Tales of the South Pacific (17 page)

She was sorry, therefore, when Dinah was ordered north to help set up a new hospital. They were talking together the night before Dinah left. Together they were laughing at poor, handsome Bill Harbison. They heard that he was drinking a good deal. Nellie had already told Dinah of how she had proposed to Bill and been refused. Dinah recalled that one night recently Bill had been slightly drunk at a party and had greeted her affectionately with a lurch and a loud, "Hi, Grandmom!"

The two nurses were talking when they heard a commotion by the guard house. An Army officer was helping a nurse out of a jeep. A doctor was running over. Soon heads popped out of all the windows. They saw another doctor come up and start to attend the officer. Like fire, news spread through the dormitories.

It was that quiet nurse who liked the Army captain. The one stationed in Vila. He was driving her home. They had stopped for a while. Near the air field. No, she didn't neck with him much. They were watching the planes. Three men jumped out of the bushes at them. They had clubs. They knocked the captain down and started to pull the nurse out of the jeep. When she screamed and fought, one of them tried to hit her with a club. He missed her and broke one of the assailants' arms. The wounded man bellowed. Then they got mad and grabbed her by one arm and one leg. She held onto the steering wheel, and the captain started to fight again. They hit him once more, and then...

A car came by. The three assailants saw it coming and fled. Two Army enlisted men were in the jeep and gave chase to the culprits. But by that time the would-be rapists were gone. One of the enlisted men drove the captain's jeep to the hospital. The captain was badly beaten around the head. The nurse was shivering from shock, but was not hurt.

All night cars whizzed by. They stopped all vehicles. At 0300 all hands at all stations were mustered in dark, sleepy lines. Officers checked enlisted men and other officers. Finally, toward morning, a man was found with a broken arm. He had slipped on a coconut log. Why hadn't he reported it? Just got in. What was he doing out? Hunting flying foxes. What with? A gun. Where was it? His friend took it. Who was his friend? He didn't know. How could he be a friend if he didn't know his name? He didn't know. Where did the friend live? He didn't know. Did anybody see him go hunting flying foxes? No. Was anyone along whom he did know? Nobody. Just him and the friend? Yes. Was his friend in the Army or Navy? He didn't know.

They locked up the suspect in a hospital ward. He knew nothing and the police were never able to establish that he was a rapist. If he was, his accomplices were not detected.

From then on nurses rarely went out at night unless their dates carried loaded revolvers. In the hot mornings Lieut. Harbison and his friends practiced target shooting so that in the cool nights they could protect their girls from enlisted men. Of course, the Army captain who had defended his nurse so well supplanted Harbison as the local hero. The captain became a greater hero when he proposed to his nurse and was accepted. They used to sit in the corner of the hospital club and talk. She would drink root beer and he usually had a coke. Lieut. Harbison was now going with a scatter-brained floozy. They used to spend a good deal of their time in the bushes. After she was sent home he took up with a divorced nurse who knew he was married. They worked out some kind of arrangement. Nellie used to nod at them whenever she saw them. She noticed that Bill was getting fat.

There were many other attacks or near attacks on nurses in the islands. They were grim, hushed-up affairs. Nobody ever knew exactly what had happened. Just rumor and surmises. But in time every nurse knew she lived in danger. She could see in the baleful looks of enlisted men that they considered her little more than a plaything brought out to amuse the officers. With thousands of men for every white woman, with enlisted men forbidden to date the nurses, it was to be expected that vague and terrible things would occur. In spite of this, Nellie found herself watching men with a deeper interest. The good men seemed better when there was trouble. The armed enlisted man who drove the hospital car when she went riding with officers seemed more willing to protect her. And every man who was apprehended as a rapist was obviously degenerate in some way or other. Back home they would have been evil, too.

"Men seem even nicer now than they did before," she said one day as Dinah was packing. "I thought it would be the other way around."

"Men are always nice," Dinah laughed.

"I was thinking the other night, Dinah. Out here good people seem to get better and bad people get worse."

"That's true back home, too, Fuzzy-brain. Wait till you know some small town really well, Nellie."

"But this is the first time I knew that everybody lives in danger all his life. We do, really. It's just that bit by bit we make arrangements that cancel out the dangers. We have certain girls to take care of certain men. If a man wants to become a crook or a gangster, we have... Well, we seem to have certain areas more or less staked out for him. Is that true?"

"I don't know, Nellie," Dinah said as she packed her duffle bags. "All I know for sure is that so far as I have been able to determine, nothing you can possibly imagine is impossible. Somebody's doing it or is going to do it. That goes for the good as well as the bad."

Shortly after Dinah's departure, shocking word was received at the hospital. Bill Harbison and some men from LARU-8 were flying down to Noumea for fresh vegetables. The plane caught fire. Radioed its position east of Noumea. It went into the rough ocean and all hands were lost.

Nellie could not work and had to be excused from her duties. She lay down, and against her will, she cried. It was horrible to think of a man so young and able dying so uselessly. In that moment Nellie found that war itself is understandable. It's the things that go along with it, things that happen to people you know, that are incomprehensible, and have been in all ages. She was physically ill for three days.

Then, in a flash, word came that all but one of the men had been found on a life raft. They were knocked about, but they would be all right. Harbison was saved. Again Nellie stayed in her room. She found that she did not want to see Bill, but that she was very glad he was alive. She realized that Bill carried part of her with him, and she was happy when that part lived again. Yet when the handsome young lieutenant appeared in the hospital with his indefinite nurse trailing along, Nellie felt sorry she had seen him again. He was sunburnt from his exposure, handsomer than ever. Every night for a week he sat at one table or another with his nurse, telling about the days on the raft. They must have been horrible.

Nellie was rescued from her emotional impasse by thoughtful Dinah, who asked for her to be sent north. Gleefully, she packed and waited for the plane. She had never ridden on an airplane before. She watched it come in from Noumea, carefully noted the busy work that accompanies any landing or takeoff, and gasped when she saw how exquisite Efate and Vanicoro were from the air. The pilot purposely flew east a bit so his passengers could see the volcanoes. The landing was perfect, and Nellie stepped out of the plane in much the same manner that Cinderella must have stepped from the pumpkin. This was living!

Dinah met her at the airfield. That night she met Emile De Becque. It was at a dinner given in a French plantation home in honor of the new nurses. Nellie, Dinah, three other nurses and some doctors were seated in an open-air, roofed-in pavilion by the ocean. Candles provided flickering light. Screens kept moths away, and a small Tonkinese boy went around periodically with a mosquito bomb which he delighted to make fizz. Young Tonk men served the food, which was very good.

At another table sat two Frenchmen having their dinner. One was short and fat, the proprietor of the plantation. Nellie had met him earlier in the evening. The other was a remarkable fellow. He was in his middle forties, slim, a bit stoop-shouldered. His eyes were black and deep-set. His eyebrows were bushy. He had long arms and wrists, and although he used his hands constantly in making conversation, they were relaxed and delicate in their movements.

Nellie tried not to stare at the Frenchman, but while waiting for the lobster and rice, she was detected by the proprietor studying his guest. The fat Frenchman rose and approached one of the doctors. "Ah, docteur!" he cried in bonhomie. "May I present my very good friend, Emile De Becque? He is our foremost De Gaullist!" At this recommendation everyone at the table looked up.

De Becque nodded slightly and rose. As he stepped toward the hospital dinner party, the rotund plantation owner continued his introduction: "M. De Becque was our first and bravest De Gaullist. He rounded up much support for the general. And when the Japanese threatened, M. De Becque and a young sea captain went to all the islands and arrested all suspicious persons. If the Japs had landed, he would have been our resistance leader."

M. De Becque nodded again and smiled in turn at each nurse as he was introduced. He had a gold tooth in front, but it did not detract from his strong features. Nellie noticed that he looked particularly French because his hair came so far down on his forehead. He wore it short, and the neatness of his head offset the inevitable sloppiness of tropical clothes.

"M. De Becque arranged the details for our flight to the hills," the plantation owner went on. "Did you know we were going to hide out until you came? M. De Becque arranged for many natives to act as guides. All women were armed."

Nellie was later to discover that in all the New Hebrides, if you could believe what you were told, there was not one Pétainist. And yet, as she looked at the fat proprietor and many others like him, she had a strange feeling that of them all only Emile De Becque acted from conviction. She felt he would have continued to act so had Pétain himself occupied the islands.

She saw a good deal of De Becque in the ensuing weeks. The tall Frenchman was eager for someone to talk to, and although he could not express himself perfectly in English, he could make himself understood. De Becque never called on Nellie. The doctors, always an interested group of men, asked De Becque to their dinners from time to time. After dinner was over, Nellie and Dinah and one or two other nurses usually joined the party and argued politics or when the war in Europe would end. The Frenchman was an able arguer, and not even the handicap of language prevented him from impressing on all present the fundamental soundness of his reasoning. Soon he was the only Frenchman attending the informal arguments at the hospital; for whereas any plantation owner was interesting once or twice as the product of an exotic world, De Becque was of himself interesting. He was as good a man as his interrogators. "I suppose," he once said, "that men were either De Gaullists or Pétainists a long time ago. I think they grew up that way. Of course," he added slyly, "some never grew up, and it was those we had to play with."

"But why," a doctor asked, "did you elect to follow De Gaulle, in particular?"

"De Gaulle?" the Frenchman asked contemptuously. "What's De Gaulle? Who cares what De Gaulle is? He looks puffed up to me. I don't like him." He snorted and waved his hands. "Ah!" he added. "But what De Gaulle stands for! What decent man could do otherwise?"

After De Becque had been a guest at the hospital several times he proposed that he act as host one night at his plantation. The doctors were delighted. "The nurses, too?" the Frenchman suggested, lifting his shoulders and stretching the word too into three syllables.

"Why not?" the doctors asked, and a few nights later a small party of Americans chugged up the hill to De Becque's plantation. It was situated upon an extensive plateau overlooking islands and the sea. Most Englishmen and Frenchmen in the islands like their houses abutting on the ocean, but not De Becque. He favored the grand view! And from his veranda there was such a view.

His house was built in an octagon with one side twice as long as the others. In that side he lived, had a few books, a radio, and an old gramophone. In the other seven sides he had a dining room, a warehouse, a store, a series of bedrooms, and a completely furnished room for guests. In the latter one might expect to find a missionary, a Tonkinese family, a government official, or a trader. On the night of his dinner the room was empty.

In the center of the octagon was placed the kitchen, a small, low, sooty building into which only the Tonkinese cooks went. From it came a series of fine dishes. Around the one-storied house clustered an odd collection of buildings whose original purposes were long since lost. Tonkinese and natives lived in them and followed their mysterious ways. A Buddhist temple crouched on the edge of the jungle. It gave visiting missionaries much concern, for natives found its tinkling bells and rhythmic drums much more fun than Methodism or provincial Catholicism.

The long room with its deep veranda faced south, and from it one could see four lovely things: the channel where the great ships lay; the volcanoes of Vanicoro; the vast Pacific; and an old Tonk's flower garden.

Nellie thought she had never before seen so florid a garden. There were flowers of all kinds, azaleas, single and double hibiscus, hydrangeas, pale yellow roses, and types she did not know. About the garden were flamboyants and bougainvilleas, red flaming bushes. And everywhere there were capriciously placed frangipani trees. De Becque pulled half a dozen branches for his guests and showed them how native men wear the four-leafed, white and yellow flowers in their hair. The nurses smelled the flowers their host gave them, and were delighted. The frangipani was the odor of jungle. It was sweet, distant, and permeating. In addition it had a slightly aphrodisiac quality, a fact which natives learned long ago.

De Becque's dinner put to shame any the doctors had ever offered him. It started with soup, grilled fresh-water shrimp, lobster and rice, and endive salad. Next came in succession three courses: filet of porterhouse, lamb chop, and a delicious concoction of rice, onions, string beans, and black meat of wild chicken. Then De Becque served the "millionaire's salad" consisting of tender shoot of coconut palm sliced wafer-thin and pressed in olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Cup custard with rum, small cakes, coffee, and a choice of six liqueurs ended the meal. And all this was on the edge of the jungle, 550 miles from Guadalcanal!