by Nevil Shute
Arjan Singh wrote letters about all this to Wazir Hussein to account for the money he was spending, and Nadezna wrote to me every week. The Wazir turned up in my office one day rather concerned about what was going on, because it seemed that two or three Dakotas full of Moslems had been there, and there was no mosque at Damrey Phong. There was a little Buddhist temple which the villagers were building up themselves out of the profits of the catering and urged on by Boonchuey, and a Bengali jute merchant had provided three lakhs of rupees for quite an imposing Hindu temple. The Wazir said that his young master was distressed to hear that there was no mosque on the strip and no Imam, and that he proposed to make good these deficiencies immediately. I said, of course, I thought that it would be a very good thing.
Connie had been there for over four months before I was able to free myself from my business in Bahrein for long enough to go down there again to see him — and Nadezna. I had replaced her in the office by an Iraqi shorthand typist, but he wasn’t really any help to me; he could never act upon his own initiative to relieve me, as Nadezna had done every day. There came a time, however, when I realised that unless I went to Damrey soon I might not see Connie again, and so I called in Gujar Singh and told him to get on with it, and cabled Arjan to meet me with the Proctor at Mergui, and went down on the Tramp with Hosein.
Arjan told me when I met him that a load of pilgrims came in almost every day, and sometimes two in one day; in fact, we got to Damrey Phong about the same time as a Dakota from Ceylon and had to make another circuit while it landed ahead of us and got off the runway. They had got into the swing of handling the pilgrims by that time. He told me that they had never had any sort of trouble, even when Moslems and Hindus had arrived together; this was probably because, being technicians, they were all fairly well-educated men, made more broadminded, too, by travel. To prevent any risk of clashes, however, he had had separate dormitory huts put up for each of the three main religions, and these stood each behind its own temple in an orderly array. With all these buildings, from the air Damrey Phong was starting to look quite a place.
I found Connie in bed on the veranda. He was looking very frail and white; it did not seem to me that he had very long to go. He no longer got up to speak to the pilgrims, nor did he pay much attention to them while I was there. The routine was that they went to prayer at their own temple, and there the resident priest explained to them that they must not expect much from the Teacher, who was now a dying man. Then they would come and sit down on the ground in front of the house where they could see Connie in his bed, and he went on talking to whoever happened to be with him, or dozing, paying little or no attention to them. In the evening they were called to prayer again, and ate, and slept, and took off again in their aircraft in the morning.
I sat with him on the veranda in the days that I was there for long periods, watched by all these pilgrims seated on the ground before the house; after a time one forgot about them, and took no notice. He was very pleased to see me, and grateful for everything that had been done to help him. Madé Jasmi sat all day on the veranda steps when she was not cooking or washing for him, making her palm leaf offerings in the Balinese way; the Hindu priest had made a special little shrine to Shiva for her in the temple, and she used to put them there, and pray. When pilgrims were about she wore her jacket, but at other times she usually left it off for coolness; when the Buddhist priest Boonchuey came to talk to Connie, which he did frequently, Madé was banished to the back quarters with the other women.
Connie liked to talk about the earliest days, when we had met in Cobham’s Circus, when we had done the Gretna Green act together in the old Ford, when we had been bombed by the crazy-flying Moths and Avros with little paper bags of flour and rolls of toilet paper, and my skirt always got torn off. He could still laugh at the recollection of the fun that we had had together, even though it hurt him to laugh now.
“You’ve come a long way since those days, Tom,” he said once. “You never thought that you’d end up by running an air line half across the world, and owning all the assets of the business.”
I smiled. “You never thought that pilgrims would be coming from five thousand miles away to watch you talking to me, and to pray beside your house.”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “No, I’d never have thought of that. It’s funny the way things turn out.”
Another time he said, “I didn’t want to end up with this sort of reputation, Tom. All I ever wanted to be was an absolutely first-class ground engineer, the best in the world. And because the best teacher is the chap who’s only one jump ahead of the pupil, I thought I could teach others to be first-class chaps. But the truth of it is, you can’t do any job really well unless you’re really good yourself. The perfect job demands a perfect man, and you can’t separate the two. I didn’t understand that when I started. It wasn’t until I came out to the East and learned something about religious ideas here that I began to cotton on to what it was all about.”
And another time he said, “They’re making legends about me already, Tom. Try and tone that down. They’re paying far too much attention to what that English pongyi, U Set Tahn, has been saying.”
“You mean, about you being born in Tibet or somewhere?”
He nodded. “It’s completely wrong. I was born in Penang, and I’m a British subject. I’ve got a birth certificate to prove it.” He hesitated. “My father married my mother up at Barkul, true enough. But I was born in Penang. So that prophecy can’t possibly apply to me.”
I wasn’t quite so sure about that, though I didn’t argue the point. Some Asiatic countries have a different definition of when a man is born.
“Another thing,” he said. “U Set Tahn and the Rangoon Buddhists say that the new Teacher’s ministry will last for four years and twenty-three days. They’re trying to pin that one on me, too.”
“I know,” I said.
“Well, when did I start teaching anybody anything?” he asked triumphantly. “I don’t know myself. I simply haven’t a clue.”
“When did you first come to Damrey Phong?” I asked.
“Four years ago last Thursday,” he said. “I worked it out. But I never taught anybody anything while I was here. So that one’s all wrong, too, because I was here three months, and I don’t suppose I’m going to live that long. Try and put a stopper on this sort of thing, Tom, if you can. I want people to remember me as a good ground engineer with both feet on the ground. Not as a legendary mystic or anything like that.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. And as I sat there I wondered if he knew when he had been teaching or if, in those early days, his teaching had been largely unconscious. U Myin and Chai Tai Foong had both been with him at Damrey Phong, and they were among the most devout of Connie’s followers.
That evening I walked out with Nadezna to the runway in the bright moon, and we walked up and down it for a time, talking of Connie. And presently, at the far end where nobody could see us, I took both her hands, and I said, “What about us? After this is all over, and it must be soon, I’m afraid — after that, will you marry me?”
She said, “I wanted to tell you about that, Tom.” She hesitated. “I’m not going to marry anybody, ever.”
I said quietly, “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”
She smiled. “I’m sure you don’t. But it’s what I’m going to do.”
I held her a little closer. “Not because of your Chinese father?” I asked. “It’s not reasonable to let that worry you. It doesn’t worry me. You know it doesn’t. We can work that out together. I don’t want to go and live in England. All my work, and all my interests are out here, Nadezna. But it won’t be any fun unless you’re with me.”
She freed herself a little, and I knew that I had failed. “It’s not that, Tom,” she said. “I’m not worried about that now. I know that if I married you we’d get over the mixed marriage side of it all right. But we’d be letting such an awful lot of people down.”
&n
bsp; I was puzzled. “Who would we be letting down?” I asked.
She did not answer me directly. “I’ve learned a great deal since I’ve been here with Connie,” she said. “You can’t help being influenced by it, Tom — all these aeroplanes that come here every day, at such expense, full of people who believe in him. People who have spent all their savings just to make this journey, because Connie is a man that they can pin their faith to. All they want to do is just to hear him say a few words, or if that’s not possible, then just to see him, or touch something that he has touched. It’s — it’s like the Bible, Tom. Like people that were wanting to see Jesus. They believe in him.”
“They haven’t been doing any worshipping, have they?” I asked. “Not like as if he was a God?”
She shook her head. “They haven’t been like that. They know that he’s a man, and that he’s dying. Gods don’t die. But they know, too, or they think they know, that he is such a man as they will never see again, and they go away feeling that just to look at him and touch what he has touched has done them good, and has made their lives complete, and justified spending all their savings to come all this way. They don’t think that he’s a God. But if you asked me if they thought that he was a man who had attained perfection as Gautama attained it — well, I think a lot of them do think of him like that. They do.”
“You mean, as an example?” I suggested.
“I think that’s it,” she said. “They venerate him as an example of what any man can attain to if he can be as wise, and thoughtful, and self-sacrificing, and as good as Connie.”
We stood together in the moonlight for a little, on the runway. Over against the strip the mountain loomed above us, scented in the warm night air. “He’s my brother, Tom,” she said simply. “One never thinks one’s brother can be anything particular. I thought he was just nuts about religion, and it was all because he’d never had a girl in the United States, because he was an Asiatic who was out of place. It’s not easy when you’re brought up as an Englishman or an American, but you’re really Asiatic, Tom. I know. I thought that Connie was just an ordinary brother, just like any girl might have. I thought that up till the time I came here. But now ... I’m not so sure.”
I was silent. Perhaps I wasn’t quite so sure, myself.
“These people that come here to see him,” she said presently, “ — they think he’s a man, but a man touched by the hand of God, whichever form of God they happen to believe in. And because that’s what they think, it does them good and gives them something to hang on to. Because, it means that God still cares about the world, and cares for them. That’s why they come here, Tom. They come to see the evidence that God still cares, that He has shown that care in making of one man a perfect example, to show everyone the way to live their lives out in the modern world.”
She turned to me. “It’s bad luck on us,” she said, “but I’m not going to spoil it for them. If I, Connie’s sister, married and had children, and lived just a normal woman’s life, going out shopping in the morning, going to the movies in the evening while you worked up a bigger business every year and we made money — it’ld detract from it. Maybe they’d get to feel that Connie couldn’t have been something after all, if his sister wasn’t anything. If they thought that, they’d lose the faith they have, and with that they’d lose everything that he has worked to give them. It’s in my hands now, Tom, whether what he’s started goes ahead or flops — at least, I think it is. And it’s not going to flop.”
I cleared my throat. “What are you going to do?”
“It’s bad luck on you, Tom,” she repeated. “You deserve a better deal than this. But if Connie could give up love to help along the things that he believes in, so can I. I don’t have to give up children, though. I’m going to go back to Penang, Tom, where I came from. I’m going to go to Mother Mary Immaculate and ask if I can start in at the bottom, working in the orphanage. That’s where I came from, and I reckon that’ll be the best thing I can do.”
I asked her, “May I come and see you there, sometimes?”
She said, “Please — please don’t do that, Tom. And please, don’t write.”
I started on my journey to Bahrein next day, because I couldn’t stay away too long. Connie lived for a month after that, gradually growing weaker. Then he went into a coma that lasted about thirty hours. He died just before dawn, and the cremation took place on the same day, according to the custom in the East.
11
ONLY THE ROAD and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,
And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.
JOHN MASEFIELD
DAMREY PHONG HAS grown a bit since then, but the Proctor still stands in the same tin hangar, with the engine that Connie took out of it when he put in the new one standing beside it on an overhaul trestle. He changed the engines before he got too ill to work and got the old one stripped down for overhaul with the sump off and the cylinder heads, cylinders, valves, valve gear, and pistons laid out neatly on a table in rows, all washed and clean and resting on a blanket. He had to give up then and he never worked again, and so the job remains just as he left it. The pilgrims file past every day and look at the Proctor and these engine parts laid out behind the wooden railing, and most of them kneel down and say a prayer or two, according to their creed.
It’s not quite the same, of course. Sheikh Fahad went there at a very early stage and had a sort of temple roof, a temple with no walls except the roof posts, built over the whole lot to protect it from the rains, so that the two little European houses and the corrugated iron hangar with the Proctor in it and the very lovely shrine that he set up to hold the casket of ashes are all under the same wide roof and safe for a considerable time. The house that Connie died in is kept just the same, with his bed and his few clothes laid out, all very simple. In the other house there is a small museum, and here his tools are displayed; he had quite a lot of fine precision tools and measuring instruments, micrometers, inside micrometers, feelers, thread gauges, callipers, vernier gauges — all that sort of thing. These are exposed to view, and may be touched and handled reverently by the pilgrims if they wish, and they are kept so carefully cleaned and greased that they are as bright and new as when he bought them.
In another room there are five pictures, and nothing else. Fahad, as a Moslem, will have nothing to do with pictures, of course, though I have been there with him and noticed that he spent a quarter of an hour in that room with them. Mr. Ghosh, the Bengal jute merchant, commissioned Evan Stanley to come out from England to paint them, and a committee of the three priests on the airstrip decided that they should be of Connie Shak Lin himself, taken from photographs, and of the four people he loved best. So there is a very good picture of Connie in his stained khaki shorts and shirt, grave and intent, working on the engine of his Proctor, which stands in the background of the hangar behind him.
There is one of Arjan Singh, seated in the pilot’s seat of the Proctor. They chose that because so many people had seen Arjan in that six months with Connie, and had seen how carefully he cared for him on that last journey.
There is one of Nadezna, a very good one. I can hardly bear to look at it.
There is one of Madé Jasmi, very sweet, but not quite natural because she has her jacket on.
And there is one of me, which oughtn’t to be there at all.
Things are a bit different at Bahrein, too, on the aerodrome. There was a considerable demand from the people, backed by Sheikh Fahad, that a mosque should be built on the bit of vacant land beside the hangar that Connie had first used for prayers, and that the hangar should continue to be used for civil aviation so that the Moslem engineers should have the mosque available for prayer right by the hangar. This meant that the R.A.F. would have to move away and leave that area undisturbed, although it is right on the edge of their camp. They have been exceptionally understanding and farsighted about all this, and have accepted the considerable inconvenience that must resul
t to them. Their new hangars are going up at the south end of the north-south runway, nearly a mile away from their camp. The mosque is going up beside the civil aviation hangar.
A fair number of pilgrim aircraft come to Bahrein, perhaps one a week. Most of these are from Egypt or Iraq, places relatively near at hand, and most of these pilgrims are people who can’t afford the long journey to Damrey Phong. Damrey is the main centre for pilgrimages, of course, since it was here that Connie’s ministry began and finished, but it’s a long way and an expensive journey for them, however much one tries to cut the rates. I have two new Tramps on order now specially fitted for pilgrims, and I hope to get the fares down to about sixty per cent of what one has to charge for a Dakota fare, but it’s still an awful lot of money for an engineer to save. And yet they do it.
Some of them, perhaps one or two machines a month, go further still, right down to Bali, where Phinit shows them the hangar and the hut in Pekendang where Connie lived, and Madé Jasmi still sits quietly weaving her lamaks on the steps, oblivious of the brown people from far lands who have come to see the relics, of which she is one. I told her, through Phinit, when I took her back to Bali, that her service to Connie had been an episode of her youth, tender and lovely to look back upon. Now, I said, she ought to marry a young man of her people, and have children like a normal girl. I told her that, but so far there is no indication at all that she intends to follow my advice.
Nadezna is in Penang, living in the convent and working with the orphans. She came to some working arrangement with the Mother Superior and the Bishop that allows her to stay there; although she is far from being a Catholic or anything else, as yet, the Bishop seems to have agreed with her desire to be taken out of circulation. Gujar Singh and Arjan go to see her from time to time when a machine night-stops at Penang, and they tell me she is well and happy in her work. But I have not seen her myself since I left Damrey Phong before Connie died, and it may be that I shall never see her again.
