Tales of the South Pacific (26 page)

The island to which Benny was going lay sixteen miles to the east. It was a large and brooding island, miasmic with malaria, old fetishes, sickness and deep shadows. It was called Vanicoro, and in the old times was known as a magic place. Four peaks lined the center of the island. Two of them were active volcanoes. Only the bravest natives dared live on Vanicoro, and they were the last to give up cannibalism.

As the small boat drew near the island Bloody Mary pointed at Vanicoro and assured Cable, "You like! You like very much!" The Marine studied the volcanoes. Upon them the red glow of sunrise rapidly lightened into the gold of early morning. Mists rose from them like smoke from writhing lava.

"That's right pretty," Benny called back. "Look at them hills smoke!"

Lt. Cable watched the mists of Vanicoro surrendering to the early sun. And then, as a child, while playing with an old familiar toy, sees a new thing from the corner of his eye, Cable suddenly saw, without looking at it, the island of Bali-ha'i.

"Benny!" he cried. "There's another island!"

There was another island! Bali-ha'i was an island of the sea, a jewel of the vast ocean. It was small. Like a jewel, it could be perceived in one loving glance. It was neat. It had majestic cliffs facing the open sea. It had a jagged hill to give it character. It was green like something ever youthful, and it seemed to curve itself like a woman into the rough shadows formed by the volcanoes on the greater island of Vanicoro.

From two miles distance no seafarer could have guessed that Bali-ha'i existed. Like most lovely things, one had to seek it out and even to know what one was seeking before it could be found.

It was here on Bali-ha'i, within the protecting arm of Vanicoro, that the women of the islands lived. The French, with Gallic foresight and knowledge in these things, had housed on this haven of the seas all young women from the islands. Every girl, no matter how ugly or what her color, who might normally be raped by Americans was hidden on Bali-ha'i.

The little boat swung into the channel. "Look!" Cable gasped. Below him the white coral beach of Bali-ha'i slipped down by slow degrees until twenty fathoms of green water rested over it. But still it could be seen. The entire bay glowed from the whiteness of the sand and the golden sunlight now piercing and probing through the valleys of the volcanoes.

Coconut trees lined the shore of Bali-ha'i. Behind them banyans, giant ferns, and strange tropical trees grew in profusion and smothered the slopes of the hill. Through clearings in the jungle, grass of wondrous green appeared, and through both grass and trees peeped flower gardens of dancing color. Lt. Cable had to close his eyes. The gardens of Bali-ha'i were like the gardens at home. He knew those flowers in the infinite jungle had been planted by women.

His thoughts were jarringly broken when Atabrine Benny tugged at the bell of the small boat and sent loud peals echoing through the narrow channel. Violently he swung the clapper back and forth until the islands fairly sang with music. Even then he continued in sheer exuberance, and melody piled upon melody so that even the peaks of Vanicoro seemed to dance.

From every hut and hovel on Bali-ha'i people poured forth. First the watchful sisters from the hospitals appeared in front of their sickrooms on the hillside. Next a host of screaming children, all boys, all naked, ran down to a rickety pier built by Tonkinese laborers. Then older native boys, perhaps nine and ten years old, piled into their own small outrigger canoes and started paddling furiously across the water. Two old men, in statelier outriggers, sedately plied their paddles and swept with leisurely speed past the frenetic boys.

Then came the girls! There were native girls with conical breasts, and red sarongs about their hips. There were inquisitive Chinese girls who were pulled back by equally inquisitive Chinese mothers. Tonkinese girls, as yet unmarried, stood close to their distinctive white and red shacks. And in the distance, properly aloof, a few French girls demonstrated their inherited superiority by looking with disdain upon the entire proceedings. They wore white dresses, and you could not discern whether their breasts were conical or flabby.

At this moment people on shore were satisfied that Benny was in the boat! Someone cried, "It's the doctor!" and the happy call was echoed up and down the beach. The children shouted it to one another, for it meant that they would have sweets from the big, green candy tin. Old men laughed for to them Benny meant cigarettes. Young girls giggled, for they knew that if they bumped against the jovial fellow and let him pat them on the bottom, he would give them some more of the good red cloth. White women were pleased to see him, for he brought endless and delightful gossip from the home island. And the sisters in the hospital were ready to welcome him, for they knew him to be a kindly fellow who could, by one way or another, get them almost any medicine they might need.

So everyone on Bali-ha'i laughed and whistled; and someone at the school started ringing a bell, whereupon Benny rang his louder. But all this time, on Vanicoro across the channel not a sound was made. Not a leaf rustled. Not a voice raised welcome. High in the hills at least three hundred men and women watched the boat come into the channel, make a ringing of bells, and tie up to the wharf of Bali-ha'i. In fact, the watchers of Vanicoro had seen the boat when it was six miles out, and all silently they watched it come... almost to their own island. Silently, they would watch it while it was there, and in the late afternoon they would watch it until it was eight or nine miles out to sea.

Atabrine Benny always visited Bali-ha'i with mixed emotions. On the one hand he enjoyed anything strange and recondite. He loved seeing brown young girls, black girls with firm bosoms, trim French girls with white frocks, sedate sisters in long black. The tragically slim strip of land was part of the South Pacific, and he reveled in its strangeness. But even as he did so, he thought of Waco, Texas, and his wife. Brusquely, he dismissed the thought. In Waco he was a druggist's helper. On Bali-ha'i he was a doctor. A consulting doctor, and he was happy.

As the boat touched the quivering dock, Benny leaped out. It seemed as if his pudgy stomach would pull him forward onto the wet boards, but he was amazingly agile. "Hello, hello!" he called out to everyone who clustered about the dock. He patted all the Tonks on the head, tried to pat the shy black girls on the bottom, and smiled at the sedate sisters who stood on the stone steps.

"Hello, hello!" he cried, waving his atabrine bottle. "Here comes the doctor!" In his exuberance, in the tireless, sweaty, steaming friendliness and at-homeness of the man everyone could see why Americans were the way they were. Atabrine Benny was all the traveling salesmen of Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California rolled into one. Even the suspicious sisters liked to take atabrine when he dispensed it!

When Benny jumped from the small boat onto the dock, Lt. Cable wondered what he should do. In the excitement of seeing old friends, Benny had completely ignored him. He studied the crowd that had gathered both on the pier and in the water. The little boys were delightful. He wondered how they managed their boats so well. The older boys were adolescently aloof, but there was much shoving amongst them. They professed not to look at the Marine, but subdued whispers sped along the shore.

"Jay-gee! One bar. Silver."

"No! No! Marine! See the little round ball. Marine!"

"Basil is right. Marine. First lieutenant!"

"Jerome is right. Marine. Jerome is right!" The Melanesian boys still refused to look at First Lt. Joe Cable, but every one of them saw that he was armed, that he was sunburnt, that he wore the Guadalcanal patch, that he was not an aviator, and that he didn't quite know what to do. All of the boys liked him on sight, and were prepared to talk with him or trade with him, or show him the trail to the cliffs. But he made no move of friendship, so they scowled all that day along the fringes of the crowd and pushed one another. In the afternoon there was one fairly rough fight.

Of course, Lt. Cable saw the boys. He even wondered what kinds of games they played. But he soon forgot his interest, passing as it was. For this was the first time in his life he had seen so many women... in fact, any women... walking about with no clothes on above their hips. He was not a prurient fellow, but the natural interests of any young man demand that he know as much about women as he properly can; and since there is not enough time in one man's life to learn all there is to know, one had better study when the opportunity presents. So, purposing each moment to call after Benny, he stood there in the boat bewildered by the scene on the small pier. Above him stood not less than thirty native girls ranging in age from twelve to twenty. They bore melons and pineapples and bananas and mangoes and split coconuts and yams and breadfruit and everything else that grows in such prodigal quantities in the South Pacific.

Cable was truly enraptured. The frieze of women looked like models awaiting the immortalizing brush of Gauguin. Unaware of their forbidding ugliness by American middle class standards, they were equally unaware of their surpassing beauty by the artist's immortal standards.

Cable, being neither exclusively an artist nor an American, had no consistent thoughts as he looked up to the dark faces with their gleaming teeth. Their breasts disturbed him mightily, and when one girl clutched anew at a melon, throwing her gingham sarong awry, he both blushed and found himself unable... or unwilling... to look away. Like the jungle, like the fruits of the jungle, adolescent girls seemed to abound in unbelievable profusion.

"You like? You like? You like?" they called in musical cadences.

He did like. He liked very much, and before he could stop himself he had bought the stern of the boat full of fruit. When he went to sort out some lengths of red cloth to pay the girls, who were now scrambling over the boat itself, he happened to smell his hands. They were redolent with the gorgeous scent of true tropical pineapples ripened on the ground. Unaware of any change in himself, he discovered that he felt very happy. And from the hills of Vanicoro the watchers looked at the boat and then at one another! It could not be believed that for a few pineapples, for some papayas, and such little papayas, one could get cloth!

It was at this moment that Bloody Mary rescued her lieutenant from more fruit, more breasts, and more thighs. "Psssst!" she exploded at the girls. "You go! You go! Bimeby you come. Bimeby you come. Bring chickens." With masterful gestures and determination she pushed the native girls away, motioned to the men in the outriggers to leave, discouraged the naked boys so that they dropped from the sides of the boat. It was only proper that as a Tonkinese she should exercise her endowed rights over the inferior Melanesians. Like a true grande dame she cleared the way for the greater nobility, a white lieutenant, to step ashore.

But as he did so, as he walked down the pier in front of Bloody Mary, he entertained a persistent question that neither he nor any other American fighting man has ever really answered: "What am I doing here? How did I, Joe Cable, of Philadelphia, wind up out here? This is Bali-ha'i, and a year ago I had never heard of it. What am I doing here?" The question pounded upon his ears in exactly the same way it does upon the ears of a commuter from New Rochelle some morning as he stands in Grand Central Station. He has stood in that station daily for nineteen years, and yet on some one unpredictable morning the meaninglessness of it all bursts in upon him, and he asks, "What am I doing here?" It is certain that Herod of Judea asked himself that question, too. Like Herod, like the man from New Rochelle, like Alexander in Afghanistan, Joe Cable could find no logical reason to explain why he was on Bali-ha'i that morning.

But being there, he was disposed to enjoy his experience to the full. He was not, however, prepared for what Bloody Mary had in store for him.

She took the lead as soon as Cable reached the sandy beach. "We go! We go!" she said at every intersection. She took him past the native huts, and the native girls stayed behind. She took him through the wild coconut trees to the climbing path that led through the loveliest tropical gardens he had ever seen. They were the gardens of the Chinese, filled with fruits and flowers. She took him past the small hospital where he heard Benny laughing with the hard-working sisters. Then she beckoned him around a corner, and suddenly he was on a plateau from which he could see the bay, and the boat, and endless blue of water upon coral sand. Between him and the bay stretched the coconut trees, the gardens, the little huts, and the spotless beach. It was impossible to think that a year ago, before the Japs threatened the islands and Americans threatened the girls, Bali-ha'i was a wilderness.

"We go!" insisted Mary, and Lt. Cable stopped his inspection of the bay, but even as he turned his eyes away, they rested upon the peaks of Vanicoro. They, too, were clean and lovely that morning as if the old volcanoes had burned them white.

Cable now followed Mary along a narrow footpath. Up to this moment he had not wondered where she was taking him. Probably to some Tonkinese hut, he concluded, and he had no time to reconsider before the waddling old woman stopped short, stepped aside, and pointed proudly at a clean, whitewashed house beneath a protecting cluster of four large jungle trees. The earth around the house was packed flat. At the door stood an old Tonkinese man, a younger man, and his wife.

Cable stood where he was and watched Mary greet her friends. They talked furiously, but they did not kiss. They grabbed one another's shoulders, but they did not shake hands. Yet when Mary brought them over and jabbered in Tonkinese, each one sedately shook Cable's hand and promptly walked down the path he had just climbed.

At this moment Mary beckoned him to follow her, and he watched her disappear into the open door at which a moment before her three friends had stood. Cable entered behind her, stooping as he did so. When he had blinked once or twice, he saw that he was standing on an earthen floor, miraculously clean. There were few articles of furniture, but against one wall stood a young Tonkinese girl, perhaps seventeen years old. She was a small girl, slender, with very black hair which was smooth about her head. She wore the Tonkinese white blouse and black trousers. She was barefooted, and her face was a lovely oval, yellow, finely modeled. When she smiled, her teeth were as white as the native girls' had been.