Round the Bend (43 page)

“You won’t accept the fact that he’s dying, either, will you?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I won’t. I won’t accept that any more than I’ll accept his resignation. He’s going to get well.”

She came over to where I was sitting, and bent down and kissed me. I stood up and held her in my arms for a minute. “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “There are times when things are a bit of a battle, and this is one of them. But it’s going to be all right.”

We broke away presently, and I sat down and wrote a cable to Connie. I said:

Nadezna stared at this. “What is this new job in Siam?” she asked.

“I haven’t thought it out yet,” I said frankly. “I’ll have it cut
and dried before I see him. We’ve got to give him something to look forward to, and hang on to.”

“But you don’t operate in Siam at all, Tom.”

“I didn’t operate in Indonesia six months ago,” I said.

I took her down to the souk myself in the old Dodge that night; it was not possible to get the car up to her house, so I stopped it at the end of the narrow alley and walked with her to the flight of steps that led up to her room. Then I went back and got into the station wagon again, and on an impulse I drove out to the Residency compound at Jufair and went to call on Captain Morrison.

The Liaison Officer was out, but he was somewhere not very far away; his boy offered to go and tell him that I was waiting to see him and his bearer brought me a whiskey and the paper. Morrison came in about five minutes and apologized for keeping me waiting in his shy, diffident way.

“I’ve come about Shak Lin,” I said. “He’s been chucked out of Bali.” And I told him all I knew.

He took it very seriously. “The bloody fools,” he said bitterly. “They’ve done just the same as we did here.”

“I don’t see that we can blame them for that,” I said.

“No. I suppose that, down in Bali, they’re right out of things; they couldn’t know how fast this Shak Lin cult is spreading. It’s up in Baghdad now.” He glanced at me. “I suppose you know about that.”

I nodded. “It’s in Teheran, too. And it’s all through India, from Lahore to Trincomalee.”

He said, “It’s gone right through the East—so far, only with one limited class of people, on the aerodromes. You can’t say that it’s a very strong cult, yet. It hasn’t touched the peasants, or the politicians, or the intellectuals. But it’s strong enough already to rouse vast resentment if we Europeans take to kicking Shak Lin out of every place he tries to settle in.”

I agreed with him. “It’s just not got to happen again,” I said. “For one thing, he’s a sick man now. After he’s got rid of this thing, I think a Buddhist country would be best for him. I’m thinking of Siam. He’s always been very well thought of in Bangkok. He’d be all right there.”

“He’d be all right here,” said Morrison. “The Foreign Office
are quite aware that a mistake was made. You don’t think he could come back here again?”

“I doubt if he’d want to,” I said. “I think he feels that he’s done all he can in this part of the world. You see, he’s much more of a religious teacher now than a chief engineer. And as the cult grows, he goes further that way every day. I’d like to see him back in the hangar on the airstrip here, running the maintenance of my aeroplanes. But you can’t put back the clock.”

“No,” he said, “you can’t do that. When you make a mistake, sometimes, it’s made for good.” He stood in silence for a moment, staring out into the night. “Do what you can to get him back here for a little while, Cutter,” he said. “Even if it’s only for a visit, for a week. We made a blunder over this, and there’s no doubt that it’s affected British prestige in the Persian Gulf. People may call the Sheikh of Khulal an old fuddy-duddy, but he’s an important man in these parts. If you could get Shak Lin back here if only for a visit so that we could make amends, I think it might be very helpful. Just bear that in mind.”

“I’ll do that certainly,” I said. “I’ll get him back here for a little if I can. But everything depends upon his health; this treatment at Karachi or in Paris must come first.”

I went back to the aerodrome for dinner in the restaurant. Alec Scott was in the Control tower; I went up and talked to him about Karachi. Radio telephone connections were not very good at the moment and he said they would get better as the night went on; I went back at about midnight and Karachi was coming through as clear as a local call.

I asked to speak to the Controller and I had luck there, because it was Khalil, the chap that I had spoken to once before, who was himself a follower of Shak Lin. I asked him to deter any aircraft that might be taking off for Bali with pilgrims and make it clear to them that they would almost certainly be stopped upon the way. I told him that I should be going down in two days’ time myself and bringing Shak Lin back to hospital in Karachi. There was no point in any pilgrims going anywhere, since Shak Lin would himself be in Karachi in a fortnight and they could see him there.

He thanked me for the message, and said he would explain
what I had said to the engineers. I only just got through to him in time, because the Dakota was already chartered and was to take off at dawn.

We left two days later in the Tramp. I made Hosein chief pilot and went as second pilot myself, and I put Nadezna on the manifest as navigator and she travelled in the navigator’s seat most of the way. We had eleven passengers for various destinations on the route, all oilmen of course, and about two and a half tons of miscellaneous machinery and stores, so we had a pretty good load up.

We passed through Karachi in the early afternoon. Wazir Hussein had arranged for his agent to meet us on the aerodrome and this chap turned up. The hospital bed was all arranged and everything laid on. I took his name and address and promised to send him a cable to tell him our exact time of arrival back with Shak Lin, so that he could meet us with a car upon the tarmac. I made these arrangements with some difficulty, because Hosein was up in the Control office with the paper work, and Nadezna and I were beset with continuous enquiries from the engineers about Shak Lin. Finally a Pakistani customs officer in uniform came to our assistance and got a couple of the aerodrome police to keep the people off us, and to explain to newcomers what we had already told them many times.

We took off presently for Ahmedabad and spent the night there. Next day we flew on to Calcutta and Rangoon, and then in the evening light up to Yenanyaung, landing just at dusk. We set down some of our passengers there and took on others, spent the night in the oil company’s rest house, and went on next day down the Kra Isthmus.

I had cleared the machine that morning from Rangoon for Kallang airport at Singapore, because when making a long journey I always like to get a good long stage done in the early part of the day, and a short one in the afternoon; it’s less tiring doing it that way than the other way about. We were passing the Siam-Malaya border about noon and beginning to think about lunch; I was flying the machine with Nadezna by me in the co-pilot’s seat, and Hosein was down organizing the lunch baskets, when Nadezna said,

“Are we going to land at Penang?”

I didn’t think for a moment. I said, “No—Singapore.” And then I said, “Why, of course—you were brought up in Penang. It doesn’t matter—I can go in there and fuel just as well. Would you like to? I can get upon the blower.”

She said, “Oh, no. I’d just like to see it.”

“We’ll go past,” I said. “Go past between Penang and Butter worth. You can see the harbour and the town that way. I’ll drop off height and come down to a thousand feet or so.” I throttled back a bit and retrimmed the machine. “How long did you live there?”

“Only till I was five,” she said.

“Remember anything about it?”

She smiled. “Oh, yes. I used to go to a convent school; I remember the nuns very well. They were so kind. There was a rocking horse there, and a swing.”

“I tell you what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll night-stop there on the way back, with Connie. I often do that. Then you can get a rickshaw and go down and see the school.”

She said, “Oh, Tom, that would be fun!”

I brought the machine down on a long descent, and Hosein came up from the cabin to see what was going on and I told him, “Nadezna was born here!” and he grinned, and went down again to reassure the passengers. We passed Georgetown on Penang Island quite close, and Nadezna looked up flushed and excited and said, “Oh, Tom, I believe I can see the street we lived in!” And I said, “Bunkum. You were only five years old.” And she said, “I’m sure I did.”

“We’ll come back this way and spend a night,” I promised her.

It was a grand day that, spent flying the Tramp in fine weather down the coast of Malaya with Nadezna by my side. I made her fly it while I ate my lunch, touching the wheel now and then to bring the machine back level when I thought the passengers would be dying of heart failure. Hosein kept bobbing up to see what was going on, and once he asked me why I didn’t use the automatic pilot. I said, “I am,” and indicated Nadezna. I think he went down and told the passengers that I was in love, and they’d
all probably be killed. We had a fine time up in the cockpit, that afternoon.

We put down at Kallang for an hour to refuel and then went on over the Linga Archipelago and Banka Strait down to Diento. It was a lovely evening; the sea blue and green around the coral atolls, the coastlines with their massive forests dim on the horizon. Nadezna and I were in the pilots’ seats as before, and now a new problem was right upon me, not altogether unpleasant. Connie had ordered me to give his sister a message, and I hadn’t given it to her. I should be meeting him the next day, and he might ask me about it; he was quite capable of asking her. It seemed to me that I’d better see about delivering it, and Diento was as good a place as any.

They had customs at Diento since our flights had become regular, so we didn’t have to waste time by putting down at Palembang. We landed just at sunset and were met, as usual, by cars from the oil company. It was dark by the time we had refuelled the Tramp and got her shut up for the night. The others had gone on, and Nadezna, Hosein, and I drove the five miles through the scented tropic night in an open car, to the refinery club. There was a great full moon, just coming up.

She said, “Oh, Tom—this is a marvellous place! It’s everything the tropics ought to be, and aren’t.”

It was, that night. The Dutchmen had arranged bedrooms for us in the club, as usual, but because we came there so frequently now they had given up the effort of entertaining us, and the routine now was that they just turned us loose to swim in their swimming pool, eat their food and drink their liquor, and dance to their dance band with the shorthand typists of the refinery. We did all that, that night. Hosein had a girl friend there and he went off with her, and Nadezna and I swam and changed and dined and danced in that lovely place beside the tropical river. I couldn’t have staged a better evening for her if I’d taken her to the south of France.

We had flown all day, down from Yenanyaung, over ten hours in the air. We were both tired, and by eleven o’clock we both felt like packing up and going up to bed. We lingered a little on the terrace by the river, bright in the moonlight; sampans
moved about on it with little lanterns, going upstream with the tide.

She said, “It’s been a marvellous evening, Tom. Thank you so much.”

I squeezed her arm a little. “Why say that? You know I’ve enjoyed every minute, being with you.”

She raised her face and smiled, and I kissed it. She said, “Oh, Tom. Think of all the Dutchmen!”

“They’ve probably got a rule against that,” I said. “We’ll get chucked out of the club.”

But nobody seemed to have noticed us, so we moved into a bit of black shadow and did it again.

“I had a message for you from Connie, that I’ve never given you,” I said presently. “Would you like to hear it now?”

“I don’t want to hear anything about Connie just now,” she said. “Not tonight.”

I raised her face to mine and stroked her cheek. “I think you’d better have it,” I said quietly. “We shall be seeing him tomorrow, and it’s kind of relevant. He came back at me when I told him that it would make you very happy if he married Madé. He seemed to think that was a bit of lip. He said that it would make him very happy if you married me.” I paused, and then I said, “He said I was to tell you.”

She stood quiet in my arms. “He isn’t very practical,” she said. “You’re English, Tom, and I’m an Asiatic. You wouldn’t want a quarter-Chinese baby.”

“If it was yours I’d want about a dozen of them,” I replied.

“That’s a fine way to propose to a girl,” she said. “I ought to push you in the river.”

“You can do that, if you’ll marry me,” I said. “Will you?”

She stood silent for a time, and then she said, “Not just like that.”

“Like what, then?” I caressed her shoulder.

She said, “We’re such very different people, Tom. I know you like the East, and for an Englishman you get on wonderfully well with Asiatics. That’s probably why you want to marry me, because you think of us as people like yourself, not different. But
we
are
different, all the same. You’re English, and I’m Asiatic.”

“Does that matter?”

She said, “It might not, but it might ruin everything. I wouldn’t want to marry without children, Tom. And I wouldn’t want to marry and try and raise a family in the Persian Gulf—there’d be no joy in that. You’re English, and some day you’ll want to go back and live in England. All your roots are there, not in a place like this.” The sampans moved on the dark water at our feet; over our heads the flying foxes wheeled under the full moon. “Suppose we went to live in England. I look Chinese now, and I may look more so when I’m older. Suppose someone said something about us, in the subway or a restaurant or something. I couldn’t bear that, Tom. I’d have to get out of England if that happened, and where would we be then?”