The Heart of the Matter (17 page)

The doctor took her gently by the arm and said, ‘We’ll do what
we
can to get you there right away. Come up to the house and do some telephoning.’

‘Certainly,’ Miss Malcott said, ‘there’s nothing that can’t be straightened on a telephone.’

The doctor said to Scobie, ‘Send those other two chaps up after us. They are all right. If you want to do some questioning, question them.’

Druce said, ‘I’ll take them along. You stay here, Scobie, in case the launch arrives. French isn’t my language.’

Scobie sat down on the rail of the jetty and looked across the water. Now that the haze was lifting the other bank came closer; he could make out now with the naked eye the details of the scene: the white warehouse, the mud huts, the brasswork of the launch glittering in the sun: he could see the red fezzes of the native troops. He thought: Just such a scene as this and I might have been waiting for Louise to appear on a stretcher—or perhaps not waiting. Somebody settled himself on the rail beside him but Scobie didn’t turn his head.

‘A penny for your thoughts, sir.’

‘I was just thinking that Louise is safe, Wilson.’

‘I was thinking that too, sir.’

‘Why do you always call me sir, Wilson? You are not in the police force. It makes me feel very old.’

‘I’m sorry, Major Scobie.’

‘What did Louise call you?’

‘Wilson. I don’t think she liked my Christian name.’

‘I believe they’ve got that launch to start at last, Wilson. Be a good chap and warn the doctor.’

A French officer in a stained white uniform stood in the bow: a soldier flung a rope and Scobie caught and fixed it. ‘
Bon jour
,’ he said, and saluted.

The French officer returned his salute—a drained-out figure with a twitch in the left eyelid. He said in English, ‘Good morning. I have seven stretcher cases for you here.’

‘My signal says nine.’

‘One died on the way and one last night. One from blackwater and one from—from, my English is bad, do you say fatigue?’

‘Exhaustion.’

‘That is it.’

‘If you will let my labourers come on board they will get the stretchers off.’ Scobie said to the carriers, ‘Very softly. Go very softly.’ It was an unnecessary command: no white hospital attendants could lift and carry more gently. ‘Won’t you stretch your legs on shore?’ Scobie asked, ‘or come up to the house and have some coffee? ‘

‘No. No coffee, thank you. I will just see that all is right here.’ He was courteous and unapproachable, but all the time his left eyelid flickered a message of doubt and distress.

‘I have some English papers if you would like to see them.’

‘No, no, thank you. I read English with difficulty.’

‘You speak it very well.’

‘That is a different thing.’

‘Have a cigarette?’

‘Thank you, no. I do not like American tobacco.’

The first stretcher came on shore—the sheets were drawn up to the man’s chin and it was impossible to tell from the stiff vacant face what his age might be. The doctor came down the hill to meet the stretcher and led the carriers away to the Government rest-house where the beds had been prepared.

‘I used to come over to your side,’ Scobie said, ‘to shoot with your police chief. A nice fellow called Durand—a Norman.’

‘He is not here any longer,’ the officer said.

‘Gone home?’

‘He’s in prison at Dakar,’ the French officer replied, standing like a figure-head in the bows, but the eye twitching and twitching. The stretchers slowly passed Scobie and turned up the hill: a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten with a feverish face and a twig-like arm thrown out from his blanket: an old lady with grey hair falling every way who twisted and turned and whispered: a man with a bottle nose—a knob of scarlet and blue on a yellow face. One by one they turned up the hill—the carriers’ feet moving with the certainty of mules. ‘And Père Brûle?’ Scobie asked. ‘He was a good man.’

‘He died last year of blackwater.’

‘He was out here twenty years without leave, wasn’t he? He’ll be hard to replace.’

‘He has not been replaced,’ the officer said. He turned and gave a short savage order to one of his men. Scobie looked at the next stretcher load and looked away again. A small girl—she couldn’t have been more than six—lay on it. She was deeply and unhealthily asleep; her fair hair was tangled and wet with sweat; her open mouth was dry and cracked, and she shuddered regularly and spasmodically. ‘It’s terrible,’ Scobie said.

‘What is terrible?’

‘A child like that.’

‘Yes. Both parents were lost. But it is all right. She will die.’

Scobie watched the bearers go slowly up the hill, their bare feet very gently flapping the ground. He thought: It would need all Father Brûle’s ingenuity to explain that. Not that the child would die—that needed no explanation. Even the pagans realized that the love of God might mean an early death, though the reason they ascribed was different, but that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in the open boat—that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God.

And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created. ‘How on earth did she survive till now?’ he wondered aloud.

The officer said gloomily, ‘Of course they looked after her on the boat. They gave up their own share of the water often. It was foolish, of course, but one cannot always be logical. And it gave them something to think about.’ It was like the hint of an explanation—too faint to be grasped. He said, ‘Here is another who makes one angry.’

The face was ugly with exhaustion: the skin looked as though it were about to crack over the cheek-bones: only the absence of lines showed that it was a young face. The French officer said, ‘She was just married—before she sailed. Her husband was lost. Her passport says she is nineteen. She may live. You see, she still has some strength.’ Her arms as thin as a child’s lay outside the blanket, and her fingers clasped a book firmly. Scobie could see the wedding-ring loose on her dried-up finger.

‘What is it?’

‘
Timbres
,’ the French officer said. He added bitterly, ‘When this damned war started, she must have been still at school.’

Scobie always remembered how she was carried into his life on a stretcher grasping a stamp-album with her eyes fast shut.

III

In the evening they gathered together again for drinks, but they were subdued. Even Perrot was no longer trying to impress them. Druce said, ‘Well, tomorrow I’m off. You coming, Scobie?’

‘I suppose so.’

Mrs Perrot said, ‘You got all you wanted?’

‘All I needed. That chief engineer was a good fellow. He had it ready in his head. I could hardly write fast enough. When he stopped he went flat out. That was what was keeping him together—“ma responsibility.” You know they’d walked—the ones that could walk—five days to get here.’

Wilson said, ‘Were they sailing without an escort?’

‘They started out in convoy, but they had some engine trouble—and you know the rule of the road nowadays: no waiting for lame ducks. They were twelve hours behind the convoy and were trying to pick up when they were sniped. The submarine commander surfaced and gave them direction. He said he would have given them a tow, but there was a naval patrol out looking for him. You see, you can really blame nobody for this sort of thing,’ and this sort of thing came at once to Scobie’s mind’s eye—the child with the open mouth, the thin hands holding the stamp-album. He said, ‘I suppose the doctor will look in when he gets a chance?’

He went restlessly out on to the verandah, closing the netted door carefully behind him, and a mosquito immediately droned towards his ear. The skirring went on all the time, but when they drove to the attack they had the deeper tone of dive-bombers. The lights were showing in the temporary hospital, and the weight of that misery lay on his shoulders. It was as if he had shed one responsibility only to take on another. This was a responsibility he shared with all human beings, but that was no comfort, for it sometimes seemed to him that he was the only one who recognized his responsibility. In the Cities of the Plain a single soul might have changed the mind of God.

The doctor came up the steps on to the verandah. ‘Hallo, Scobie,’ he said in a voice as bowed as his shoulders, ‘taking the night air? It’s not healthy in this place.’

‘How are they?’ Scobie asked.

‘There’ll be only two more deaths, I think. Perhaps only one.’

‘The child?’

‘She’ll be dead by morning,’ the doctor said abruptly.

‘Is she conscious?’

‘Never completely. She asks for her father sometimes: she probably thinks she’s in the boat still. They’d kept it from her there—said her parents were in one of the other boats. But of course they’d signalled to check up.’

‘Won’t she take you for her father?’

‘No, she won’t accept the beard.’

Scobie said, ‘How’s the school teacher?’

‘Miss Malcott? She’ll be all right. I’ve given her enough bromide to put her out of action till morning. That’s all she needs—and the sense of getting somewhere. You haven’t got room for her in your police van, have you? She’d be better out of here.’

‘There’s only just room for Druce and me with our boys and kit. We’ll be sending proper transport as soon as we get back. The walking cases all right?’

‘Yes, they’ll manage.’

‘The boy and the old lady?’

‘They’ll pull through.’

‘Who is the boy?’

‘He was at a prep. school in England. His parents in South Africa thought he’d be safer with them.’

Scobie said reluctantly, ‘That young woman—with the stamp-album?’ It was the stamp-album and not the face that haunted his memory for no reason that he could understand, and the wedding-ring loose on the finger, as though a child had dressed up.

‘I don’t know,’ the doctor said. ‘If she gets through tonight—perhaps—’

‘You’re dead tired, aren’t you? Go in and have a drink.’

‘Yes. I don’t want to be eaten by mosquitoes.’ The doctor opened the verandah door, and a mosquito struck at Scobie’s neck. He didn’t bother to guard himself. Slowly, hesitatingly, he
retraced
the route the doctor had taken, down the steps on to the tough rocky ground. The loose stones turned under his boots. He thought of Pemberton. What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. He had cut down his own needs to a minimum, photographs were put away in drawers, the dead were put out of mind: a razor-strop, a pair of rusty handcuffs for decoration. But one still has one’s eyes, he thought, one’s ears. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.

Outside the rest-house he stopped again. The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?

‘Well, Major Scobie?’ It was the wife of the local missionary speaking to him. She was dressed in white like a nurse, and her flint-grey hair lay back from her forehead in ridges like wind erosion. ‘Have you come to look on?’ she asked forbiddingly.

‘Yes,’ he said. He had no other idea of what to say: he couldn’t describe to Mrs Bowles the restlessness, the haunting images, the terrible impotent feeling of responsibility and pity.

‘Come inside,’ Mrs Bowles said, and he followed her obediently like a boy. There were three rooms in the rest-house. In the first the walking cases had been put: heavily dosed they slept peacefully, as though they had been taking healthy exercise. In the second room were the stretcher cases for whom there was reasonable hope. The third room was a small one and contained only two beds divided by a screen: the six-year-old girl with the dry mouth, the young woman lying unconscious on her back, still grasping the stamp-album. A nightlight burned in a saucer and cast thin shadows between the beds. ‘If you want to be useful,’ Mrs Bowles said, ‘stay here a moment. I want to go to the dispensary.’

‘The dispensary?’

‘The cook-house. One has to make the best of things.’

Scobie felt cold and strange. A shiver moved his shoulders. He said, ‘Can’t I go for you?’

Mrs Bowles said, ‘Don’t be absurd. Are you qualified to
dispense
? I’ll only be away a few minutes. If the child shows signs of going call me.’ If she had given him time, he would have thought of some excuse, but she was already out of the room and he sat heavily down in the only chair. When he looked at the child, he saw a white communion veil over her head: it was a trick of the light on the mosquito net and a trick of his own mind. He put his head in his hands and wouldn’t look. He had been in Africa when his own child died. He had always thanked God that he had missed that. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion. He prayed silently into his hands, ‘O God, don’t let anything happen before Mrs Bowles comes back.’ He could hear the heavy uneven breathing of the child. It was as if she were carrying a weight with great effort up a long hill: it was an inhuman situation not to be able to carry it for her. He thought: this is what parents feel year in and year out, and I am shrinking from a few minutes of it. They see their children dying slowly every hour they live. He prayed again, ‘Father, look after her. Give her peace.’ The breathing broke, choked, began again with terrible effort. Looking between his fingers he could see the six-year-old face convulsed like a navvy’s with labour. ‘Father,’ he prayed, ‘give her peace. Take away my peace for ever, but give her peace.’ The sweat broke out on his hands. ‘Father …’

He heard a small scraping voice repeat, ‘Father,’ and looking up he saw the blue and bloodshot eyes watching him. He thought with horror: this is what I thought I’d missed. He would have called Mrs Bowles, only he hadn’t the voice to call with. He could see the breast of the child struggling for breath to repeat the heavy word; he came over to the bed and said, ‘Yes, dear. Don’t speak, I’m here.’ The night-light cast the shadow of his clenched fist on the sheet and it caught the child’s eye. An effort to laugh convulsed her, and he moved his hand away. ‘Sleep, dear,’ he said, ‘you are sleepy. Sleep.’ A memory that he had carefully buried returned and taking out his handkerchief he made the shadow of a rabbit’s head fall on the pillow beside her. ‘There’s your rabbit,’ he said, ‘to go to sleep with. It will stay until you sleep. Sleep.’ This sweat poured down his face and tasted in his mouth as salt as
tears
. ‘Sleep.’ He moved the rabbit’s ears up and down, up and down. Then he heard Mrs Bowles’s voice, speaking low just behind him. ‘Stop that,’ she said harshly, ‘the child’s dead.’