by Nevil Shute
It wasn’t very comprehensible, but one would hardly have expected it to be because Stevie was very drunk. I asked for curiosity, “What do you dream about?”
“You want a pipe for it,” he said drowsily. “Lie down with a pipe, ‘n the dreams come. All about Queens and Princes and that, and flying, and being in love. All across the world, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, all across the world, and carrying the Queen.”
I stood by the verandah rail in silence, wondering at the jumble of words generated by the muddled, alcohol-poisoned brain. Flying, because this man long ago had been a pilot, though that seemed incredible now. Being in love — well, that lasts till the grave in some men. The Queens and Princes — figures on a pack of cards, perhaps. The pipe, and lying down — did that mean opium? It was at least a possibility for one who shared a home with an old Chinaman. A phrase of Sister Finlay’s came into my mind; had she been hinting at that?
I stood there silent under the bright moon thinking about all these things till the steady rhythm of breathing from the darkness told me that Stevie was asleep. Then I went quietly down the wooden stairway to the yard and slipped away from the hotel, and went back to my vicarage to go to bed.
I did not see much more of Stevie after that. The race meeting was over, and most of the people left town early next morning to go back to their stations. Stevie hung around for a couple of days, moody and bad-tempered because he was out of money and there was nobody left in town to stand him a drink except a couple of engineers belonging to the Post Office and Reg McAuliffe selling life insurance to the residents. Finally Sister Finlay took the stitches out of Stevie’s ear, started him off with a clean bandage, and dismissed him. Somebody going out to Dorset Downs gave him a lift in a truck, and that was the end of him. Everybody in the town was glad to see him go.
I started then to get acquainted with my parish. Miss Foster very kindly undertook to carry on the little daily hymn service for the school children, and I set out one day to go to Godstow to see what was to be done about St. Jude’s. I travelled on the mail truck and we stopped at every house and station on the way, of course — perhaps once every twenty miles or so. It was very hot and dusty and I wore a khaki shirt and shorts, but I had my case with me, of course, containing my cassock and surplice and the sacramental vessels, and I baptized three children on the first day, and held two Celebrations. The driver of the mail truck was most kind and waited for me while I held these services, although it meant that he would have to drive far on into the night to keep his schedule.
Sergeant Donovan was riding in the truck with us, because he had police business out in the same direction. We stayed at Beverley that first night with Mr. and Mrs. Maclaren. One or two matters that concerned Stevie were still running through my mind, and rather foolishly I raised the question of opium at the tea table.
I said, “Old Stevie said one thing that night in the hotel, Jim, after you went down. He said he got beautiful dreams.”
“I bet he does.”
“I know. But he said he gets them when he’s lying down with a pipe. Would you say he smokes opium? He lives with that Chinese.”
Sergeant Donovan said a little tersely, “No reason to think that. He could smoke tobacco, couldn’t he?”
“I suppose so.” Something in his tone pulled me up, and made me feel that there was more in this than I quite understood. I said no more, but later in the evening Jim Maclaren had a word with me privately. “About Stevie and that Chinaman, Liang Shih,” he said. “I wouldn’t talk about opium to Donovan unless you’ve got some reason.”
“You think they smoke it?”
“Of course they do. Liang Shih smokes opium — what Chink doesn’t? It doesn’t do them any harm, no more than smoking tobacco. Liang grows the poppies in his garden out on Dorset Downs, along with all the other stuff. Donovan knows all about it.”
I said, “But that’s illegal. If Donovan knows all about it, why does he let it go on?”
He grinned. “Arthur likes fresh vegetables.”
I was silent for a moment. “You mean, if Liang Shih was prosecuted he might go away?”
“Of course he would. He’d pack up and go and grow his lettuces and poppies somewhere else, and then there’d be nothing but tinned peas in Landsborough. Arthur reckons that it’s more important that the town should get fresh vegetables than that he should go out of his way to persecute one old Chinaman, for doing what he’s done all his life and that doesn’t hurt him anyway.” He paused. “Only, if people get to talking about it too much, he’ll have to do something or else lose his job.”
Right is not wholly right, nor wrong completely wrong in the Gulf Country. I said no more about the opium.
With that, I put Stevie out of my mind. I had more important things to think about, because the dry season was already well advanced and I had determined that before the rains came in December and stopped travelling I would visit every family in my rather extensive parish, and hold a service upon every cattle station. That may not seem a very ambitious programme for five months because there are only a hundred and ten families all told, but it meant a great deal of travelling. I did not care to leave Landsborough for longer than a week; I was trying to get the people of the town into the habit of going to their parish church again, and I felt it to be very important that I should be there on Sundays if it were humanly possible. I had no transport of my own so I had to depend on the mail truck or on lifts in casual vehicles travelling about the area, and these seldom fitted in with my desire to be back in Landsborough every Sunday.
I worked hard all through the dry that year, and I succeeded in getting to know most of my parishioners. I think they appreciated it, because as time went on I began to get messages more and more frequently asking that I should go back to some family to comfort some dying old woman, or to conduct a funeral service over a new, hastily dug grave, or to baptize a baby. These calls set back my schedule, of course, but I was able to attend to all of them and get to the place where I was needed within two or three days.
There was another race meeting at Landsborough in September, but I did not go to it. A clergyman can do little in a town that is enjoying a race meeting; his opportunity for service comes at quieter times. It seemed to me that I was better occupied in visiting in the more distant parts of the parish, and I did not bother to return to Landsborough until that Saturday. By then the meeting was over and most of the people had gone back to their stations, but half a dozen station owners and managers had stayed in the town with their wives to come to church on Sunday, and that was a great encouragement to me.
I asked Sister Finlay if she had had Stevie up at the hospital. “No, not this time,” she said. “He was in town for the races, but Liang Shih came in with the vegetables on Friday, and I think he went back with him.” She paused. “He wasn’t looking at all well.”
I smiled. “I’m not surprised at that.”
“No . . .” She thought for a minute. “I believe he’s got something the matter with him,” she said. “I was saying so to Mitchison only the other night. He’s got that sort of grey look about him.” She paused. “Dr. Curtis was here with the flying ambulance and I asked him to have a look at Stevie if he got a chance, but they got a call to go to Forest Range on the second day to take an Abo stockman to the hospital at the Curry with broken ribs. I don’t think he ever saw Stevie.”
“Is there another doctor coming here, at any time?”
“There’s nothing fixed,” she said. “I’ve got it in mind. But it’s a bit difficult, with him living out there in the bush. I don’t suppose he’d come in to see a doctor, and anyway, the doctor would be gone before we could get a message to him, probably. It’s only a fancy that I got when I saw him, this time. It may have been just that he had a hangover that day.”
I kept it in my mind that I should go out to the market garden upon Dorset Downs before the wet, to visit Liang Shih and Stevie in their home. But a visit such as that came low do
wn on my list of priorities; I could not hope to do much for them spiritually, and their house was off the beaten track and difficult for me to get to without a truck of my own. I always meant to go to them before the wet, and I never went.
Those last few weeks were very exhausting. November is always a hot month in North Queensland, and that year it was particularly trying. I was hurrying against time, moreover, to finish getting around my parish while travelling was still easy, and I took a good deal out of myself. I knew that when the rains set in about Christmas time I should have plenty of time for rest in my vicarage, since it would be impossible to move very far from Landsborough till March or April. I drove myself hard in those last few weeks; I’m not a young man any longer, and I must confess that I got very tired indeed.
We got a few short rainstorms early in December and as usual these made conditions worse than ever, for they did little to relieve the heat and brought the humidity up very high. Every movement now made one sweat profusely, and once wet one’s clothes stayed wet for a long time. I got prickly heat which is a thing I seldom suffer from, and the continuous itching made it very difficult to sleep. Everyone began to suffer from nervous irritability and bad temper, and everyone looked anxiously each day for the rains that would bring this difficult season to an end.
The rains came at last, a few days before Christmas. For three days it rained practically without ceasing, heavily and continuously. The dusty roads gradually turned into mud wallows, and motor traffic ceased for the time being. Landsborough retired into winter quarters, so to speak. I lay on my bed for most of those three days revelling in the moderation of the heat and in the absence of sunshine, and reading the fourth volume of Winston Churchill’s war memoirs which an old friend had sent me from Godalming.
The wet brought its own problems, of course. I had to go down to the hotel twice a day for my meals and it was still so hot that a raincoat was almost unbearable; if one walked down in a coat one got as wet from sweat as if one went without one. If the rain was light I went without a coat, because wet clothes are no great hardship in the tropics. The difficulty, of course, lay in getting any dry clothes to put on; my vicarage has no fireplace and there was now no sunshine to dry anything. Mrs. Roberts was very kind and let me dry some of my washing by her kitchen fire, but the difficulty was a real one, and I often had to wear wet clothes all day and sleep in a wet bed.
Christmas came and went. We had a carol service in the church with Good King Wenceslaus and See Amid the Winter Snow, and Miss Foster had to spend some time and energy in explaining to the children what snow was, a task made more difficult by the fact that she had never seen it herself. We had a children’s party in the Shire Hall with a Christmas tree with imitation snow on it, and I dressed up as Santa Claus and gave the presents away. The aeroplane from Cloncurry brought us the cinema operator with his projector, three dramas, and Snow White which none of the children had ever seen, so altogether we had quite a merry time.
After these excitements things went rather flat in Landsborough, and the rain fell steadily. In these conditions and although I had been taking my pills, I fell ill with an attack of malaria. It was nothing like so bad as the first bout that I had had in Salamaua, and I knew what to do about it now. I lay in bed sweating and a little delirious for a day, dosing myself; Mrs. Roberts was very kind and brought some things up to my vicarage and either she or Coty looked in every two hours to make me a cup of tea. On the second day Sister Finlay heard that I was ill and came to see what was the matter, and gave me a good dressing down, and wrapped me up in blankets and took me to the hospital in Art Duncan’s utility which got bogged a hundred yards from the hospital so that I had to get out and walk the rest of the way. Finlay and Templeton put me to bed in more comfortable surroundings than I had been in for some time, and I stayed in hospital for the next week.
The fever spent its force after the first few days, as I had known it would, and they let me get up for dinner and sit in a dressing gown to write my parish magazine, going to bed again before tea. My temperature was generally normal at that time though it rose a point or so each evening, but that was nothing to worry about. I was sitting writing in their sitting room on the afternoon of January the 8th; I remember the date particularly because it was two days after Epiphany. I had not been able to preach in Church the previous day, the first Sunday after Epiphany, and so I was writing what I wanted to tell my parishioners in the magazine. January the 8th it was, and I was sitting writing in the middle of the afternoon when I heard the sound of a horse and wheels. I got up and went to the verandah, and I saw Liang Shih draw up before the hospital in the vegetable cart.
I was surprised to see him, because we had had no fresh vegetables since Christmas and we all thought that we should see no more until the rains were over and the roads improved. Sister Finlay and Templeton were lying down; I went and called them, and then went back to the verandah. It was raining a little; Liang was getting down from his two-wheeled vehicle and tying the reins to the fence. He had an old Army waterproof sheet tied with a bit of string around his shoulders to serve as a cape; under that he was in his working shirt and dirty, soaked trousers; he wore a battered old felt hat upon his head to shed the rain.
I said, “Come in out of the wet, Liang. Nice to see you.”
He came on to the verandah. “Sister, she here?” he asked.
“She’s just coming,” I replied. “We didn’t expect to see you for a bit. What have you got for us?”
“I no got vegetables,” he said. “Garden all under the water. I come see Sister. Stevie, he got sick in stomach.”
“Sick in the stomach, is he?” I asked. “What sort of sickness, Liang?”
He put his hand upon his lower abdomen. “He got pain here, big pain. He been sick three days.”
“Is he very bad, Liang?”
He nodded. “Very bad now. I want Sister come see him, or perhaps he die.”
2
SISTER FINLAY CAME out on to the verandah behind me. I turned, and told her that Stevie was sick. She nodded briefly, and I knew that she had been expecting this. “Where is he sick, Liang?” she asked. “Show me just where the place is.”
He put his hand upon his abdomen and rubbed it over a fairly wide area. “He sick here.”
“Does that mean anything to you?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “It might be almost anything.” She turned to Liang. “Has he been taking anything for it?”
Perhaps there was a tiny hesitation. “Hot cloths,” he said. “I put hot cloths on belly. Very hot water, sister.”
“And that didn’t do any good?”
“No, sister.”
“Why didn’t you bring him in here with you?”
Liang said, “He no understand me — him mind away. I no can lift him, put in jinker. I no know what to do, and then I think better come for help.”
She stood biting her lip for a minute. “We’ll have to get him in here, Liang,” she said. “He can’t be nursed out there.”
“He very sick,” he said. “We take stretcher and put stretcher on the cart, maybe.”
“What’s the road like?” I asked. “Did you have much difficulty getting in here, Liang?”
“Or-right,” he said. “Water near house, one mile, two mile.” He put his hand down to within nine or ten inches of the floor. “Deep like that. Then road or-right.”
A mile or more of shallow water wasn’t quite so good, but the old horse could pull the light two-wheeled cart where no motor vehicle could go.
“All right, Liang,” said Sister Finlay. “I’ll come back with you. If we go at once, can we get to your place before dark?”
He nodded. “We start quick, sister.”
I turned to him. “How long did it take you to get in here, Liang?”
“I no got watch,” he said. “I think two hours, maybe.”
It was nearly three in the afternoon, and in that overcast weather it would be dark before six. I had never
been to Liang’s house but I had been told that it was ten miles out; clearly in the conditions the old horse would not go very fast. I turned to Sister Finlay. “We’d better get away as soon as we can. I’ll come with you, sister.”
She hesitated for a moment. “You’d better stay here,” she said. “I’ll get Sergeant Donovan to come out with us. I don’t want you getting a relapse.”
“I ought to go,” I said. “If the man’s likely to die, I should be with him.”
“He won’t die before we get him back here to the hospital,” she said. “I’ll take some dopes with me. All I want is somebody to help me get him on the cart and bring him in. No, you stay here. I’ll pick up Donovan on the way out.”
It was sensible, of course; I had only been out of bed a day or two. “I tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “While you’re getting ready, I’ll go on down and warn Donovan, so that he’ll be ready to start when you come past with Liang.” There are no telephones in Landsborough.
“That’d be a help,” she said. “I’ll be about a quarter of an hour.”
I went and slipped on a pair of trousers and a raincoat and shoes, and set off down the road to the police sergeant’s house. Mrs. Donovan came out to meet me on the verandah. “Afternoon, Mrs. Donovan,” I said. “Is Arthur in?”
“Why, Mr. Hargreaves!” she said. “I heard you’d been sick — I do hope you’re recovered. Art’s gone to Millangarra — he rode out this morning.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“He’ll have stayed for dinner,” she said. “He said he’d be back before dark. Is it anything important?”
I told her briefly what had happened. “Jim Phillips is still on leave?”
“I’m afraid he is, Mr. Hargreaves. I don’t know what to suggest, unless she took one of the black boys. Dicky might go.”
