Collected Short Stories: Volume 1 Page 2

  ‘It means we shall have to stay here for ten days at least.’

  ‘But I’m urgently needed at Apia,’ said Dr Macphail.

  ‘That can’t be helped. If no more cases develop on board, the schooner will be allowed to sail with white passengers, but all native traffic is prohibited for three months.’

  ‘Is there a hotel here?’ asked Mrs Macphail.

  Davidson gave a low chuckle.

  ‘There’s not.’

  ‘What shall we do then?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to the governor. There’s a trader along the front who has rooms that he rents, and my proposition is that as soon as the rain lets up we should go along there and see what we can do. Don’t expect comfort. You’ve just got to be thankful if we get a bed to sleep on and a roof over our heads.’

  But the rain showed no signs of stopping, and at length with umbrellas and waterproofs they set out. There was no town, but merely a group of official buildings, a store or two, and at the back, among the coconut trees and plantains, a few native dwellings. The house they sought was about five minutes’ walk from the wharf. It was a frame house of two storeys, with broad verandas on both floors and a roof of corrugated iron. The owner was a half-caste named Horn, with a native wife surrounded by little brown children, and on the ground-floor he had a store where he sold canned goods and cottons. The rooms he showed them were almost bare of furniture. In the Macphails’ there was nothing but a poor, worn bed with a ragged mosquito net, a rickety chair, and a washstand. They looked round with dismay. The rain poured down without ceasing.

  ‘I’m not going to unpack more than we actually need,’ said Mrs Macphail.

  Mrs Davidson came into the room as she was unlocking a portmanteau. She was very brisk and alert. The cheerless surroundings had no effect on her.

  ‘If you’ll take my advice you’ll get a needle and cotton and start right in to mend the mosquito net,’ she said, ‘or you’ll not be able to get a wink of sleep tonight.’

  ‘Will they be very bad?’ asked Dr Macphail.

  ‘This is the season for them. When you’re asked to a party at Government House at Apia you’ll notice that all the ladies are given a pillowslip to put their – their lower extremities in.’

  ‘I wish the rain would stop for a moment,’ said Mrs Macphail. ‘I could try to make the place comfortable with more heart if the sun were shining.’

  ‘Oh, if you wait for that, you’ll wait a long time. Pago-Pago is about the rainiest place in the Pacific. You see, the hills, and that bay, they attract the water, and one expects rain at this time of year anyway.’

  She looked from Macphail to his wife, standing helplessly in different parts of the room, like lost souls, and she pursed her lips. She saw that she must take them in hand. Feckless people like that made her impatient, but her hands itched to put everything in the order which came so naturally to her.

  ‘Here, you give me a needle and cotton and I’ll mend that net of yours, while you go on with your unpacking. Dinner’s at one. Dr Macphail, you’d better go down to the wharf and see that your heavy luggage has been put in a dry place. You know what these natives are, they’re quite capable of storing it where the rain will beat in on it all the time.’

  The doctor put on his waterproof again and went downstairs. At the door Mr Horn was standing in conversation with the quartermaster of the ship they had just arrived in and a second-class passenger whom Dr Macphail had seen several times on board. The quartermaster, a little, shrivelled man, extremely dirty, nodded to him as he passed.

  ‘This is a bad job about the measles, doc,’ he said. ‘I see you’ve fixed yourself up already.’

  Dr Macphail thought he was rather familiar, but he was a timid man and he did not take offence easily.

  ‘Yes, we’ve got a room upstairs.’

  ‘Miss Thompson was sailing with you to Apia, so I’ve brought her along here.’

  The quartermaster pointed with his thumb to the woman standing by his side. She was twenty-seven perhaps, plump, and in a coarse fashion pretty. She wore a white dress and a large white hat. Her fat calves in white cotton stockings bulged over the tops of long white boots in glacé kid. She gave Macphail an ingratiating smile.

  ‘The feller’s tryin’ to soak me a dollar and a half a day for the meanest-sized room,’ she said in a hoarse voice.

  ‘I tell you she’s a friend of mine, Jo,’ said the quartermaster. ‘She can’t pay more than a dollar, and you’ve sure got to take her for that.’

  The trader was fat and smooth and quietly smiling.

  ‘Well, if you put it like that, Mr Swan, I’ll see what I can do about it. I’ll talk to Mrs Horn and if we think we can make a reduction we will.’

  ‘Don’t try to pull that stuff with me,’ said Miss Thompson. ‘We’ll settle this right now. You get a dollar a day for the room and not one bean more.’

  Dr Macphail smiled. He admired the effrontery with which she bargained. He was the sort of man who always paid what he was asked. He preferred to be over-charged than to haggle. The trader sighed.

  ‘Well, to oblige Mr Swan I’ll take it.’

  ‘That’s the goods,’ said Miss Thompson. ‘Come right in and have a shot of hooch. I’ve got some real good rye in that grip if you’ll bring it along, Mr Swan. You come along too, doctor.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I will, thank you,’ he answered. ‘I’m just going down to see that our luggage is all right.’

  He stepped out into the rain. It swept in from the opening of the harbour in sheets and the opposite shore was all blurred. He passed two or three natives clad in nothing but the lava-lava, with huge umbrellas over them. They walked finely, with leisurely movements, very upright; and they smiled and greeted him in a strange tongue as they went by.

  It was nearly dinner-time when he got back, and their meal was laid in the trader’s parlour. It was a room designed not to live in but for purposes of prestige, and it had a musty, melancholy air. A suite of stamped plush was arranged neatly round the walls, and from the middle of the ceiling, protected from the flies by yellow tissue-paper, hung a gilt chandelier. Davidson did not come.

  ‘I know he went to call on the governor,’ said Mrs Davidson, ‘and I guess he’s kept him to dinner.’

  A little native girl brought them a dish of Hamburger steak, and after a while the trader came up to see that they had everything they wanted.

  ‘I see we have a fellow lodger, Mr Horn,’ said Dr Macphail.

  ‘She’s taken a room, that’s all,’ answered the trader. ‘She’s getting her own board.’

  He looked at the two ladies with an obsequious air.

  ‘I put her downstairs so she shouldn’t be in the way. She won’t be any trouble to you.’

  ‘Is it someone who was on the boat?’ asked Mrs Macphail.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, she was in the second cabin. She was going to Apia. She has a position as cashier waiting for her.’

  ‘Oh!’

  When the trader was gone Macphail said:

  ‘I shouldn’t think she’d find it exactly cheerful having her meals in her room.’

  ‘If she was in the second cabin I guess she’d rather,’ answered Mrs Davidson. ‘I don’t exactly know who it can be.’

  ‘I happened to be there when the quartermaster brought her along. Her name’s Thompson.’

  ‘It’s not the woman who was dancing with the quartermaster last night?’ asked Mrs Davidson.

  ‘That’s who it must be,’ said Mrs Macphail. ‘I wondered at the time what she was. She looked rather fast to me.’

  ‘Not good style at all,’ said Mrs Davidson.

  They began to talk of other things, and after dinner, tired with their early rise, they separated and slept. When they awoke, though the sky was still grey and the clouds hung low, it was not raining and they went for a walk on the high road which the Americans had built along the bay.

  On their return they found that Davidson had just come in.


  ‘We may be here for a fortnight,’ he said irritably. ‘I’ve argued it out with the governor, but he says there is nothing to be done.’

  ‘Mr Davidson’s just longing to get back to his work,’ said his wife, with an anxious glance at him.

  ‘We’ve been away for a year,’ he said, walking up and down the veranda. ‘The mission has been in charge of native missionaries and I’m terribly nervous that they’ve let things slide. They’re good men, I’m not saying a word against them, God-fearing, devout, and truly Christian men – their Christianity would put many so-called Christians at home to the blush – but they’re pitifully lacking in energy. They can make a stand once, they can make a stand twice, but they can’t make a stand all the time. If you leave a mission in charge of a native missionary, no matter how trustworthy he seems, in course of time you’ll find he’s let abuses creep in.’

  Mr Davidson stood still. With his tall, spare form, and his great eyes flashing out of his pale face, he was an impressive figure. His sincerity was obvious in the fire of his gestures and in his deep, ringing voice.

  ‘I expect to have my work cut out for me. I shall act and I shall act promptly. If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast into the flames.’

  And in the evening after the high tea which was their last meal, while they sat in the stiff parlour, the ladies working and Dr Macphail smoking his pipe, the missionary told them of his work in the islands.

  ‘When we went there they had no sense of sin at all,’ he said. ‘They broke the commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instil into the natives the sense of sin.’

  The Macphails knew already that Davidson had worked in the Solomons for five years before he met his wife. She had been a missionary in China, and they had become acquainted in Boston, where they were both spending part of their leave to attend a missionary congress. On their marriage they had been appointed to the islands in which they had laboured ever since.

  In the course of all the conversations they had had with Mr Davidson one thing had shone out clearly and that was the man’s unflinching courage. He was a medical missionary, and he was liable to be called at any time to one or other of the islands in the group. Even the whaleboat is not so very safe a conveyance in the stormy Pacific of the wet season, but often he would be sent for in a canoe, and then the danger was great. In cases of illness or accident he never hesitated. A dozen times he had spent the whole night baling for his life, and more than once Mrs Davidson had given him up for lost.

  ‘I’d beg him not to go sometimes,’ she said, ‘or at least to wait till the weather was more settled, but he’d never listen. He’s obstinate, and when he’s once made up his mind, nothing can move him.’

  ‘How can I ask the natives to put their trust in the Lord if I am afraid to do so myself?’ cried Davidson. ‘And I’m not, I’m not. They know that if they send for me in their trouble I’ll come if it’s humanly possible. And do you think the Lord is going to abandon me when I am on his business? The wind blows at his bidding and the waves toss and rage at his word.’

  Dr Macphail was a timid man. He had never been able to get used to the hurtling of the shells over the trenches, and when he was operating in an advanced dressing-station the sweat poured from his brow and dimmed his spectacles in the effort he made to control his unsteady hand. He shuddered a little as he looked at the missionary.

  ‘I wish I could say that I’ve never been afraid,’ he said.

  ‘I wish you could say that you believed in God,’ retorted the other.

  But for some reason, that evening the missionary’s thoughts travelled back to the early days he and his wife had spent on the islands.

  ‘Sometimes Mrs Davidson and I would look at one another and the tears would stream down our cheeks. We worked without ceasing, day and night, and we seemed to make no progress. I don’t know what I should have done without her then. When I felt my heart sink, when I was very near despair, she gave me courage and hope.’

  Mrs Davidson looked down at her work, and a slight colour rose to her thin cheeks. Her hands trembled a little. She did not trust herself to speak.

  ‘We had no one to help us. We were alone, thousands of miles from any of our own people, surrounded by darkness. When I was broken and weary she would put her work aside and take the Bible and read to me till peace came and settled upon me like sleep upon the eyelids of a child, and when at last she closed the book she’d say: “We’ll save them in spite of themselves.” And I felt strong again in the Lord, and I answered: “Yes, with God’s help I’ll save them. I must save them.”’

  He came over to the table and stood in front of it as though it were a lectern.

  ‘You see, they were so naturally depraved that they couldn’t be brought to see their wickedness. We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions. We had to make it a sin, not only to commit adultery and to lie and thieve, but to expose their bodies, and to dance and not to come to church. I made it a sin for a girl to show her bosom and a sin for a man not to wear trousers.’

  ‘How?’ asked Dr Macphail, not without surprise.

  ‘I instituted fines. Obviously the only way to make people realize that an action is sinful is to punish them if they commit it. I fined them if they didn’t come to church, and I fined them if they danced. I fined them if they were improperly dressed. I had a tariff, and every sin had to be paid for either in money or work. And at last I made them understand.’

  ‘But did they never refuse to pay?’

  ‘How could they?’ asked the missionary.

  ‘It would be a brave man who tried to stand up against Mr Davidson,’ said his wife, tightening her lips.

  Dr Macphail looked at Davidson with troubled eyes. What he heard shocked him, but he hesitated to express his disapproval.

  ‘You must remember that in the last resort I could expel them from their church membership.’

  ‘Did they mind that?’

  Davidson smiled a little and gently rubbed his hands.

  ‘They couldn’t sell their copra. When the men fished they got no share of the catch. It meant something very like starvation. Yes, they minded quite a lot.’

  ‘Tell him about Fred Ohlson,’ said Mrs Davidson.

  The missionary fixed his fiery eyes on Dr Macphail.

  ‘Fred Ohlson was a Danish trader who had been in the islands a good many years. He was a pretty rich man as traders go and he wasn’t very pleased when we came. You see, he’d had things very much his own way. He paid the natives what he liked for their copra, and he paid in goods and whisky. He had a native wife, but he was flagrantly unfaithful to her. He was a drunkard. I gave him a chance to mend his ways, but he wouldn’t take it. He laughed at me.’

  Davidson’s voice fell to a deep bass as he said the last words, and he was silent for a minute or two. The silence was heavy with menace.

  ‘In two years he was a ruined man. He’d lost everything he’d saved in a quarter of a century. I broke him, and at last he was forced to come to me like a beggar and beseech me to give him a passage back to Sydney.’

  ‘I wish you could have seen him when he came to see Mr Davidson,’ said the missionary’s wife. ‘He had been a fine, powerful man, with a lot of fat on him, and he had a great big voice, but now he was half the size, and he was shaking all over. He’d suddenly become an old man.’

  With abstracted gaze Davidson looked out into the night. The rain was falling again.

  Suddenly from below came a sound, and Davidson turned and looked questioningly at his wife. It was the sound of a gramophone, harsh and loud, wheezing out a syncopated tune.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  Mrs Davidson fixed her pince-nez more firmly on her nose.

  ‘One of the second-class passengers has a room in the house. I guess it comes from there.’

  They listened in silence, and presently they heard the sound of
dancing. Then the music stopped, and they heard the popping of corks and voices raised in animated conversation.

  ‘I daresay she’s giving a farewell party to her friends on board,’ said Dr Macphail. ‘The ship sails at twelve, doesn’t it?’

  Davidson made no remark, but he looked at his watch.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asked his wife.

  She got up and folded her work.

  ‘Yes, I guess I am,’ she answered.

  ‘It’s early to go to bed yet, isn’t it?’ said the doctor.

  ‘We have a good deal of reading to do,’ explained Mrs Davidson. ‘Wherever we are, we read a chapter of the Bible before retiring for the night and we study it with the commentaries, you know, and discuss it thoroughly. It’s a wonderful training for the mind.’

  The two couples bade one another good night. Dr and Mrs Macphail were left alone. For two or three minutes they did not speak.

  ‘I think I’ll go and fetch the cards,’ the doctor said at last.

  Mrs Macphail looked at him doubtfully. Her conversation with the Davidsons had left her a little uneasy, but she did not like to say that she thought they had better not play cards when the Davidsons might come in at any moment. Dr Macphail brought them and she watched him, though with a vague sense of guilt, while he laid out his patience. Below the sound of revelry continued.

  It was fine enough next day, and the Macphails, condemned to spend a fortnight of idleness at Pago-Pago, set about making the best of things. They went down to the quay and got out of their boxes a number of books. The doctor called on the chief surgeon of the naval hospital and went round the beds with him. They left cards on the governor. They passed Miss Thompson on the road. The doctor took off his hat, and she gave him a ‘Good morning doc,’ in a loud, cheerful voice. She was dressed as on the day before, in a white frock, and her shiny white boots with their high heels, her fat legs bulging over the tops of them, were strange things on that exotic scene.