by Nevil Shute
I shook my head. “I’ll go with her myself. When Arthur comes in, tell him where we’ve gone, will you? If we’re not back by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, ask him to ride out that way and have a look. I’m just a bit afraid that with all this rain the water may be rising.”
“I think it will,” she said. “Liang Shih got through all right, did he?”
“Didn’t have any difficulty,” I told her. “If you’d just tell Art when he comes in.”
I met Liang and Sister coming towards me in the cart as I walked back towards the hospital. “Donovan’s away,” I said. “He’s gone to Millangarra — I left a message.” I swung myself up into the cart. “I’ll come with you, sister.”
“I don’t like it, Mr. Hargreaves. There must be someone who could come.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “If we waste time looking for somebody you won’t get there in daylight.”
She said no more, because it would be most dangerous to go wandering about in darkness in the flooded Queensland bush; it was imperative that the journey should be finished in daylight. We stopped for a minute or two at the vicarage while I went in and picked up my little case of sacramental vessels and a small electric torch, and then we started out upon the road to Dorset Downs. It was raining steadily.
One of the characteristics of that part of North Queensland is that it is entirely featureless; it is a flat country with no hills or mountain ranges, covered in sparse forest and intersected with river beds. The view is exactly the same whichever way you look, and the sun gives little guidance in the middle of the day at that time of the year, for it is directly overhead. It is a very easy country to get bushed in; the sense of direction can be easily lost, and when that happens the only safe course is to camp till the evening when the setting sun will show the direction of the west.
That afternoon there was no sun in any case; we plodded on through the rain, the old horse sometimes trotting on hard patches but more often walking and labouring in the shafts to pull the jinker over the soft ground. In half an hour I had lost all sense of direction; we might have been going north or south, or east or west for all I knew. Liang, however, knew the way; from time to time he showed us broken trees or a side track branching off into the bush that were familiar signposts to him on the road he knew so well.
We were all of us wet through in a very short time, of course, but with the temperature still in the eighties that was no great matter; there was little risk of a chill, because there was no wind at all. We sat there in a row on the bench seat of the jinker, motionless but for the movement of our bodies as the wheels bumped and swayed over the uneven ground, not talking, depressed. The grey, monotonous scene and the hot, steaming rain, and perhaps a sense of the futility of our mission to relieve this drink-sodden old man, all these conspired to rob us of all wish to talk. For my part, although it was my duty to go to offer spiritual consolation to any man near to his death, I went with the knowledge that my offer to Stevie would almost certainly be spurned, and I could not help thinking of the cheerful, green painted hospital rooms that I had left to come upon this somewhat worthless errand.
Presently we came to pools and standing water on the road, and soon the pools were continuous and we were driving through water several inches deep, the old horse making a great splashing as he plodded on. I roused myself, and said to Liang, “Has the water risen much since you came out this morning?”
He said, “No water here this morning. Water deeper now.”
“What do you think about it? Will we be able to get to your house?”
“Or-right,” he said. “We get to house or-right.”
He kept on steadily, and though now we could seldom see the track it was clear that he never left it, for the wheels rolled beneath the water on fairly hard ground. With the approach of evening the light began to fail, or possibly it was that the clouds were getting thicker. I asked Liang, “How much further have we got to go? How long before we get there?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Two-three mile, maybe.”
“Think we’ll get there before dark?”
“Or-right,” he said. “We get there before dark.”
Presently we came to land that undulated slightly, so that islands of dry land appeared among the floods, and here we had to go more cautiously, for we were getting to a region that was cut up by tributaries of the Dorset River. We crossed one or two small creeks, places that Liang identified carefully and where the depth of water reached almost to the wheel hubs. Presently, as we drove cautiously through one of these rising creeks, we saw a very unpleasant sight.
There were three or four Hereford cows standing on a dry piece of land quite near to us, part of the Dorset Downs station. One of these cows standing near the water’s edge had a small calf running with her, only two or three days old. The cow raised her head to look at us as we splashed past, and moved in curiosity a little nearer to us, and to the water’s edge. The calf moved nearer to the water, too.
I happened to be looking at them, and I saw the whole thing happen. The long nose of a crocodile thrust quietly up out of the water and the jaws closed upon the near foreleg of the calf; there was a great thrashing in the water and a struggling as the brute dragged the calf under. The thrashing and the struggling went on under the water for a time, and then everything was still. The cow did nothing about it, but stood looking puzzled.
Sister Finlay said, “We should have brought a rifle.”
“I never thought of it,” I said. “I should have borrowed one from Mrs. Donovan.”
We went on in silence after that, busy with our own thoughts, and now the water was over a foot deep, and the light was definitely going. Presently Liang pointed with his whip to a ridge of dry land ahead of us, perhaps a mile away across the surface of the water. “House,” he said. “House on land.”
“That’s your house, is it?” I asked him. “Where we’re going to?”
He nodded, and at that moment we went down into the hole. It was impossible, of course, to see the track ahead of us, and perhaps I had distracted Liang’s attention from the course. Whatever was the reason, one moment we were on firm ground and the next moment the old horse was swimming, and the jinker was rolling down an underwater bank pushing the horse further out.
Liang dropped the reins and stood up, and plunged over the side to go to the horse’s head; he must have known the ground, for he was wading hardly more than waist deep. I hesitated for a moment, and then, shamed by the old Chinaman, I plunged in from my side to go to the horse on the near side and to lighten the jinker. The water was out of my depth, and I swam to the horse’s head with the thought of a crocodile searing on my mind, terrified. My feet touched ground at the same moment as the horse’s feet, and then Liang and I were on each side of his head as he fought and strained to climb the steep underwater bank and pull the sinking jinker up it. Sister Finlay was standing up, uncertain whether to get out and swim. I shouted to her to stay where she was.
With a series of strains and heaves the horse pulled the jinker up the bank and stood in a foot of water, quivering with fright. I was quivering no less, and even Liang was disturbed, I think, because we all got back into the jinker in remarkably short time, out of the way of the crocodiles.
“Well, that’s all right,” I said rather stupidly, because one has to say something when one is frightened. “There must have been a hole there.” And then I looked around, “Everything all right?”
And then I saw that everything was far from right. The tailboard of the jinker had fallen down, and Sister Finlay’s case and my case of sacramental vessels were no longer in the cart with us. They must have slid out as the jinker was pulled up the bank, and they were nowhere to be seen.
“Hold on a minute,” I said to Liang. “We’ve lost the cases.” I looked under the seat, but they were not there. Darkness was falling quickly, and the water behind us looked grey and menacing, and deep enough, I knew, to hold a crocodile. My own case could lie the
re till the dry weather, perhaps, for in emergency I could give the Sacrament in a teacup and had often done so, but the sister’s case was essential. Without her drugs and medicines she could do little to relieve her patient.
“Wait a minute while I find them,” I said, and slipped down into the water again, absolutely terrified. Sister Finlay said, “Come back, Mr. Hargreaves!” but I did up the tailboard of the jinker and started to walk slowly back, feeling under water with my feet to find the cases, miserable with fear. When I was about waist deep down the submerged bank my foot touched one of them and I stooped down in the water and picked it out; as luck would have it, it was my own case of sacramental vessels.
“Here’s one of them,” I said. “The other one won’t be far off,” and I waded back and put it in the jinker. Liang and Sister Finlay were expostulating with me, but I was too shaken with my terror to answer them, and I started back into the pool to look for the other case. I could not touch it with my feet, and when the water was up to my shoulders I dived down, and searched for it under water with my hands among the mud and grass. When I came to the surface Liang and Sister Finlay were splashing through the water to me; they seized me one on each side and began to propel me back to the jinker.
“I’ll find it in a minute,” I said. “Let me have one more try.” And Sister Finlay said, “You’re absolutely crazy. This place is full of crocodiles. I can manage without it tonight.”
“But it’s got all your medicines in it,” I said.
She was quite angry. “Get back into that cart at once,” she said. “I don’t know how you could be such a fool.” We were all very frightened secretly, of course, or she wouldn’t have spoken to me in that way.
We all got back into the jinker in silence, and Liang touched the old horse with the whip; he strained and we moved forward. It was really getting quite dark now; we could still see the loom of the dry land ahead of us, but I could see no sign of the house. I found out soon that the land on which the house stood was a ridge a mile or so in length between two creeks, which was so high that it was never flooded; the house was at one end of this dry ridge and we were approaching it from the other.
We plodded on through the water in the dusk; the water grew shallower and the old horse went faster, and presently in the dim light the track appeared before us winding through the gum trees, and we were on dry land. And then we saw a most extraordinary sight. The ground under the trees was covered as usual with a light growth of stunted scrub and grass and bracken fern, and in this undergrowth were animals, hundreds and hundreds of them. I saw Hereford cows and bulls, and Brahmah bulls, and scores of wallabies, and several enormous black wild pigs with long faces and savage tusks. There were dogs there, too — dingoes, perhaps, or cattle dogs gone wild and breeding in the bush. There were plains turkeys there stalking about like little emus, and there were goannas and lizards and snakes upon the track ahead of us, gliding off out of our way. All these animals had swum and walked and crawled and hopped and crept to this sanctuary of dry land among the floods, and now they stood looking at us as we passed in the half light.
I said to Liang, “Do you get all these animals here every year, in the wet?”
He nodded. “Every year.” He turned and grinned at me. “I Buddhist. Animals, they know. I no eat um.”
We plodded on through the trees, and now I was impatient to arrive. We had sat upon the hard seat of the jinker for about three hours, and I was beginning to feel quite unwell. As I have said, my temperature had been rising every evening just a point or so, but now I was feeling hot and I was having difficulty in focussing my eyes and thinking clearly. I was very much annoyed at the thought that my fever might be coming back again; at all costs I must suppress it till I got back to Landsborough next day. I felt that if I could get down out of the jinker and have a long drink of cold water, and sit quietly in a comfortable chair for a little I should be all right, and able to carry on with what I had to do that night without letting Sister Finlay see that I was not very well.
I was thankful when at last we saw the house in the last of the light. It was a poor little place of two rooms built of weatherboard with an iron roof; whatever paint there might once have been on it was now bleached and blown away, and it had weathered to the normal grey colour of ancient wood. It was built on posts as usual in that country, and a short flight of steps led up to a rickety verandah. A tumble-down fence surrounded it and stretched away into the darkness.
There was no light in the house.
Liang got down from the jinker and tied the reins to the fence and went up the steps; we followed him. It was quite dark under the roof and we heard him striking a match; a sputter of flame followed, and Liang made some kind of exclamation. Then he lit a candle that was standing in a saucer on a table; as the light slowly grew we could take in the scene.
There was a bed in the room with a mosquito net, but this net was thrown back disclosing the soiled, rumpled sheet and pillow. Stevie was lying on this bed clothed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet; only the top button of the trousers was done up. On a chair beside the bed was a small spirit lamp, and a slender metal pipe with a tiny bowl, and a saucer with some brown stuff in it; there was a heavy, acrid smell about the room. On the floor beside the bed a cheap paraffin lamp, the sort that hangs upon a wall, lay overturned; the oil had flowed out of this and made a pool upon the wooden floor. Stevie did not appear to be conscious.
Liang went forward and picked up the lamp and swept away the pipe and spirit lamp and saucer, but not before we had seen them. Sister Finlay went forward to the bed. “Evening, Stevie,” she said. “I’m Sister Finlay from the hospital. What’s the matter with you?”
There was no answer; the old man was clean out, but whether from the opium or from the march of his disease I could not say. Finlay threw off her raincoat and took Stevie’s wrist to feel his pulse, peering at her wrist watch. “Would you see if you can get that lamp lit, Mr. Hargreaves?” she asked. “We’ll have to have more light than this.”
I picked up the lamp from the floor and examined it; the glass was unbroken. I asked Liang, “Where’s your drum of kerosene?” He did not answer me, but began to hunt about the cluttered room for something, and finally produced about an inch of candle end. I said, “I’ve got a torch here,” and opened my soaked case; the torch was lying in a puddle of water with my cassock, but it lit all right. Liang grinned, and led the way down from the verandah underneath the house, which stood on posts as many of these houses do.
The drum of kerosene was there, and that’s about all there was — just the drum. Somebody — it could only have been Stevie — had left the tap running, and there was paraffin all over the earth floor, soaking in and running away with the water. We shall never know exactly how he did it, but I think he must have gone down to refill the lamp, and probably a spasm of his abdominal pain took him while he was down there, so that it was all that he could do to get back to his bed. Anyway, the barrel was just about empty.
Liang picked up a can and made me hold it while he tilted the drum forward, but only about a teacupful ran out into the can because the drum had already been tilted down a little as it lay. “Is that all you’ve got, Liang?” I asked. “Have you got another drum?”
He shook his head. “No more drum.”
“No more kerosene than this?”
“No more.”
It was bad, but there was nothing to be done about it. He produced a funnel and we emptied the can carefully into the lamp, filling it about a quarter full. We went back up into the house, and I explained the position to Sister Finlay. “I’m sorry, sister,” I said, “but this is all the kerosene there is. I shouldn’t think it would last through the night, but it may. We’d better turn the wick down when you’ve finished — make it last as long possible.”
I helped her to get Stevie’s trousers off so that she could examine him. We laid him on his back, and he did not wake, and then I held the lamp while she examined the man’s abdomen
. There was a swelling which was evidently tender, because when she pressed it gently he stirred and complained even in his deep, drugged sleep. Presently she pulled the sheet over him to the waist, and stood there looking down at him in silence. “Peritonitis, I should think,” she said at last. “He’s so heavily doped there’s not much we can do.”
She turned to Liang. “Show me the things that were on this chair, Liang,” she said, and there was no acrimony in her tone. “The pipe, and the opium.”
He brought them out and showed them to her in silence.
“Does he smoke much of this?” she asked.
“Three,” he said. “Three, when it is dark, to sleep. Not good smoke more.”
“You smoke it yourself, I suppose?” I asked.
He nodded.
Sister Finlay asked him, “Do three pipes send a man to sleep like that?”
He shook his head. “He smoke more yesterday, today. Good for pain.”
“How many pipes do you think he’s had today?”
He picked up the saucer and looked at the remnant of brown, treacly paste smeared on the bottom. “Ten — eleven,” he said. “I not know. I think when he wake up he smoke one, two pipes, good for pain, and then he sleeps again, one, two hours.”
She leaned over the patient and raised one eyelid carefully; I held the lamp for her while she looked at the eye. Then she stood back again from the bed. “It’s not a bad thing, in a way,” she said at last. “We’ll have to get him to the aerodrome tomorrow somehow, and get the ambulance to fly him to the Curry. There’ll have to be an operation. If I’d had my case with me I’d probably have had to give him a dope, and now he’s doped himself. In a way, and in the circumstances, it may be rather a good thing.”
I nodded. “What is opium?” I asked.
“It’s morphine,” she said. “I don’t know what else it is, but that’s the element that works in it. It’s what I should have given him in any case, so far as the narcotic goes.”
There was nothing to be done, and I sat down wearily on a packing case beside a table that was littered with the remains of a meal; my head was swimming and I was very hot. From a great distance I heard Finlay say, “We’ll just have to watch him tonight, and hope we can get him out of this tomorrow, somehow.”
