by Nevil Shute
We rode in to his camp a couple of hours before sunset. He was camped by a waterhole with cattle and horses everywhere, of course. Normally he would have been travelling, but he had rested that day in order to get hold of me. His camp consisted of a tent for himself and his wife, and a humpy shelter made of gum tree boughs for his white ringer, Phil Fleming; his three Abos had swags and slept under the stars.
There was a rough cookhouse arranged against a bank, with a fireplace made of a few stones and a couple of iron bars, and here the girl was tending the fire. She was a half caste, a coffee-coloured girl, very quiet and rather good looking. Perhaps in my honour she was wearing a bright red dress, and her long black hair was done up in a sort of coil around her head. I think this was unusual, because when they struck camp next morning she was dressed in a man’s clothes, in ringer’s strides and a check shirt. She served as the camp cook, and cooked for all of them.
She had the baby in an old American Army jungle hammock, which seemed to me a good sort of a cot for an infant on the trail; it had a waterproof roof to keep the sun off him and mosquito netting to keep off the flies, which were bad in that camp. They opened up this thing to show him to me, a well-developed boy several months old, not very dark in colour. I said, “My, he’s a fine chap. When was he born?”
“January the 9th,” said Jock. “At Robinson River, at about five in the morning.”
January the 9th, I thought, was the third day after Epiphany, and five o’clock in the morning was the time when I had stood up, dazed and weary, to find the animals still standing round the house. It was a coincidence, of course, that this man’s name was Anderson; I had decided that I must put such thoughts out of my mind, and there was no going back upon that resolution. I stared down at the baby. “He looks very well,” I said. “What are you going to call him?”
The girl looked up at her husband with one of her rare smiles, and he laughed self-consciously. “The wife had an idea when he was born she’d like to call him Stephen. But I thought that I would choose to name him David, after my father. We’re agreed upon that now.”
It was imperative that I should hide any perturbation that I might feel and carry on with the business in hand as if there was nothing unusual about it. I turned to the girl. “You are quite happy about that name?” I asked.
She nodded. “David is his name.”
“David’s a good Christian name,” I said mechanically, and while I gained time to collect my thoughts I glanced at the girl’s hand. There was a wedding ring. I asked, “You two are married?”
“Aye,” he replied. “Brother Fisher married us last September, over on the Roper River.” Not before time, I thought, and yet I thought the better of Jock Anderson for marrying the half caste girl who was to bear his child.
There was no more to be said about it and my duty was quite plain; it was to baptize this child into Christ’s holy Church. There seemed to be nothing to be gained by delaying, and so I told Jock Anderson that we would have the service right away before we ate, and he told the mother. Thinking back, I cannot remember that she took much part in our discussion; she was a very quiet girl, who spoke remarkably little, and that in a low tone. He gave her name to me for the register, Mary Anderson.
There was a little difficulty about the godfathers and godmothers, because Jock had made no provision at all for those. Phil Fleming was there, a black haired, lean, gangling lad of twenty who had little idea of what a godfather should do. It was impossible to suggest one of the black boys, of course, and Phil declared himself willing, so I had a talk with him privately and tried to make him understand what he was taking on. There was no godmother at all, but Mary was understood to say that her sister Phoebe would be godmother and that she had done it before, and so I allowed the mother to stand proxy for Phoebe, who apparently was working in a job at Chillagoe.
They had a clean bucket, and I washed it and filled it with rather muddy water and set it on a tucker box draped with my little altar cloth, to serve as a font. I arranged this in front of a couple of gum trees near the water’s edge on clean ground a little way away from the camp, we drove away the cattle, and then I got them all together and showed them where to stand and what to do, and I began my service.
I have administered the Baptism of Infants many hundreds, perhaps thousands of times since I was ordained, and one would have thought that at my age I would have understood what the words of the service meant. Moreover, I have schooled myself to think about the words that I am saying as a trick to prevent the service from becoming mechanical, and this concentration had never before led me into any surprises in the Baptism of Infants. But when I came to the passage which commences, “Give Thy Holy Spirit to this infant, that he may be born again, and be made an heir of everlasting salvation,” I had to stop, because suddenly I wondered what on earth I was talking about. It seemed to me that I had never said those words before, and I had to look at my prayer book to assure myself that there was, in fact, no error before I could collect my thoughts and go on with the service.
There were cattle all around us in the evening light, standing knee deep in the water, moving around with squelching noises, or lying chewing the cud. The smell of them was strong all over the camp. I coaxed the godfather through his responses and went on, and presently I took the child from his mother’s arms and held him in my own, and I baptized him David.
That was virtually the end of it, but that I had the same trouble with the words of the Thanksgiving, parts of which seemed to hold meanings that I had never seen in them before. And finally it was all over, and the child was back in his jungle hammock, and the mother was busy at the cooking place with supper, and I was folding up my altar cloth.
The supper was the usual thing — a roast of salted beef with potatoes, homemade bread, butter, and quantities of strong sweet tea from a billy, served on tin plates and tin mugs, and eaten sitting on the ground. The light was failing as we ate and the mother lit the hurricane lamp; in the last of the daylight I chose a spot under a tree to sleep, and unrolled my swag and made my bed ready.
I knew that they would go to bed early, for they would be up long before dawn cooking the breakfast and striking camp, in order to get the cattle mustered with the first of the light and get them on the road. But while the mother tidied up the supper things and nursed her baby at the door of the tent, I sat with Jock Anderson upon a log, smoking a last pipe with him before turning in.
“He’s a fine child, Jock,” I said. “You must be proud of him.”
“Aye,” he replied. And then he said, “He’ll have a hard time with the colour.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” I said. “It’s not so important as some other things. He’s got a good mother.”
“Aye,” he said. “She’s a good girl.” He paused, and sucked his pipe. “I don’t know what the folks at home would say. They’d never understand, Brother. A man lives year after year and never sees a white girl that’s unmarried, and gets terrible lonely in the bush. And she’s a good wife.”
“I’m sure of that,” I said. “A white girl could never stand this kind of life. You ought to think about some settled job, Jock, for the child’s sake, now. Especially if you’re going to have any other children. Your wife’s doing wonderfully well — I can see that — but every girl should have a settled home when children come.”
“Aye,” he said slowly, “that’s a fact. She tells me that she’s in the family way again already.” He paused. “Jimmie Beeman, manager at Tavistock Forest, he said he’d offer me the job of head stockman, last year. He’ll be at Croydon races, and I’ll see him. Maybe I’ll break up this outfit, and go there.”
“He knows about Mary, does he?”
“Aye. He doesn’t mind about the colour.”
I said, “I should do that, Jock. You oughtn’t to ask your wife to go on droving with you with another baby on the way. It’s not fair to a woman, that. If Jimmie Beeman wants you at Tavistock, I should go there. He�
�s got a house, hasn’t he?”
He nodded. “I’ll think on it, Brother. He’s got a two-roomed house out past his stockyard.”
“He’d probably build on another room if he knew that you’d stay a year or two,” I said. “I’ll have a talk with him next time I’m round that way, if it’d help.” I paused, and we sat smoking, looking out across the water hole in the still moonlight. “You know that girl he married?” I said presently. “Nan Fowler, daughter of old Jim Fowler on the railway at Julia Creek?” He nodded. “She was a school mistress at Charters Towers,” I reminded him. “They’ll be having their family along with yours, and she might start a bit of a school. You want to think about these things, now you’re a father.”
“Aye,” he said slowly, “that’s a fact. I dunno that schooling’ll be much use to him, though, with the colour.” He paused. “He’s a fine bairn,” he said presently. “As fine a bairn as I ever saw. He’ll be a big fellow when he grows up. He’ll make a good stockman, or a drover maybe.”
“You can’t tell,” I said quietly. “You ought to give him a good schooling. You never know what people will turn into. He might rise to be anything before he dies.”
We knocked our pipes out and turned in soon after that. I lay in my swag for a long time before sleep came watching the brilliant Queensland stars through the fine tracery of the gum leaves. I knew then that a corner of the veil had been lifted a little for me by Stevie Figgins under the hand of God, and I am still puzzled to know why this thing was done. Because it means that I have been honoured in a way beyond my station in life; I am an obscure and unimportant man, a man like a million others doing the job each day that comes to hand, and not doing it very well. Who am I that God should pick me to reveal His wonders to?
And who was Stevie, to whom the full revelation had been made? But here I feel I am on firmer ground, because it is the way of God to deal with poor and humble men. If the Scriptures teach us anything, it is that God speaks seldom to the wise men or to the great statesmen. For His messages he speaks to poor and humble men, to outcasts, to the people we despise.
So there it is, and I can add no more to this account. I have written down what happened, and it has eased my mind to do so, and I shall now lock these exercise books away, put the whole thing out of my mind, and go on with my job here in this scattered parish. All that this strange experience has taught me has gone to confirm what I think I already knew, secretly, perhaps, and deep down in my heart. If what I think I have been told is true it means that we make our own heaven and our own hell in our own daily lives, and the Kingdom of Heaven is here within us, now, for those who have gone before.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
AS A BACKGROUND to this story, I have tried to picture the relations of the countries in the British Commonwealth as they may be thirty years from now. No man can see into the future, but unless somebody makes a guess from time to time and publishes it to stimulate discussion it seems to me that we are drifting in the dark, not knowing where we want to go or how to get there.
The Monarch is the one strong link that holds the countries of the Commonwealth together; without that link they would soon fall apart. If any forecast of Commonwealth relations in thirty years time is to be made, it is vacant and sterile unless also it contains a forecast of the position of the Monarch, and gives warning of the strains and tensions that in thirty years may come upon that very human link.
Since personal strains and tensions must inevitably affect the future of the Commonwealth, it seems to me that fiction is the most suitable medium in which to make this forecast. Fiction deals with people and their difficulties and, more than that, nobody takes a novelist too seriously. The puppets born of his imagination walk their little stage for our amusement, and if we find that their creator is impertinent his errors of taste do not sway the world.
Nevil Shute
Requiem for a Wren (1955)
OR,THE BREAKING WAVE
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
The first edition
I shall never be friends again with roses;
I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong
Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes,
As a wave of the sea turned back by song.
There are sounds where the soul’s delight takes fire,
Face to face with its own desire;
A delight that rebels, a desire that reposes;
I shall hate sweet music my whole life long.
The pulse of war and passion of wonder,
The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,
The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,
The music burning at heart like wine,
An armed archangel whose hands raise up
All senses mixed in the spirit’s cup
Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder —
These things are over, and no more mine.
A. C. Swinburne.
1
THERE WAS A layer of cumulus, about seven-tenths, with tops at about five thousand feet as we came to Essendon airport; we broke out of it at two thousand and we were on the circuit downwind, with the aerodrome on our starboard wing. I sat with my eyes glued to the window looking out at Melbourne, because this was my home town and I had been away five years. The hostess touched me on the arm and drew my attention from the scene, and told me to fasten my safety belt. I had not seen the sign light up.
“Sorry,” I said.
She smiled, and then she said quietly, “Would you like any help down the gangway, sir?”
I shook my head. “I’ll wait till the others are all off. I’m all right if I take my time.”
She nodded and moved on, courteous and efficient. I wondered how she knew that going downstairs was the tricky part; perhaps that was a feature of her training, or perhaps the hostesses on the machine from San Francisco had told her about me at Sydney. I turned back to the window to watch the approach to the runway and the landing, and I remained absorbed in the techniques till the machine came to a standstill at the terminal building and the engines came to rest.
While the other passengers got off I sat at the window trying to see who was there to meet me. It was likely to be my father. I hadn’t given them much notice for I had only telegraphed the time of my arrival from Sydney when I landed there the previous evening and it was barely two o’clock now; moreover they weren’t expecting me for another four days and we live a hundred and twenty miles from the airport. The wing hid a good part of the enclosure but I saw nobody I knew. I wondered if I should have to go in to town to the Club and telephone home from there.
I followed the last passenger down the aisle to the door, and thanked the hostesses as I passed them. I made slow time down the steps but once on the flat I was all right, of course, and walked over to the enclosure. Then I caught sight of a face I knew. It was Harry Drew, our foreman, come to meet me. It was a warm, summery spring day and Harry was very smart. He is a man about forty years old, with dark, curly hair and a youthful figure. He was wearing an opulent-looking American shirt without a jacket on that warm day, a brown shirt buttoned to the neck and worn without a tie; his brown-green grazier’s trousers were clean and newly creased and held up with a brand-new embossed belt with a large, shiny buckle. He caught my eye and half raised his hand in salutation.
I passed through the gate and he came to meet me. “Morning, Harry,” I said. “How are you today?”
“Good, Mr. Duncan,” he replied. “We didn’t expect you till Friday.” He took the overnight bag from me.
“I came along a bit quicker than I thought I would,” I said.
He was clearly puzzled, as they all must have been by my telegram. “Did you come on a different ship?” he asked. “We thought you’d
be flying from Fremantle, arriving Saturday morning.”
“I didn’t come that way,” I said. “I had to stay in London a bit longer. I flew all the way, through New York and San Francisco to Sydney.”
“Come the other way round?”
“That’s right,” I said. We passed into the airport building. “How’s my mother, Harry? She’s not here, is she?”
“She didn’t come,” he said. “She gets out most fine days, but sitting in the chair most of the time, you know. She don’t go away much now. Three months or more since she went down to Melbourne.” He paused by the newspaper stand. “The colonel, he was coming down to meet you, but we had a bit of trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?” I enquired.
“The house parlourmaid,” he said. “Seems like she committed suicide or something. Anyway, she’s dead.”
I stared at him. “For God’s sake! How did that happen?”
“I don’t really know,” he said. “It only happened this morning, and I left about half past ten to get down here to meet you. She took tablets or something, what they give you to make you sleep.”
“She did it last night?”
“That’s right, Mr. Alan.”
“Who found her?”
“She didn’t come down to her work. They get down to the kitchen in the house about six or quarter past and have a cup of tea. When she didn’t come down Annie went up to her room about seven.”
“Old Annie found her?”
“That’s right. She was dead. The colonel rang through for me to go up to the house, ‘n soon after I got there Dr. Stanley, he arrived. I suppose the colonel telephoned for him. But there wasn’t anything that he could do; she was dead all right. So then they got on to the police, and just about then your telegram came from Sydney saying you’d be coming in today. The colonel, he couldn’t leave home with all that going on to come down here to meet you, so he said to me to take the Jaguar and come instead.”
