese meal, and after some discussion about meeting we settled that I should meet them at six o’clock at the convent school that Nadezna had been to as a child, the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
I found it was a big place, with a school and an orphanage attached to it, down in the lower and less fashionable part of the town. Children played in the crowded streets all round it and the telephone wires overhead were tangled with their kites, and the streets were full of young women in flowered cotton pyjamas and old women in black pyjamas and young men in vests and shorts. The door was opened to me by an old sister in a coarse white cotton habit who showed me into a bare waiting-room, embarrassingly clean and scantily furnished.
Nadezna and Connie came very soon, and with them was the Mother Superior and a couple more sisters. Connie introduced the Mother to me, who was evidently Irish, and then they were saying good-bye to her. She wished Connie a good recovery from his illness. To Nadezna she said, “Remember that we deal in orphans here. If at any time you feel you have no home, come back and see us.”
She said, “That’s very kind of you, Mother.”
When we were out in the street I asked her, “Did they remember you?”
She nodded. “They remembered us both. The one you saw, Mother Mary Immaculate, she used to teach me in the kindergarten. She looks just the same as she did then. Connie sometimes used to come to take me home. She knew both our names, before I told her.”
She paused. “They’re so stable, those sisters,” she said quietly. “Whatever else may change, whatever gets upset, you feel that they’ll be going on there just the same, taking in orphans and bringing them up and putting them out into the world. Teaching the children …”
I told my passengers when I got back to the hotel that night that I wasn’t going to tire Shak Lin by flying very long stages. We took off at about nine o’clock next morning and stopped for the night at Calcutta. On the following evening we landed at Karachi. As usual, when we landed there a crowd of engineers was waiting on the tarmac to see Connie. I kept him in the aircraft and got out myself to find out what arrangements had been made. There was an ambulance from the hospital waiting for us; I got this backed up to the aircraft and got him into it and away while Hosein held the crowd off and answered questions.
Nadezna stayed in Karachi to be near her brother in the hospital, and I went on with the Tramp next morning to Bahrein.
The specialist from Paris, M. Serilaud, got to Karachi about the time that the Tramp went through again on its way down to Bali some days later. I had sent Arjan Singh this time, and I told him to night-stop at Karachi and go into town to see Nadezna, and then write me by air mail before flying on, to tell me what he thought about it all.
His letter came a couple of days later, and in the same mail there was one from Nadezna. And it wasn’t very good news.
There is no known cure for leukaemia, only palliative treatments, and none of these are of great value. The disease is a sort of cancer of the blood-forming organs, and once you’ve got it medical science can’t do a lot for you. Medical science, of course, is reluctant to admit this; the disease is a rare one and human guinea pigs with it are not so plentiful, so that medical science has plenty of new suggestions for treatment when a case appears. There is not much evidence that anybody’s life has been prolonged by such experiments, and no record of a cure.
Nadezna said as much to me in her letter. She said that Connie had agreed to a short course of X-ray therapy, not because he had any faith in it but because it would take a few days that he would have to spend in Karachi anyway. He wanted to come to Bahrein to see me, and he proposed to leave the hospital and travel to Bahrein on the Tramp with Arjan Singh on his return from Bali. Nadezna said that she had come to the conclusion that his time was limited, and as he had things on his mind that he wanted very badly to do, it would be best to let him do them.
Arjan Singh’s letter was to the same effect. He made the point that a first-class ground engineer, accustomed to diagnosing the ailments of the most complicated aircraft engines and instruments from an examination of the symptoms, had little difficulty in mastering the functions of so crude and inefficient a mechanism as the human body. He said that the Teacher knew all about the prospect before him and he was not distressed. He wanted very much to come back to Bahrein for a short time, and Arjan proposed to bring him back on his return from Bali. In the meantime the Teacher was quite happy to rest in hospital, and let the doctors have their fun.
I saw Captain Morrison with these letters. He was pleased that Connie was willing to come back for a short time, and he sat down there and then and wrote a short personal letter to him to welcome him back to Bahrein; we got that off to him that night by air mail.
As I was going away, he said, “Let me know when you expect him to arrive, Cutter. I’d like to come out to the aerodrome and meet the machine.”
I smiled, a little bitterly. “Shall I see if I can find a bit of red carpet?”
“We all make mistakes,” he said quietly. “I’d like to come and meet him, if you’d let me know.” I was sorry then that I’d said that, because after all, the mistake had not been his.
The Tramp came in late one afternoon. I had got Gujar Singh to fix up Connie and Nadezna in the same rooms that they had occupied before in the house of Mutluq bin Aamir, the silk merchant; Nadezna had retained her room, I think, but someone had to be turned out of Connie’s, which was done with great despatch. This of course
put the news that he was coming back to Bahrein all around the souk, and when the Tramp landed there were close on a thousand people waiting by the hangar to see it touch down. Morrison knew about this, and he had laid on a few policemen to keep the crowd behind the rope barrier that I had set up, and when the Tramp taxied to a standstill Morrison went forward to meet Connie as he got out of the machine. Connie was bareheaded and dressed in khaki shirt and stained khaki drill slacks, and Morrison shook hands with him in front of all the crowd. It was good of him to do that.
Connie wasn’t very tired, though I think he was paler than when I had seen him a fortnight before. He wanted to join in the sunset Rakats, and as there was half an hour to go I took him round the hangar with Tai Foong and showed him what was going on in the shop. When it was time for prayer, he went out to the vacant ground with the Imam, and the crowd trooped on to it when we took away the rope, and the engineers formed a solid phalanx around Connie so that he would not be crowded. Then the Imam stood up in front of them and called on Allah, and I went over to the office with Nadezna and gave her a cup of tea.
After the prayers were over, Connie came into the office. I said, “I expect you’d better get down to the souk and rest.” And I got out my keys and began putting the papers away and locking up my desk, because I was to drive him in the station wagon.
He sat down on a chair and said, “One thing, Tom, if you’ve got a minute. I came back here because I wanted to see you.”
I stopped bustling around. “Of course,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”
“I want an aeroplane,” he said. “I haven’t got any money for it, but I was wondering if you could let me have a Proctor for a month or two.”
I had two old Proctors. I had paid six hundred pounds for one and four hundred and fifty for the other; they were a fleabite in the total value of my aeroplanes, and both of them were pretty well written down in the accounts. “Of course,” I said. “You can have a Proctor for as long as you like. What do you want to do with it?”
