Beat Not the Bones (18 page)

‘What's the matter?' said Stella. ‘Why are you up?'

It struck him that she had changed; that she was no longer silly, deluded and helpless, that the jungle that had robbed him of reason and strength had given these very qualities to her. He had been rejected and she had been chosen.

‘I heard something,' he said. ‘Was there anything?'

‘No. You must put something on that cut or it may fester.'

He followed her meekly into the hut. It will not be me who kills her, he thought. She will kill me.

CHAPTER 17

They made a later start the next day. Stella slept soundly and was awakened only by the sounds of the village stirring. Washington was already up and folding his net. ‘Why didn't you wake me?' she said.

He looked around. ‘There's plenty of time.' His face shocked her. It was white and strained, and he looked like an old man. The skin folded loosely round his throat and chin. His heavy, bloodshot eyes told that he had had no sleep.

He had forgotten the anguished emotions of the night and turned on her a glance of cold hostility.

‘Two of the boys are staying here,' he said.

‘Why?'

He would not meet her eye. ‘They are afraid,' he said, and went on folding the net.

‘Which two?'

‘Hitolo and the police boy are going on with us. We'll leave some of the food here for when we return.'

Stella went to the entrance of the hut and called, ‘Hitolo! Hitolo!'

The boys were nowhere to be seen. A few silent figures moved about in the village, their legs shrouded in the morning mist that still hung over the ground. She climbed down the steps. ‘Hitolo!'

Washington followed her out on to the verandah and stood looking down at her. ‘What's the matter? What do you want?' he said. There was a nervous edge to his voice. ‘You won't be able to persuade them. It's no use. They're terrified. They saw something last night.'

‘What?'

‘It doesn't matter what it was,' he said. ‘They were prepared to be afraid and something frightened them. You can't bring reason to bear. It might have been a bird or a bat.'

Hitolo had appeared round the side of the hut. He stood looking up at them. Stella thought that his eyes looked wild. They were set in his head in a peculiarly unfixed way, as if at any moment they might roll round in their sockets like the broken eyes of a doll.

‘What's all this about the boys not coming?'

‘They come now, Mrs Warwick,' he said.

‘You mean they've changed their minds?'

‘Yes, Mrs Warwick. They come now. I tell them and they come.' A momentary smile of self-congratulation passed over his face, but his eyes still looked wild.

She glanced at Washington. He was leaning against the door frame, and she could not tell whether the expression on his face was anger or relief.

‘All right, Hitolo, make breakfast.'

He shook his head. ‘Boys no stop, sinabada. Kai-kai breakfast in bush. No stop here.' She looked at Washington again for explanation.

‘They're afraid,' he said. ‘They say that a sorcerer was here last night. He might come back and pick up their leavings. We'll have to walk for an hour and then have breakfast.'

A quarter of an hour later they started. The boys still looked frightened. They huddled together, walking almost on each other's heels, for the path was only wide enough to allow them to walk in single file. They whispered and grunted among themselves and kept throwing apprehensive glances about them. Washington kept near to the rest of the party and did not stride off in front as he had done the day before. He walked so close to Stella that he fell in alongside her whenever the path widened. Yesterday he had been silent, today he talked.

At seven they stopped for breakfast. The boys sat apart and ate like dogs, bolting their food, eyes on the surrounding trees. When they had finished they scraped a hole on the side of the path and buried the scraps, stamping the earth hard and flat with their feet. They hid the empty tin in the undergrowth and pulled the foliage of the bushes up around it so that it could not be seen from the path. Washington had finished his breakfast and sat watching them.

‘Why do they do that?' said Stella.

‘It's dangerous to leave scraps around. If a sorcerer finds a piece of food you have been eating, it can be used just as potently against you as leavings from the body.'

He spoke quietly, but there was an undercurrent of eagerness in his voice. She had noticed it once before, the first time she met him, when he spoke of the Eola vada men. He believes it all, she thought, watching him curiously, and he welcomes it. There is something here that he dreads but wants.

The jungle was lighter now, and she could see more clearly his worn, haggard face. A nerve fluttered in his cheek. His eyes did not dart about searching the trees like the eyes of the native men. His eyes were wide, and haunted. Terror lived within him now, not in the jungle outside.

She felt she should not pity him, but pity was there, struggling against judgment. Even the wicked, in the moment of executing their most monstrous plans, are pitiful. She was not astonished or shocked by this discovery – discovery now was an hourly event – but waited to find the new paradox in it.

Free from the illusion of having loved David, she was free from those opinions and attitudes of his she had worn as her own. She thought of Marapai, and of Anthony and Trevor Nyall. What were they really like? About Anthony she felt she knew, about Trevor she had no idea. People had always come to her second hand, stamped with the insignia of someone else's approval. Why had David liked one and disliked the other? His choice now seemed to her incongruous, and she could not understand it. She could not understand David for she had never known him, only his opinions. Perhaps he had never liked Trevor, but preferred it to be thought that he did.

She felt that everyone she had known had hidden from her, had protected her from the dangers of discovery because they had enjoyed in her a condition of innocence. All except one person, who alone had respected her enough to disclose what he believed to be the worst in himself.

The boys had huddled together on the path and were watching her expectantly. She glanced over her shoulder at Washington to see if he was ready to move. He was squatting down on the path with his back towards her. For a moment she could not see what he was doing. One knee was bent, his head was lowered, and his elbows jerked backwards and forwards. He was scraping the pieces of charred yam from his plate into a hole he had dug in the ground.

She felt her stomach lurch. She was frightened and revolted as if she had looked on something obscene. ‘Don't !' she cried. ‘Don't!'

He looked around. He crouched still, his head lowered. His muddied hands dabbled like paws on the ground. His eyes were turned in their sockets showing a rim of smoky, bloodshot white. He looked like a cornered dog. She could hear the sharp hiss of his breath.

‘That's not for you!' she said. ‘It's for
them
. It's all right for them. They manage. They know all the ways out and the loopholes and evasions. But you're a westerner! Don't be a fool!'

He rose slowly to his feet and turned to her, his muddy hands hanging at his sides.

‘A fool!' he said. His teeth clenched and he was very white. He lashed back at her as if she had insulted him. ‘A fool! You don't know what you're saying. Only fools are safe! Westerner! What place has the west here! Good God, this is the tropics! We are standing virtually on the equator! Don't you know that's where all living things – slugs, pigs, fishes, trees, flowers, mosquitoes, humans – are the same and survive on equal terms! Do you suppose it'll snow for us because we've got Nordic blood in our veins?
We
must give in.'

He stopped abruptly and stamped on the earth he had been digging. She glanced around her. Hitolo and the three carriers were still waiting, and watching. They won't stay, she thought, they'll leave us tonight.

Washington did not speak to her for some time. She realised he was angry at being caught and rebuked for his furtive digging. But after they had walked about half a mile the track widened into mud flats on the edge of the river and he dropped back and walked alongside her.

‘You don't understand,' he said. ‘You've just come here, you haven't been here long enough to realise these things. You can't know them intellectually, they don't bear examination, you've got to feel them. For hundred of years now the white men have been trying to live in the tropics and the only ones who have survived are those who have obeyed its commands and worshipped its gods.'

He seemed unaware of the half hour of silence that had passed between them and spoke as if in direct continuation of their earlier conversation. ‘Isn't it possible,' he said, ‘that this belt that circles the world demands some other sort of equipment for living?' He spoke almost in a whisper and kept looking into the trees on either side. ‘In every tropical country, there are native peoples who have survived and built up cultures of their own. And always, always, with the people who survive you find witchcraft, magic, sorcery and a conglomeration of methods for harnessing and counteracting the forces of evil. They recognise evil. They
recognise
it and survive. But
we
don't survive. Not the whites, the westerners, as you call them, because they won't acknowledge what they can't explain as a scientific formula. They think it's childish; they won't climb down and admit their helplessness.'

‘There could be other reasons for their not surviving,' Stella said.

‘What other reasons?' His voice was again eager. His own theory seemed to fascinate him. ‘Why is it that after a year or so up here or in any other tropical country, they lose touch with their own natures? Why do their personalities rot and crumble? Why is their work futile and profitless? Why do they end up in suicide and madness, drink, sex and sickness?'

He paused and spoke more loudly now, more passionately. ‘Because they refuse to understand that all the phenomena that they have been brought up to be enlightened about, to be sceptical about, are still here. Oh, God! What fools! They think a jungle is an English wood. They've never spent a night alone in the jungle as I have. They refuse to live – with their goddamned superiority – as a native has learned is the only way to live – cunningly, instinctively and acknowledging their own insignificance!'

Stella did not reply, and he rambled on about instincts, feelings, the false trails that the intellect followed; the inner eye that the western world had lost. Every now and again he would stop and glance back over his shoulder and then the boys behind them would stop too.

They arrived at a village in the mid-afternoon and decided to stop there for the night. They were now a day's march from Eola.

While the other boys were preparing food in the evening Stella tried to talk to Hitolo, but she felt that he had ceased to be frank with her. He was wary and on the defensive.

‘Will the boys come on tomorrow?' she asked. But he only shook his head enigmatically and would not meet her eye. ‘If they don't, we shall leave food here and take presents and just a little food for the people at Eola.'

‘We take no presents,' he replied indifferently.

‘Why not?'

‘Last time, Eola people send all presents back again.'

‘Surely not. Mr Washington said they took a lot of presents. Pearl shells and cowries. And Mr Seaton said it too.'

He nodded. ‘Plenty presents. Mr Washington and Mr Warwick and my brother bring them all back. The people of Eola bad people.' He looked away. ‘
Bad
people,' he said again.

‘What do they say about them here?' asked Stella, pointing a hand to indicate the village.

‘Bad people,' Hitolo said vaguely. He had become inarticulate, as if the jungle silence had made him feel the futility of words.

‘Do they ever see them?'

He threw a quick glance around him. ‘Vada men,' he said.

‘They must trade with them,' she insisted. ‘They're not more than fifteen or twenty miles away.'

‘Vada men kill plenty people.'

They were no longer able to talk together. Whatever knowledge Hitolo had acquired of European language and customs was now muddled. The fear that was his birthright had claimed him. She wondered if he had forgotten his dead brother, or if this memory, too, was lost with all that he had started with. He no longer set himself apart from the other boys, seeing himself as an administration clerk, more white than brown. He walked away from her to the other boys busy around the fire with, she felt, an air of relief.

The boys did not, as she had half expected, stay behind in the village. She woke early at about four o'clock and lay for a few moments looking out through her net at the grey light outside.

‘Are you awake?' she said.

‘Yes,' Washington said. The relief in his tone suggested that he had been lying awake for hours.

This is the day, she thought. ‘We should leave as soon as possible. Will you wake the boys?'

He said nothing but got up and left the hut. It was understood between them now that she should make the decisions. A moment later he returned. Stella was up and folding her bed.

‘Are they coming?'

‘Yes.' There was no telling what this meant to him.

They had breakfast and left as it was growing light. The day before they had walked through open country but now they were in forest once more. The path was narrow and only visible for a few yards ahead. The light was not daylight but a thin dark.

Washington tried to make the boys lead. ‘They might sneak off behind,' he explained. But they refused, so he and Stella went first, walking abreast and continually knocking against each other on the narrow path. She felt that he sought this constant collision of hand, shoulder and knee as an antidote to his loneliness. More than once she noticed his fingers feel towards hers in the unconscious act of clasping her hand. But this statement of bewilderment and fear was never completed; consciousness intervened just in time and his hand was drawn back.

The boys walked close behind. They did not speak now and moved so silently there was no way of telling they were there. Every now and again Washington stopped and glanced over his shoulder, then the boys would stop too. His constant checking agitated them and they picked up his anxiety as a horse senses fear in its rider's hands.