The Missionaries Read online

  The two chiefs of Lavalava and Niovoro, Abuk and Deng, approached the dais and attempted to salute. The sergeant-major, standing rigidly at attention by the steps, shuddered, and wished fervently to have them in his drill squad for a whole, hot, afternoon.

  “O Tikame,” said Abuk in the Morok language, which Fletcher spoke fluently, “O Tikame, thou well knowest these dung piles of Niovoro, how their women stink so foul that only the wild boars of the forest can abide to mount them, how the cods of their young men hang tiny and shrivelled like the smallest finger of an aged crone, how they feed their guests on dogs’ turds, now, and now”—his voice rose to a shriek of anguished rage—“these half-men, these bush pigs, dare to claim the sacred land of our fathers, the land called Arafura, bounded by the pandanus palms and by the Lava river, of me and my brothers. Thou knowest well, O mighty Tikame, that words of truth fall as often from the lips of men like these as riches from the arses of our pigs. Give us leave, then, to smite this offal, utterly to destroy them, and drive them from thy sight, that even their pigs shall flee them for shame.”

  “What sayest thou, O Deng?” Fletcher looked to the chief of the Niovoro.

  Deng, half of whose face had been smashed in by a club when he was young, and who had been gazing at Abuk in silent contempt during his frenzied harangue, produced a handful of feathers from behind his back and replied.

  “O Tikame, we men of Niovoro heed not these bird songs of the Lavalava. For the Lavalava are like unto these feathers that when the wind bloweth upon them, are scattered over the earth, and are seen no more.” He blew the feathers away, and they were taken up by the wind. “That is all my speech. Let us to arms, O Tikame.”

  “So be it,” said Fletcher, waving them back to their places to await his signal. The two chiefs departed to the ranks of their men, and the RM welcomed a number of Europeans onto the dais, including Oelrichs, who had just arrived in his creaking palanquin.

  Tikame was the mightiest of the Morok folk-heroes, half man, half spirit, who had roamed their mountains in the dawn of antiquity, a great hunter, law-giver, and breaker of heads. The Moroks were convinced that Fletcher was a reincarnation of this prepotent Being, an illusion that he did nothing to dispel. But native philosophers had been much exercised to find a place in their scheme of things for Oelrichs. Clearly, he was the inseparable companion of Tikame; he was not his wife, equally clearly; and he seemed to spend his life in eating. Garang, the greatest philosopher of the Moroks, had spent many fruitless hours alone on his rock, high above the Lamaipa River, attempting to precisely reconcile these curious features of the relationship between Tikame and his oversized companion.

  One afternoon—it was the dry season, when men scurried up and down the tracks with new timbers for garden fences, and women sang to their babies as they gathered up the dried underbrush for burning, and the great valleys were full of the hazy smoke from grass fires—the truth dawned upon Garang. Of course: the legends told that Tikame did have a male companion, his inseparable comforter, vast in bulk and fathomlessly cunning. It had been his great pig, Oburabu. The true identity of Oelrichs was discovered at last!

  “Amazing,” thought Garang, as he made his way back to the men’s house in his village to spread the news of this revelation. “Amazing how one can penetrate the red men’s secrets, if one only thinks clearly and patiently. They’re almost human.”

  Fletcher and Oelrichs were joined on the dais by the other Europeans of the station—“Smith,” the doctor; Madame Negretti, proprietress of the Cosmopolitan Hotel; Ned Oakley, a gold miner down for the week-end from his camp at Armpit Creek; and Erny English, storekeeper and airline agent.

  “Smith” was really Wladlislaw Prsloczlawski, a cheerful Pole who had been rechristened Smith on his arrival by Fletcher, who refused “to have a bloody disgustin’ set o’ noises like that on me clean station register.” Although Smith was a doctor, his real interests lay with the dead, not the living, since the focus of his life was pathology. Every morning, his eyes roamed over the patients in his dispensary, as they lolled against the grime-encrusted, shiny plaster walls, probing each hopefully in turn for some sign of mortal decay, some festering lesion in a vital organ that would bring them swiftly to his mortuary slab, and perhaps to the ultimate distinction of the pickling jar, most of which came from Madame Negretti’s kitchen when she could find no fruit suitable for bottling. His autopsies, at which sherry was served, were one of the few bright spots on the Ungabunga social calendar.

  Madame Negretti was an Italian lady, of ample proportions, the widow of a sea captain, with beady eyes but a jolly sense of humour. Her hobbies were cooking, at which she was superb, and knitting, at which she was exceedingly bad. In moments of agitation, her cardigans and bed-jackets were apt to disintegrate into a mess of tangled cordage and broken spars, resembling the rigging of one of Nelson’s ships of the line after a prolonged fleet action.

  Ned Oakley was a small, intensely respectable gold-miner, who wore spectacles and came into Ungabunga once a month on land dispute day to pick up his grub from the store, his copies of The Tablet and The Chess World, and a case of rum, and to watch the conflicts being resolved, for he prided himself on having a connoisseur’s eye for a good scrap.

  Erny English came from God knows where. No one knew much about his past, since he was always drunk by ten in the morning, and his steady consumption of rum made conversation between then and bedtime rather laborious.

  As soon as the official party was comfortably seated, Fletcher rose and drew his revolver. The police on the strip observed his action, and galloped furiously to safety as he raised the weapon and fired a single shot. Its reverberations were drowned by a mighty yell as the two ranks of frenzied mountain men, their gaping mouths dripping red with betel juice and lifted to heaven as they howled aimlessly, rushed forward to lock themselves in combat.

  Cudgels rose and fell, and feather headdresses flew like chaff on the threshing floor. Scalps split, and blood splattered over arms and shoulders and mingled with the ochres and clays on the faces of the warriors. But most of the blows were taken on the shields, and sounded like heavy rain on a palm-leaf roof. At first the men of Lavalava, urged on by the wild shouts of Abuk, pressed the warriors of Niovoro back under the furious impulse of their charge. The ranks swayed this way and that, each side struggling for mastery, but suddenly, under the cool leadership of Deng, the men of Niovoro changed their tactics. Deng and his picked warriors at the centre began delivering devastating body thrusts at the vitals of their enemies, many of whom collapsed writhing and clutching themselves. The Lavalava centre weakened and in a trice was broken by the Niovoro vanguard. Abuk went down to a particularly vicious thrust from Ajiek, brother to the wife of Deng, and the Lavalava, now split in two, turned aside from the furious assault. The Niovoro cudgels fell instead on kidneys and elbows, and thwacked across muscular buttocks, as the Lavalava broke and ran before the final colossal charge, flinging away cudgels and shields as they sprinted for safety to the drainage ditch at the side of the strip. The Niovoro, in the heat of the charge, would have followed up their advantage and well rubbed-in their victory with iron fence-posts, rocks, and broken bottles, but the police, anticipating them, fired a volley over the heads of the winners with their shotguns, bringing the Niovoro to a halt, dust rising in clouds around them, now cheerful and exultantly throwing their cudgels in derision after their scattering foes.

  It was only then, as the shouting died, that everyone became aware of the plane circling low overhead.

  Chapter III

  Ross turned the plane on to final approach, and they glided in across the gorge of the Ungabunga, a thousand feet below. Prout froze as the plane dropped suddenly, and it seemed that they would undershoot and crash into the cliff below the end of the strip, but Ross maintained height, and aimed for a point well beyond the threshold. A gust of cross-wind swung the aircraft for a second, but he dipped his wing and held a straight course with rudder until his main wheel
s touched, then taxied up the strip, with a burst of power to take the plane over the last few hundred feet to its parking position opposite the trade-store.

  As the propellers tick-tocked to a halt, Prout flung open the door and stepped out on to the wing, looking about him. Much to his surprise, after the miniature Armageddon he had witnessed from the air, everything now seemed peaceful. He felt vaguely that his own presence might already have begun to have a steadying effect. And the greater the chaos at the beginning of his administration, the greater would be his credit for restoring order.

  His speculations were rudely disturbed by the arrival of Erny, who was by now in the cheerful stage of his alcoholic trajectory, and had come to carry out his duties as airline agent. Seeing a lonely figure poised hesitantly upon the wing, Erny’s first thought was to assist the obviously nervous passenger to alight. Staggering forward, he clumsily embraced Prout’s ankles:

  “Yer just put yer foot there, mate.”

  The next second, Prout found himself overbalanced. Erny crumpled beneath the unexpected weight, and fell flat on his back as gravity drove one of Prout’s bony knees into a sensitive part of the drunkard’s anatomy. In response, Erny vomited, noisily and copiously, over Prout’s legs. As Prout scrambled to his feet, green and trembling, his brow dewed with sweat, Fletcher and Smith came up.

  “Jeez, I’m sorry, mate,” groaned Erny. “Didn’t mean to hurl over yer strides like that. Just tryin’ to help.” Clutching himself with one hand, he knelt up and tried to wipe his breakfast from Prout’s grey flannels with the other. Prout looked down, horror-stricken.

  “Yer a bloody good chunderer, Erny,” broke in Fletcher, “But you’d better leave the laundry business to Angelina.” He held out his hand to Prout, who took it limply.

  “I’m Roger Fletcher, Resident Magistrate. And this is Smithy, the Doc.”

  “I’m Sydney Prout, United Nations Special Commissioner.”

  “G’day. We’ve been expectin’ yer. Y’d better come over to the pub. There’s a shower there. One of the boys’ll fetch yer gear. Look after Ern, Smithy.” They began to walk over to the pub.

  “Didja have a good trip?”

  “Very smooth, thank you.”

  “Yeh, good. Well, we’ll have plenty of time to talk later on today, after dinner.”

  They had reached the hotel, built of red corrugated iron, with a white verandah of fantastic woodwork around the upper floor, and Fletcher led the way inside. Prout, unhappily aware of the mephitic vapours which enveloped him, was not anxious to linger in company, and went off at once with the “boy” to have his shower and change. As soon as he had gone, Fletcher steered Ross, who had come in a moment later, over to the bar.

  “Well, Ross, that’s a weird cargo you brought us. What did yer make of it?”

  “Ah, typical bloody do-gooder. Reckons he and the orlies’ll be pissin’ in each other’s pockets in half no time, yer could see that.”

  “They may, too.”

  “How d’ya mean?”

  “Well, we knew this joker was comin’, so we told the locals an old mate of ours is bringin’ ’em all kinds of goodies from the sky. I’ll take ’im on a walkabout.”

  “Ya’ oughta drop ’im dahn a shit ’ouse, Roj.”

  “That’s Plan B. Plan A is that after a coupl’a months of that Morok sense of humour he goes stark ravin’ troppo and gets shipped out in a box with ’oles in it.”

  “I reckon the first bloke who’ll get shipped out is you, Roj.”

  “The hell I will. Who’s gonna interpret for ’im? Who knows the people? He’s gotta keep me on whether he likes it or not. Same goes for Olly. You stayin’ over till tomorra?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Well don’t forget tonight’s piss-up night. I’ll see yer down ’ere. Get Angelina to keep the prick busy till after dinner. I’ll be up at Olly’s.” And he strode quickly out of the bar and set his course for Oelrichs’ residence.

  Up in his room, as he tugged off his soiled clothes, Prout brooded on his humiliating entry to Ungabunga, his memory riveted on those hideous moments on the grass, that ruffian heaving and retching, the stench, and the fetid slime gluing his trousers to his legs—faugh! He was a joke, a figure of ridicule, probably at this moment the butt of Australian crudities in the bar downstairs.

  But as he relaxed under the soothing waters of the shower he reflected that they had little enough to laugh about, when their own headquarters had just been turned into a battleground. He dried himself carefully, feeling thoroughly cleansed. Yes, absolute chaos—Fletcher had obviously lost his grip completely. The reports had seriously underestimated the social disintegration on the island. Restored, he pulled on a clean pair of flannels and slipped his stockinged feet into some open leather sandals, sank into an easy chair and unlocked his briefcase to prepare for his first official meeting with his new subordinates.

  Moia, Madame Negretti’s chef from a neighbouring island, was in the kitchen, expertly preparing Quiche Lorraine for lunch and whistling as he sliced the bacon. This was one of his favorite dishes, declared by the epicures of Ungabunga to be surpassed only by his Supréme de Volaille à la Maréchal. But, as the best piano tuners are said to lose their ear if they play the instrument to which their lives are devoted, so Moia never tasted the dishes he so dexterously prepared—the smell and texture were enough. His personal menu was drawn from the simpler repertoire of his tribe: at that very moment a plump, juicy rat lay in the colander ready to be boiled for his lunch. He left the table and went to the larder for some eggs, but as he was putting them in the bowl he heard a crash in the kitchen behind him.

  Running back he saw Malvolio, Madame Negretti’s cat, leap from the table with his dinner in its jaws. In an instant the veneer of the cook was shed, and he became as his fathers before him, hunters of the wild boar with bow and spear; seizing a cleaver he hurled it at Malvolio, crouching and growling behind the door, and nearly severed the brute’s head. Bloody pusscat, he’d had it coming to him all right. Not the first time he’d nicked his dinner. But Missus would be angry. She loved it like his own women loved their baby pigs. Maybe she would call the sergeant and have him put in the calaboose. The vision of hunters in the primeval forest faded, and that of the chef resumed its place. What would he do with the body, its fur now matted with the blood that spread thickly over the concrete floor? Suddenly, he remembered that it was curry night at the Cosmopolitan. He grinned as an idea occurred to him, and in his culinary imagination, as he carried the corpse to the larder, Malvolio was already jointed and simmering in a rich broth.

  After an excellent lunch, Prout received word that he would be welcome at the Office to discuss his plans with the Resident Magistrate. The policeman who delivered the invitation conducted him the few hundred yards, and showed him up the steps and into the Office. Facing him was the heaving bulk of Oelrichs, seated at the centre of the table, while Fletcher sat at one end, tilting his chair back against an arms-rack behind him, filled with Lee-Enfields complete with bayonets in black scabbards and green canvas frogs. The inevitable newspaper cigarette hung from his lips. Since it was eight inches long—about half a page from the Sydney Herald—he was obviously expecting an intellectually arduous afternoon.

  “I don’t think you’ve met Mr Oelrichs. Me right ’and man. Dr Prout, the Special Commissioner.”

  “How do you do,” said Oelrics.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Well, Dr Prout, we’ve been expecting you. Like to put us in the picture?” said Fletcher.

  “I certainly would. I may as well come straight to the point and speak frankly. From all the reports I have studied, it’s quite clear that your policies have resulted in social stagnation for the people—no schools, no democratic institutions, no improvement in the standard of living–”

  “Yeah, but–”

  “Please let me finish. I’m quite prepared to agree that Canberra must bear a great deal of this responsibility, in view of its lax supervis
ion, and I suppose since you obviously have no faith in the ability of these people to operate civilized institutions, your policies are consistent with your beliefs. But one might have expected that, as a practical man, you would at least have been able to maintain law and order. Yet this morning I was unable to land here, at your own headquarters, because the aerodrome was a seething mass of… of… well, what exactly is your explanation of the incredible violence which I saw?”

  “Just a land dispute being heard by the Court. It’s the way we settle things here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, y’see, we know bugger-all about these jokers. Their minds don’t work the same as ours. After a few years, y’think y’re gettin’ to know ’em, and then one morning y’wake up and find y’ve had it all arse about face from the word go.”

  “Very likely, I should think.”

  “Yeah, well, as I was sayin’, it’s a bloody waste of time tryin’ to apply our laws and customs to these blokes. Yer get a coupl’a tribes, next-door neighbours most often. The men are always sneakin’ off inter the bush for a naughty with the other blokes’ wives, or nickin’ each others’ pigs, or fellin’ each others’ trees, out’a spite. It goes on like this for a while, and the bad blood starts boilin’ up. So the chiefs get the sorcerers on the job. They get their bags o’ tricks out and a few kids die of the screamin’ abdabs, and an old granny or two goes potty, and some other bugger dies of the tremblin’ toms, and before yer could say “knife,” in the old days they’d got the axes out and were hackin’ each other up like firewood. Right, says I, I don’t want to know the rights and wrongs of it—and with these bastards they’re all bloody wrong, anyhow—any fightin’ and yer get clobbered.”

  “What do you mean by clobbered?”

  “Oh, burnin’ villages, shootin’ a few pigs, floggin’ the hard cases with wet cane, just to let ’em know I’m around, and got my eye on ’em.”