Round the Bend (49 page)

I smiled. “You never thought that pilgrims would be coming from five thousand miles away to watch you talking to me, and to pray beside your house.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “No, I’d never have thought of that. It’s funny the way things turn out.”

Another time he said, “I didn’t want to end up with this sort of reputation, Tom. All I ever wanted to be was an absolutely first-class ground engineer, the best in the world. And because the best teacher is the chap who’s only one jump ahead of the pupil, I thought I could teach others to be first-class chaps. But the truth of it is, you can’t do any job really well unless you’re really good yourself. The perfect job demands a perfect man, and you can’t separate the two. I didn’t understand that when I started. It wasn’t until I came out to the East and learned something about religious ideas here that I began to cotton on to what it was all about.”

And another time he said, “They’re making legends about me already, Tom. Try and tone that down. They’re paying far too much attention to what that English pongyi, U Set Tahn, has been saying.”

“You mean, about you being born in Tibet or somewhere?”

He nodded. “It’s completely wrong. I was born in Penang, and I’m a British subject. I’ve got a birth certificate to prove it.” He hesitated. “My father married my mother up at Barkul, true
enough. But I was born in Penang. So that prophecy can’t possibly apply to me.”

I wasn’t quite so sure about that, though I didn’t argue the point. Some Asiatic countries have a different definition of when a man is born.

“Another thing,” he said. “U Set Tahn and the Rangoon Buddhists say that the new Teacher’s ministry will last for four years and twenty-three days. They’re trying to pin that one on me, too.”

“I know,” I said.

“Well, when did I start teaching anybody anything?” he asked triumphantly. “I don’t know myself. I simply haven’t a clue.”

“When did you first come to Damrey Phong?” I asked.

“Four years ago last Thursday,” he said. “I worked it out. But I never taught anybody anything while I was here. So that one’s all wrong, too, because I was here three months and I don’t suppose I’m going to live that long. Try and put a stopper on this sort of thing, Tom, if you can. I want people to remember me as a good ground engineer with both feet on the ground. Not as a legendary mystic or anything like that.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. And as I sat there I wondered if he knew when he had been teaching or if, in those early days, his teaching had been largely unconscious. U Myin and Chai Tai Foong had both been with him at Damrey Phong, and they were among the most devout of Connie’s followers.

That evening I walked out with Nadezna to the runway in the bright moon, and we walked up and down it for a time, talking of Connie. And presently, at the far end where nobody could see us, I took both her hands, and I said, “What about us? After this is all over, and it must be soon, I’m afraid—after that, will you marry me?”

She said, “I wanted to tell you about that, Tom.” She hesitated. “I’m not going to marry anybody, ever.”

I said quietly, “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

She smiled. “I’m sure you don’t. But it’s what I’m going to do.”

I held her a little closer. “Not because of your Chinese father?” I asked. “It’s not reasonable to let that worry you. It doesn’t worry me. You know it doesn’t. We can work that out together.
I don’t want to go and live in England. All my work, and all my interests are out here, Nadezna. But it won’t be any fun unless you’re with me.”

She freed herself a little, and I knew that I had failed. “It’s not that, Tom,” she said. “I’m not worried about that now. I know that if I married you we’d get over the mixed marriage side of it all right. But we’d be letting such an awful lot of people down.”

I was puzzled. “Who would we be letting down?” I asked.

She did not answer me directly. “I’ve learned a great deal since I’ve been here with Connie,” she said. “You can’t help being influenced by it, Tom—all these aeroplanes that come here every day, at such expense, full of people who believe in him. People who have spent all their savings just to make this journey, because Connie is a man that they can pin their faith to. All they want to do is just to hear him say a few words, or if that’s not possible, then just to see him, or touch something that he has touched. It’s—it’s like the Bible, Tom. Like people that were wanting to see Jesus. They believe in him.”

“They haven’t been doing any worshipping, have they?” I asked. “Not like as if he was a god?”

She shook her head. “They haven’t been like that. They know that he’s a man, and that he’s dying. Gods don’t die. But they know, too, or they think they know, that he is such a man as they will never see again, and they go away feeling that just to look at him and touch what he has touched has done them good, and has made their lives complete, and justified spending all their savings to come all this way. They don’t think that he’s a god. But if you asked me if they thought that he was a man who had attained perfection as Guatama attained it—well, I think a lot of them do think of him like that. They do.”

“You mean, as an example?” I suggested.

“I think that’s it,” she said. “They venerate him as an example of what any man can attain to if he can be as wise, and thoughtful, and self-sacrificing, and as good as Connie.”

We stood together in the moonlight for a little, on the runway. Over against the strip the mountain loomed above us, scented in the warm night air. “He’s my brother, Tom,” she said simply. “One never thinks one’s brother can be anything particular. I
thought he was just nuts about religion, and it was all because he’d never had a girl in the United States, because he was an Asiatic who was out of place. It’s not easy when you’re brought up as an Englishman or an American, but you’re really Asiatic, Tom. I know. I thought that Connie was just an ordinary brother, just like any girl might have. I thought that up till the time I came here. But now … I’m not so sure.”

I was silent. Perhaps I wasn’t quite so sure, myself.

“These people that come here to see him,” she said presently, “—they think he’s a man, but a man touched by the hand of God, whichever form of God they happen to believe in. And because that’s what they think, it does them good and gives them something to hang on to. Because, it means that God still cares about the world, and cares for them. That’s why they come here, Tom. They come to see the evidence that God still cares, that He has shown that care in making of one man a perfect example, to show everyone the way to live their lives out in the modern world.”

She turned to me. “It’s bad luck on us,” she said, “but I’m not going to spoil it for them. If I married, Connie’s sister, and had children, and lived just a normal woman’s life, going out shopping in the morning, going to the movies in the evening while you worked up a bigger business every year and we made money—it’ld detract from it. Maybe they’d get to feel that Connie couldn’t have been something after all, if his sister wasn’t anything. If they thought that they’d lose the faith they have, and with that they’d lose everything that he has worked to give them. It’s in my hands now, Tom, whether what he’s started goes ahead or flops—at least, I think it is. And it’s not going to flop.”

I cleared my throat. “What are you going to do?”

“It’s bad luck on you, Tom,” she repeated. “You deserve a better deal than this. But if Connie could give up love to help along the things that he believes in, so can I. I don’t have to give up children, though. I’m going to go back to Penang, Tom, where I came from. I’m going to go to Mother Mary Immaculate and ask if I can start in at the bottom, working in the orphanage. That’s where I came from, and I reckon that’ll be the best thing I can do.”

I asked her, “May I come and see you there, sometimes?”

She said, “Please—please don’t do that, Tom. And please, don’t write.”

   I started on my journey to Bahrein next day, because I couldn’t stay away too long. Connie lived for a month after that, gradually growing weaker. Then he went into a coma that lasted about thirty hours. He died just before dawn and the cremation took place on the same day, according to the custom in the East.

D
AMREY PHONG
has grown a bit since then, but the Proctor still stands in the same tin hangar, with the engine that Connie took out of it when he put in the new one standing beside it on an overhaul trestle. He changed the engines before he got too ill to work and got the old one stripped down for overhaul with the sump off and the cylinder heads, cylinders, valves, valve gear, and pistons laid out neatly on a table in rows, all washed and clean and resting on a blanket. He had to give up then and he never worked again, and so the job remains just as he left it. The pilgrims file past every day and look at the Proctor and these engine parts laid out behind the wooden railing, and most of them kneel down and say a prayer or two, according to their creed.

It’s not quite the same, of course. Sheikh Fahad went there at a very early stage and had a sort of temple roof, a temple with no walls except the roof posts, built over the whole lot to protect it from the rains, so that the two little European houses and the corrugated iron hangar with the Proctor in it and the very lovely shrine that he set up to hold the casket of ashes are all under the same wide roof and safe for a considerable time. The house that Connie died in is kept just the same, with his bed and his few clothes laid out, all very simple. In the other house there is a small museum, and here his tools are displayed; he had quite a
lot of fine precision tools and measuring instruments, micrometers, inside micrometers, feelers, thread gauges, callipers, vernier gauges—all that sort of thing. These are exposed to view and may be touched and handled reverently by the pilgrims if they wish, and they are kept so carefully cleaned and greased that they are as bright and new as when he bought them.

In another room there are five pictures, and nothing else. Fahad, as a Moslem, will have nothing to do with pictures, of course, though I have been there with him and noticed that he spent a quarter of an hour in that room with them. Mr. Ghosh, the Bengal jute merchant, commissioned Evan Stanley to come out from England to paint them, and a committee of the three priests on the airstrip decided that they should be of Connie Shak Lin himself, taken from photographs, and of the four people he loved best. So there is a very good picture of Connie in his stained khaki shorts and shirt, grave and intent, working on the engine of his Proctor which stands in the background of the hangar behind him.

There is one of Arjan Singh, seated in the pilot’s seat of the Proctor. They chose that because so many people had seen Arjan in that six months with Connie, and had seen how carefully he cared for him on that last journey.

There is one of Nadezna, a very good one. I can hardly bear to look at it.

There is one of Madé Jasmi, very sweet, but not quite natural because she has her jacket on.

And there is one of me, which oughtn’t to be there at all.

Things are a bit different at Bahrein, too, on the aerodrome. There was a considerable demand from the people, backed by Sheikh Fahad, that a mosque should be built on the bit of vacant land beside the hangar that Connie had first used for prayers, and that the hangar should continue to be used for civil aviation so that the Moslem engineers should have the mosque available for prayer right by the hangar. This meant that the R.A.F. would have to move away and leave that area undisturbed, although it is right on the edge of their camp. They have been exceptionally understanding and farsighted about all this and have accepted the considerable inconvenience that must result to them. Their new hangars are going up at the south end of the north-south
runway, nearly a mile away from their camp. The mosque is going up beside the civil aviation hangar.

A fair number of pilgrim aircraft come to Bahrein, perhaps one a week. Most of these are from Egypt or Iraq, places relatively near at hand, and most of these pilgrims are people who can’t afford the long journey to Damrey Phong. Damrey is the main centre for pilgrimages, of course, since it was here that Connie’s ministry began and finished, but it’s a long way and an expensive journey for them, however much one tries to cut the rates. I have two new Tramps on order now specially fitted for pilgrims, and I hope to get the fares down to about sixty per cent of what one has to charge for a Dakota fare, but it’s still an awful lot of money for an engineer to save. And yet they do it.

Some of them, perhaps one or two machines a month, go further still, right down to Bali, where Phinit shows them the hangar and the hut in Pekendang where Connie lived, and Madé Jasmi still sits quietly weaving her lamaks on the steps, oblivious of the brown people from far lands who have come to see the relics, of which she is one. I told her, through Phinit, when I took her back to Bali, that her service to Connie had been an episode of her youth, tender and lovely to look back upon. Now, I said, she ought to marry a young man of her people, and have children like a normal girl. I told her that, but so far there is no indication at all that she intends to follow my advice.

Nadezna is in Penang, living in the convent and working with the orphans. She came to some working arrangement with the Mother Superior and the Bishop that allows her to stay there; although she is far from being a Catholic or anything else, as yet, the Bishop seems to have agreed with her desire to be taken out of circulation. Gujar Singh and Arjan go to see her from time to time when a machine night-stops at Penang, and they tell me she is well and happy in her work. But I have not seen her myself since I left Damrey Phong before Connie died, and it may be that I shall never see her again.

I had several long conferences with Sheikh Fahad and Wazir Hussein in the months that followed Connie’s death. I was lonely and troubled, and at first there didn’t seem to be much point in going on with anything; I was very tired, and I didn’t know what
to do. I thought of selling out my business, to Airservice, perhaps, and going to live at Damrey Phong, for a time anyway. It’s quiet there, and one can think about things. But after a time I got settled down, and then it seemed to me that it would be a better thing to carry on the business and run it in the way that Connie liked, so that in a materialistic world my airline should be an example running through Asia to show that men can keep the aircraft safe by serving God in Connie’s way, and yet keep on the black side of the ledger. I’d go so far as to say, from my experience, that only by serving God in this way can you keep out of the red.