A Writer's Notebook (61 page)

The D.s asked me to dinner to meet some friends of theirs, husband and wife, who were spending a few days in Singapore. The man was Resident somewhere in British North Borneo. Mrs. D. told me that he had been a fearful drunkard and took a bottle of whisky to bed with him every night which he finished before morning. He became so tiresome that the Governor sent him home on leave and told him that if he didn't sober up by the time he came back he would have to dismiss him. The man was a bachelor, and the Governor advised him to find a nice girl in England and marry her, and she would keep him straight. At the end of his leave he came back married and a reformed character. He never touched a drop of alcohol.

They came to dinner. He was a big, fat man, with a very naked face, rather bald, prosy and pompous; she was smallish, dark, neither young nor pretty, but alert and evidently competent. She was very lady-like. She was the sort of woman whom you meet by the dozen at Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham or Bath—born spinsters who seem never to have been young and who will never, you think, grow old. They have been married five years and seem very happy. I suppose she had married him just to be married.

I never saw them again, and they never knew what they had let themselves in for when they came to dinner that night. They suggested to me a story which I called “Before the Party”
.

Java. At the station there was a group of dejected people, three men and two women, handcuffed and guarded by Javanese soldiers. The prisoners were native Christians. Eight of them had gone to a village to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. They expounded their doctrines of peace and good will to all men, and the headman sought to argue with them. The argument grew hot, and presently the chief evangelist struck the headman. A fight started. The women joined in and the headman was killed. This turned into a general scrummage as
the result of which seven persons of the village were killed and three evangelists.

Thursday Island. The Browns, man and wife, run the hotel. She is a little stoutish woman in open-work blouses, with marcelled dark hair. She is fond of a joke. She has keen, rather cunning eyes and a nose which is suspiciously red. She may once have been pretty. Like her husband she is full of wild-cat schemes for making a fortune. He is a man of the middle size, about forty, with thin long hair that waves about over his head. He has a curious looseness of limb and of gesture so that he seems to be on springs. He has followed many professions. He began as a barber, then was a professional runner, he has been a bookmaker and a trainer, a miner, a tobacconist and a barber again. He is very frank about his running experiences, in which he made a lot of money. It seems to be a somewhat crooked sport and he tells stories of running under a false name, of not winning when the bookmakers made it worth his while and so forth. He conducts the hotel very negligently and is only interested in a mining property on an adjacent island where he expects to find gold. He never drinks. He has a daughter by a former marriage called Queenie who waits at table. She feels herself superior to such work and takes the orders as if they were veiled insults. But when one of the guests chaffs her she hits him over the head with her menu and says: “Get along with you.” The housemaid is a dried-up maiden of thirty with a sallow face and sharp features. She goes about with her fringe in curl papers. She has been a barmaid and looks upon it as beneath her dignity to do the housework. She is very fond of gossiping about the various people on the island.

C. He owns a twenty-ton ketch and a couple of cutters which he used for pearling till, owing to the slump, the industry
grew unprofitable. He is a man of six feet high, strongly built, stout, with a round face and honest blue eyes. His manner is slightly shy, but he is good-natured and considerate. His hair is closely cropped except for a little curly lovelock on his forehead. He is between thirty-five and forty. When he is sailing his ketch he wears very old and ragged ducks and a singlet, but when he goes ashore he puts on yellow boots, a pair of grey trousers, and a white coat, a stengah shifter, which he leaves unbuttoned, a starched collar no matter how hot the weather is, and a black knitted tie which he arranges to look as though it went round his neck by a neat contrivance which he fastens on to his collar stud. As he walks along with a slight roll you would tell him anywhere for the master of a small vessel.

The
Dinton
. A ketch fifty-five feet long. The crew consisted of C. and four Torres Straits islanders, black, with crisp curly hair and fine figures. They are dressed in patched, dirty trousers, singlets and battered felt hats. Tom Obi is grey and solid; the others are young; Henry is a blood, rather handsome, dashing and boastful. Utan, with nothing on but a lava-lava, does the cooking on a fire of sticks in the hold, and here are the crew's bunks. The cabin is aft, and through it runs the main mast; it is so low that you can't stand upright in it; and the ceiling is blackened by the smoky hanging lamp. There is room for two men to sleep lengthwise and one across the hatch. Two dinghies are wedged between the bulwarks and the hold.

We were to start at nine in the morning, but C. was late and when he came discovered that a spare jib had been left behind, and two of the crew were sent to his house to fetch it. We cast off and slipped away with the tide. There was a stiff breeze, but the sun was shining and the sky was blue. It was exhilarating to speed along under the mainsail and the jib. We expected to get to Mobiag that evening. It was a distance of forty-five
miles. We ran down between Thursday Island and Prince of Wales Island, and we had lunch, which we ate on the deck house, cold beef, pickles, boiled potatoes, and a sponge cake. We drank tea. When we got out of shelter of the land we found the monsoon blowing hard, and there was a heavy sea. C. had the foresail set and the water cask lashed down. Now and then we were caught in a squall and when a sea struck us a shower of spray swept along the deck. The waves, crested with white, looked very big, and in that little boat one was very near the water. We were passing small islands all the time, and as we passed each one I wondered if I could swim to it if we capsized. After some hours we reached the island of Badu, and C. said he would anchor there and go to Mobiag next day. When we rounded the island we were protected from the wind and it was more comfortable. There was an anchorage, and we found ten or a dozen pearlers which had been driven in by the bad weather. They were Japanese, but one who was an Australian, with a black crew, and when we anchored we sent a dinghy off to fetch him. We gave him a cup of tea and asked him to come back to dine and play bridge with us. We went ashore and bathed. Our dinner consisted of a king-fish we had caught on the way, cold meat and apple pie. We drank tea, and whisky and soda out of tin panikins; and after we had done played bridge on the deck house by the bright light of a hurricane lamp. T. (the Australian) told us that the weather was terribly bad farther north and said that he had nearly been capsized. He was purposing to wait till the storm moderated; anyhow the water was too dirty for pearling. He was of about my height, and though quite young, looked dried-up. He was thin, fair, with a weather-beaten wrinkled face, false teeth and blue eyes. He wore a pair of dark pants and a singlet. At about nine we were all sleepy and he left us. The night was clear and bright, the moon nearly full, and in that sheltered spot there was no wind. We rigged up a sail to make a shelter and put our mattresses on the deck and lay down.

Next morning we set sail early to take advantage of the out-flowing
tide, but we hadn't gone far before we struck a sandbank. The tide was going out, and we stuck there till it turned and floated us off. We sailed between islands and soon found ourselves in the open sea. Mobiag, an uneven, hazy mass, stood away in the distance. The wind was stronger even than the day before and the sea ran high. We sailed through islands, in muddy water, and there were reefs all about. One of the men stood on the jib-boom and kept a look-out. Each time a sea dashed over us we ducked to avoid the spray. Presently there was a dull scraping sound and we knew we had struck a reef. We bumped over and were again in deep water. The look-out man with a gesture of one arm or the other guided C. at the helm. He was very anxious. We struck another reef and again bumped off. Then we sailed out to avoid them.

Mobiag is surrounded by a double reef, and we were aiming for the end of one to bear up between the two and so get round the island to where there was an anchorage. We got to the end of the outer reef and sailed across till we were within a few yards of the inner one, veered about—the ketch turned almost in her own length—and tacked back to the outer reef. It was blowing hard and we had all our sails set. There was a quivering and rattling of the sails as we put about. This we did five or six times, gradually getting to the end of the island. The jib sail was torn to tatters and flapped with loud smackings against the mast. We were soaked to the skin. At last we made for a channel between Mobiag and a small island where our anchorage was. The tide was coming in against the wind, and this made the sea very heavy. I was frightened. The ketch rolled like the devil and righted herself each time with a jerk. I watched a heavy wave ride towards us, break, flooding the deck, and I expected the next wave to break over us before the ketch had time to recover, but with an almost human agility she avoided it and rode triumphant on. Then the outer island gave us protection and we sailed bravely to the anchorage.

We got into a dinghy and went ashore. There, in a hollow, among coconut palms, at the edge of the beach of a little cove,
C. had a cottage. The skeleton of a cat lay at the door. After our wetting it was good to get into dry clothes and have a cup of tea. We wandered about the island. The huts of the islanders nestled prettily among the coconuts. That night the wind blew wildly, whistling through the coconuts, and it made such a racket that I couldn't sleep. Next day the crew spent the morning loading great stones from the beach into the dinghy to add to the ballast. In the afternoon they went up to the village and didn't return till night. Tom Obi came to the cottage and said the weather was very bad, so C. decided to wait another day. The coconuts were writhing in the wind, and looking out to sea we saw a squall dark in the distance rushing on to break into thin rain on the island. The clouds were scudding across the sky. We played cards. The villagers notwithstanding the heavy sea went out in cutters and in the evening came back with four sea-cows. Everyone on the island assembled to watch the catch being cut up, and when this was done went off with great lumps of red meat. It tastes like beef-steak not so tender as it should be.