by H. E. Bates
The boy looked more than ever inconspicuous under the tall thin palms, the fronds of which began to flap above him like steel feathers as the little plane, taxi-ing in, stirred up currents of air with its dusty slip-stream.
From the plane came two men, the older, taller one spectacled and rubbery, in crumpled grey suit, carrying a brown leather bag, the smaller with a pigskin brief-case under his arm, neat and studious, with immaculate white shirt and shorts and thin white stockings.
The boy ran towards these men with excitement, waving both hands in greeting.
‘Dr Gregory! Monsieu’ Longuemart! Dr Gregory!’
Dr Gregory, the rubbery, spectacled American, waved a hand in reply. The Frenchman merely smiled at the sight of the boy stumbling down towards the air-strip and it was Gregory who called:
‘Hi, Timi! How are you? What goes?’
He held out a cool greyish hand to grip the boy’s dusty palm and the boy in turn held out his other hand to grasp the bag.
‘I may carry the bag?’
‘One of these days the bag will carry you.’
‘Please?’
‘Never mind. Skip it,’ the doctor said. ‘Have you been a good boy? That’s the thing. Did you take your pills?’
‘Yes, doctor.’
‘All of them? How many left?’
‘Four. I’d forgotten it was today you came.’
‘Good boy.’
The boy walked the rest of the way to the water-front between the Frenchman and the American. The Frenchman was speechless, reserved and smiling. It was always the American who talked.
‘Did Ginette take her pills?’
‘I think so.’
‘Anybody else you know take them? What about Fat Uncle?’
‘He was going to take them one night and then he went fishing. Another day he was sick.’
‘Where? How sick?’
‘Here.’
The boy put his hand on his stomach. The doctor said, ‘They are always sick, aren’t they?’ and the Frenchman, to whom the remark was really addressed, smiled, a little more broadly this time.
‘Have you been sick?’
‘No, doctor.’
They were by now on the water-front, in sight of the short cluster of houses, the schooner and the hotel.
‘I see Pierre’s boat isn’t here,’ the doctor said. ‘Where’s Pierre?’
‘I think he has taken the boat to Apia,’ the boy said. ‘He went yesterday.’
As they walked the rest of the distance down the waterfront the doctor felt a sudden compulsion to muse aloud to the Frenchman.
‘One of these days they’ll be in a fine jam here. Pierre will have the boat in Apia or Suva or somewhere and we won’t have the plane fixed and something’ll break out and there’ll be a fine mess. Like the epidemic on Bora-Bora. There’ll be hell to pay.’
He waved seemingly tired loose-jointed hands at house-fences on which trailed creepers of tender golden bells. His grey, rather globular eyes rested on bright barriers of red ginger-lily and hibiscus, the hibiscus full blown, crimson and yellow, but still unshrivelled by glaring sun.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ the doctor said. ‘Incredibly beautiful. I must get some pictures before I go back. I’ve got a batch of new slides. Look at the crotons. They always remind me of snakes, those yellow ones. They come out well in colour.’
They presently drew level with Edison’s schooner, the semi-derelict hen-house rocking gently up and down against the wooden water-front piles, and the doctor stopped to regard her with a certain ironic sadness.
‘All so beautiful, Jean, but no telephone.’
Gazing from the schooner, he turned with shrugged shoulders to the Frenchman.
‘How do you like your lines of communication?’
The Frenchman, staring at the schooner, smiled too and also ironically.
‘She goes like the wind,’ the boy said.
‘Does she now? Who says so?’
‘Fat Uncle. Faster than the wind. She goes faster than the wind.’
‘Does she?’ the doctor said.
He strode out, too affected to look at the boy, feeling it time to move on. He rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder, as if in comfort or tenderness, or merely confidentially. ‘So you haven’t been sick? Nothing? Not once?’
‘No, doctor.’
‘And you know why you haven’t been sick?’
‘Yes, doctor.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I take the pills.’
‘Good boy,’ the doctor said.
They were already within fifty yards of the hotel. Abruptly the doctor stopped again, eyes protuberant with moderately pained disgust as he stared at Edison’s crumbling frontage.
‘How do you suppose it holds up?’ he said. ‘The only good thing about it is the soda-water. Every time I come here I expect to see it flat. Which way do you suppose it would fall, Jean? On its face or on its backside?’
The Frenchman spoke with meticulous, pointed effect for the first time.
‘On its knees, I hope.’
‘Yes? I suppose a short prayer would do it no harm,’ the doctor said.
The first of these ironic flippancies was lost on the boy. He understood the doctor only when he spoke of pills. In a simple illustration, months before, the doctor had made him understand, perfectly and for all time, the meaning of the pills.
‘I want you to look at this. The picture of a girl. Do you think she’s beautiful?’ The doctor, who was fond of photography, had drawn from his case a coloured slide. The boy held the translucent glass to the light and gazed at it. ‘Yes, she is beautiful. Something like Ginette,’ he said. The doctor retrieved the slide and held out another. ‘Now look at this. Would you think, perhaps, she was the same girl?’
‘No. Not the same girl.’
‘Why not?’
‘She looks very old and she has the elephant legs.’
‘She is the same girl,’ the doctor said. ‘She has the elephant legs. Only ten months later.’
After this the doctor took him by the hands. The doctor’s loose large-jointed fingers were surprisingly cool and tender.
‘Nothing like that can happen to you if you take the pills,’ he said. ‘You understand? Nothing can ever happen to you.’
They were by now outside the front of the hotel. The doctor and the Frenchman went inside and sat at one of the scarlet cubicles, followed by the boy. ‘I guess a gin-fizz is called for,’ the doctor said. ‘Perhaps two gin-fizzes.’ White globes of sweat from the short exertion of the walk had begun to drip from his face and neck and chest and with a large white handkerchief he started to mop them away.
‘Tell Edison two gin-fizzes,’ he said to the boy. ‘Two really nice long gin-fizzes. Special ones.’
‘Special ones,’ the boy said. ‘Yes, doctor,’ and moved away from the cubicle.
It was the girl and not Edison who eventually brought the gin-fizzes, carrying them in on a round bamboo tray.
‘Ginette,’ the doctor said and both he and the Frenchman half-rose from their seats in greeting.
‘Eddo will be here in a minute. Oh! don’t get up.’ Her mouth, red and rather full, broke at once and for no reason at all into bright beating laughter. ‘He’s in a temper at me because I was late getting the fish.’
‘Please sit down,’ the doctor said. ‘Have a drink with us.’
‘Oh! no, I’m quite happy.’
She laughed again, too readily and too loudly, the doctor thought, with head thrown back, thick red tongue quivering in the broad but pretty mouth.
‘The boy could get it.’
‘Oh! no, I’m really quite happy.’
She sat down. The doctor could not help admiring, as he always did, the sumptuous golden arms, the primitively sensational shoulders rising smooth and naked from the cavern of blue-black hair, as she leaned her elbows on the table and laughed splendidly again, for the third time. There was always something extraordinarily lovable, simpl
e and touching, he thought, about that laughter. But today it struck him as being not only physically rich and splendid but also, in some way he hadn’t yet fathomed, uneasily sad.
‘Well, have a drink of mine,’ he said.
She laughed again.
‘Well, all right, doctor, a drink of yours.’ She picked up the long glass and half looked at the doctor, then the Frenchman, through the rim of it. ‘Santé? She drank gin-fizz, very briefly. ‘How long do you stay?’
‘It depends,’ the doctor said, ‘on how good people are. If they take their pills. Did you take your pills?’
‘Of course.’
‘If they were all as good as you,’ the doctor said, ‘we’d be away the same afternoon.’
‘Then I’m glad they’re not all as good as me.’
This was the signal for new and louder laughter and this time the doctor and the Frenchman joined in.
The laughter had hardly died away before Edison appeared in sloppy purple shirt, sky-blue trousers and a growth of beard that was like a pale sandy scrubbing brush.
Slouching, he shook hands loosely with the doctor and the Frenchman, and then sat down, scratching his bare chest.
‘Fish salad all right?’ he said. ‘Raw fish? All I can do today. I know you always like it.’
‘Fine,’ the doctor said.
‘Might get a sucking pig next time you come,’ Edison said, ‘and Ginette’ll get some shrimps. She’ll do that favourite curry of yours.’
Suddenly Edison got up, went to the corner bar, beyond the cubicle, and poured himself a neat deep whisky to which he added a gill of soda. Then he came back to the cubicle, bringing the bottle and drinking from the glass as he walked along. It was a favourite habit of his.
‘Fit?’ the doctor said. ‘I’ll bet you didn’t take those pills?’
‘No,’ Edison said, ‘and you know I never will. Whites don’t get elephantiasis. You know that.’ He held up his glass. ‘This is my bug-killer. Served me well and faithfully, man and boy, for many years.’
The doctor looked away. He was not anxious to pursue any further the discussion of a subject on which he was aware he was liable to grow distastefully fanatical when roused. He stared instead at Edison’s schooner, moored across the waterfront.
‘I see Pierre’s away. What do you do for supplies when Pierre’s not here?’
‘Oh! people call. Boats. You’d be surprised.’
‘Something you’d like when we come next time?’
‘Don’t think so,’ Edison said. ‘We always manage. Nothing ever happens here.’
‘Supplies of bug-killer good?’
‘Splendid. Never been exhausted yet.’
It pained the doctor to sit through the remainder of the drinks, through lunch and through some minutes of coffee afterwards, during which Edison lowered the level of the whisky bottle by several further inches and Ginette laughed at every other sentence or so. He did not know why he now felt unusually discomforted and pained at the impression of some rift between the drinking Edison and the laughing girl, but his heart felt curiously sore and sick whenever he looked at her.
He found relief in praising the coffee. The only really tolerable thing about Edison, he thought, was the coffee.
It was really quite remarkable coffee that Edison made. Perhaps, in relief, he praised it over-generously:
‘This is not only the best coffee in the islands. It’s the best coffee in the world.’
‘I know it.’
‘It’s nectar. It’s perfect. You could never ask for anything better.’
‘And you tell me how to live,’ Edison said. ‘On pills.’
Only a sense of irony kept anger pinned at the back of the doctor’s throat.
‘I don’t tell you how to live,’ he said. ‘I don’t tell you how to die either.’
He was relieved and glad to escape to the soda-water bottling shed, where he found the boy feeding bottles into the rattling roundabout and the indolent yellow mass of Fat Uncle responding mechanically, three-parts asleep, in the oppressive afternoon.
He shook hands with the massive bloated mountain and, while Longuemart got ready a notebook in which to record figures, if there were any figures to record, introduced the subject of pills.
Pain and nausea, with actual imitations of the process of vomiting, sprang sweatingly from Fat Uncle’s face. The slits of eyes actually opened, dark with simple despair.
‘Sick,’ Longuemart said. ‘He’s been very sick, he says. For several days.’
Gregory did not bother to use his own bad French, but said simply, in English:
‘Give him two pills. Explain to him that the boy takes the pills.’
Longuemart, in French, explained this, at the same time holding out the pills. The eyes of Fat Uncle rolled open and then shut themselves tightly. The big soapy hands groped at the air like shaggy spiders crawling up and down invisible webs.
‘He says he’s sick enough already. The pills made him vomit twice as much. He cannot eat his food.’
‘Hurt his pride,’ the American doctor said. ‘Shame him. Ask him if he wants to be thought less courageous than the boy.’
Fat Uncle held out his hands, flatly this time, in an appealing gesture of mute despair and Longuemart took the opportunity of placing the pills in the right hand palm. Fat Uncle recoiled as if cut, speaking quickly.
‘He says it is not a question of being as courageous as the boy. He knows the boy is very courageous but he is also younger. He says youth is everything. It never knows what it is to be tormented.’
‘Tell him – no, don’t bother.’
In despair, too, mildly tormented himself, the American suddenly gave up.
‘We’ll talk to him tomorrow before we leave,’ he said. ‘Give the boy his quota.’
The boy, with one of his rare smiles, held up his hands for the pills. Gregory patted him on the shoulder, smiling and saying:
‘See you later, Timi. Ask Ginette to find me a watermelon.’
Together the two doctors started walking up the slight incline at the back of the hotel, away from the water-front. A sun like a burnished wheel flared down nakedly on that part of the road where there was no shade of palms. Its force struck the American with such unexpected brutality after the shade of the hut that he paused suddenly on the hillside to pass his hand across his face. He was a great believer in the virtues of tabulation. He was a firm worshipper of efficiency. As a consequence he had made up his mind to record every house on the island, to give it a number and to make up a case-history of every inhabitant, giving them numbers too. It would take many weeks, but he was determined to see it through.
‘Where do we start today?’ he said.
‘House number four. Just along the road. Three Chinese. Numbers thirty-seven, thirty-eight and thirty-nine – S.’
The S, the doctor was aware, stood for Suspect. He twisted loose fingers across his chin. He was suddenly oppressed by heat, by the meaningless mass of trivial details which he himself had helped to devise and which now seemed of less consequence, than the occasional snaking curls of dust that a light hot sea-wind blew from the pot-holes.
He looked back down the hill, towards the scrubby waterfront, the hotel, and the flat dust road running beside the lagoon. He could just make out the shape of the little plane on the edge of the air-strip and it was as if, for a moment, he wanted or had decided to go back to it.
‘Something the matter? Did you mean to bring your camera?’
The American shook his head, seeming to sniff something. Cursorily he gave another glance at the hotel, so insubstantial-looking and tinder-like that he would not have been surprised to see it at any moment suddenly crumble or ignite in the torrid air.
‘I just thought I smelled corruption,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
With increasing despair Gregory followed the Frenchman along the dust track by the lagoon at noon the following day. Both men were riding bicycles, the only form of transport, apart from h
orses, the island knew. The further bay of the island was too far away for walking and the American already felt exhausted as he tried to plough the bicycle along a track that the past rainy season had left like a scoured river-bed.
All morning his mind had been alight with irritating warning signals about the perils of inefficiency. His entire training and nationality revolted against the mere notion of mess. He disliked the idea of riding a bicycle not so much for its own power to discomfort but because his mind clamoured constantly that there must be some simpler, more efficient, less sweatily wasteful way of achieving the same end.
He got off the bicycle.
‘Jean.’ The Frenchman, riding ahead, turned and got off his bicycle too. ‘Jean – do you think you could manage here by yourself for a time?’
‘I think so.’
‘Perhaps a week? Maybe ten days?’
‘I think so. Why?’
The American raised loose irritated hands and let them fall deprecatingly back on the handlebars of the bicycle.
‘Two successes, ten failures, four pill-spitters and one who actually palmed it,’ he said. ‘We’re great. We move mountains.’
‘The vale of prejudice.’
‘We’ve got to re-attack,’ the American said. ‘Re-form, I mean to say. If we’re even going to reduce the incidence of this thing, let alone stamp it out, we’ll only begin to do it by efficiency. And riding bicycles isn’t efficiency.’
‘Nor is it a cure for filariasis.’
The doctor, though fond of the Frenchman’s habit of talking sense with light flippancy, did not smile.
‘I’m going to take the plane back,’ he said, ‘and get scooter engines fitted to the bicycles.’
‘You think they will prove more effective than pills?’
‘I’ve got another idea in my mind, too,’ he said, ‘but firs the bicycles.’
He actually turned his bicycle round in the track and stood with one foot on the pedal, preparing to get on.
‘It’ll take a few days to work out,’ he said. ‘But if you wouldn’t mind staying on here—’
‘Of course. Not at all.’
‘Let’s get back then. We’ll have lunch and then load the bicycles into the Rapide and I’ll be away.’
