Appleby on Ararat Page 4

  “Really, unless we have Methuselah among our number as well as Noah I hardly think–”

  “I am speaking of our descendants,” said Miss Curricle.

  They turned round and in silence walked back across a beach which might have led to Lilliput, so tiny were the inconceivable myriads of whorled shells of which it was composed. They stepped off the beach and Lilliput gave way to Brobdingnag, to giant palms and arcadings of tree fern, to yakkas thrusting up like the spears of careless giants in ambush, to a lustre of convolvulus impossibly vivid and impossibly large. Grass parrots fussed before them; there were slithers in the undergrowth and the plop of some creature taking to a pool; a goanna preened a belligerent ruff as they passed and a sleepy lizard drowsed across a log, like a lazy emissary from the world of some tropical Beatrix Potter.

  “And here we are.” Miss Curricle spoke as one who turns a latch-key and invites a friend to enter. They had reached a glade in which the grass would have been a sheet of emerald were it not strewn thick with a profusion of purple petals from the branches of vast and circumambient jacaranda.

  It was the present headquarters of the party. Colonel Glover, who now combined military eyebrows with a nautical beard, was building a fireplace. He looked up as Appleby approached. “Glad to see you right again. Something to talk about in a minute – official matter.” He returned to the complicated arrangement of a circle of stones.

  Mr Hoppo appeared, pink under a load of bracken. “My dear sir, I am rejoiced to see you; it is capital that we are all safe and in our right mind.” He gave something between a giggle and a cough, and it was to be guessed that his conversations with the Seraphic Doctor were not to be alluded to again. “The climate looks as if it is going to be ideal.” He dumped down the bracken. “Which is just as well. Our sleeping arrangements are bound to be somewhat primitive at first.”

  Appleby glanced at Miss Curricle – resolute to replenish the earth – and wondered if this was not rather what they were likely to be later on. “The bracken looks very comfortable,” he said. “I wonder if there are snakes?”

  “Unumunu has already killed one. He declares that he found it close to Mrs Kittery while she was plucking fruit – a species of apple, I understand – this afternoon.” Mr Hoppo gave what was definitely a latitudinarian chuckle. It looked as if he were touching what the stock-exchange calls a new low. “And now he is showing her how to set snares for pigeons.” He looked vaguely round the glade. “At least that is what I understood.”

  There was a silence that was expressive. Glover banged stone upon stone. Hoppo looked dawningly disturbed. And then Miss Curricle spoke.

  “The island,” she said tartly and with satisfaction, “is not a London park. There is nobody to clatter a bell at dusk and bawl ‘All out.’ And it would be childish to continue to think in terms of that sort of thing. At the moment I suggest that we think of dinner instead. Careful thought must be given to diet. At present we are so many city-bred weeds. And we must grow strong.” As she uttered this Tarzan-like sentiment Miss Curricle stooped with a sudden grace not at all suggestive of weediness and began to gather sticks.

  It was dusk. Hoppo was looking at his piles of bracken as if in sudden doubt or discouragement; Glover was banging down his final stone. And from the mysterious world beyond the glade there came voices, a sudden laughter, a snapping of boughs. Unumunu and Mrs Kittery appeared, their proportions momentarily heroic in the half-light.

  “Pigeons,” called Mrs Kittery. “Six of them!”

  “And clay.” Unumunu’s voice held all the texture of the advancing night. “You will find them delicious baked in clay. Colonel, light your fire.”

  They gathered round the flame; it leapt and was an instantaneous spell, a focus in the exactest sense.

  “The flame,” said Miss Curricle, “is wonderfully golden.”

  “Not so golden as the brand beneath,” said Hoppo.

  “No, not so golden as the brand.”

  “If only it smelt of gum leaves,” said Mrs Kittery, “and we could have billy-tea. There’s nothing so nice as that.”

  “It must be delicious.” Glover spoke unreservedly. “You must tell us about Australia; I had only a glimpse of it.”

  “You would love it. And it might love you.”

  Glover, throwing sticks on the fire, laughed pleasedly. “Well, we’re one family, after all.” He stopped, frowned. “That reminds me – I suppose everybody here is a British subject by birth?” He gave his companions something of a parade-ground glance. “Very well. Appleby, would you say anyone is likely to have landed here before?”

  “Conceivably not. There is no sign of anything of the sort.”

  “Exactly. Well now, I think we ought to annex the island – just in case. Might come in handy one day. Air-bases – that sort of thing. You never can tell.”

  “Particularly,” said Unumunu, “as we haven’t the faintest idea where it is.”

  “Just so.” Glover nodded acknowledgement of this strengthening of his argument. “Tomorrow morning, then, we’ll run up a bit of a flag. And – yes – I think there ought to be a short proclamation. Some formality will be proper. After all – king’s name.” He paused, embarrassed.

  Mrs Kittery, vastly impressed, set down her pigeon to clap her hands. “And shall you be Governor? And Miss Curricle lay the foundation-stone of Government House here by the fireplace?”

  “Who,” asked Miss Curricle, “is going to read the proclamation?”

  “Well, I rather feel that Sir Ponto” – Glover enunciated the name with a shade of difficulty – “is the man. He must be regarded as taking precedence here.”

  “Not at all.” Unumunu, upon whom the firelight was weirdly reflected in licking tongues of flame, shook his head decidedly. “In my part of the empire, I assure you, the knights come just after the second-class clerks. So there can be no doubt at all. This important ceremony must be performed by the colonel himself.”

  “Well,” said Glover, “in that case – and if you all agree – perhaps after all it might be as well. Something very simple, you know. I, Herbert Glover, a colonel of horse in His Majesty’s commission–”

  Mrs Kittery leant forward into the full light of the fire. “I think it should be Sir Ponto.” She spoke with childlike candour and equally childlike decision. “And for Governor as well.”

  The magic of the fire was troubled; the silence hung baffled and awkward. Then Appleby spoke. “Perhaps it would be as well if we asked Mr Hoppo.” He cast rapidly about in his mind for supporting argument. “It would give the ceremony a certain character. Just a few simple words and – er – a short prayer.”

  “Or I wouldn’t mind Mr Appleby,” Mrs Kittery spoke as if she had just discovered this, “I wouldn’t mind Mr Appleby at all.”

  Miss Curricle rose to her feet. “This,” she said, “is scarcely the real problem that confronts us… Or perhaps it is.”

  5

  Appleby and Diana Kittery lay on a rock and the sea splashed them.

  “I think,” she said, “that you and Ponto will kill the colonel and poor old Hoppo.”

  “Surely not.” He turned on his side and surveyed her perfections with a glance which was becoming increasingly dutiful merely. The Island Idyll was dreadfully boring.

  “Yes. Or perhaps just enslave them.” She wriggled on her stomach and kicked her heels in air at this amendment. “They could be kept to do the washing-up.”

  “There is no washing-up.”

  “They could chop wood and carry water – like Billycan in the play.”

  “Caliban, Diana – Caliban. But aren’t you afraid that the black man might kill me too – and guzzle you up in the end? You wouldn’t always have a bottle handy.”

  Diana trailed a brown arm luxuriously in water. “That was an awful thrill. I felt good. The whole thin
g was good in its horrid way. It was” – she searched for her conception – “full-time.”

  He burst out laughing. “There – you’re bored too. Born with the equipment of a houri, and labouring hard at the role–”

  “What,” she asked dangerously, “is a houri? Something not nice?”

  “Not at all. It’s a black-eyed girl. Born–”

  “My eyes aren’t black. You know they’re not.”

  “Born as you are, and working to perfect the idea, you are yet enormously bored just for lack of a few honest jobs. Hoovering the carpets, perhaps, and tinkering with sherbets in the refrigerator. And the washing on Monday.”

  “I think you have a – a banal mind.”

  “Diana, where do you get these words? And, anyway, it is banal to imagine that I should do in the colonel for a chit like you – entirely pleasing though you are in your way. We have nothing to do on this damned island, and so we turn our minds into cinemas and imagine dramatic absurdities.”

  “Nothing to do? There’s still the exploring.”

  “We’ve been everywhere except over the east range – and that can conceal nothing but a few small coves.”

  “Coves?” said Diana hopefully.

  “Alas, my dear – not that sort of coves. Not men. Small bays.”

  “Small boys?” She had an uncertain ear for strange accents, and looked bewildered.

  “You are unnecessarily and enormously stupid.” He jumped into the sea. “Or rather, you’re not. You put it on – like the coconut oil. Actually you are a woman of astounding character. Our wanderings witnessed it. Come in.”

  They swam to another rock, peering down at the exotic drama clearly visible on the sea floor. “You should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he said as they climbed out.

  “What?”

  “Nothing – only poetry.”

  “It didn’t sound like poetry. Was that Ponto across the lagoon?”

  “I didn’t notice. I’m not all eyes for Unumunu.”

  “You’re horrid. I don’t care a bit for Ponto today.” She stretched herself. “Or rather I do. Listen. If the colonel should die–”

  “He won’t.”

  “If the colonel should die – preferably doing something helpful, like Masterman Ready, so that he would be happy about it – and then if we could get Hoppo up a bit–”

  “Up a bit?”

  “You know – higher again, so that he would believe in a celebrate clergy–”

  “Celibate, Diana.”

  “That’s what I said. Well then, it would be alright – wouldn’t it?”

  “Neither alright nor all right.”

  “John Appleby, if I didn’t think it might just give you pleasure I would bite. And it would be alright. Hoppo could marry Ponto and me, and the Curricle and you – or the other way round – and nobody could say anything.”

  “There’s nobody to say anything in any case, except a dubious entity, of unknown staying-power, called the super-ego.”

  “There!” Diana Kittery stared at him with her lucid and disconcerting intelligence. “I don’t know what you mean. But I think you’re agreeing with me. About the maddened men killing each other.”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Come again in six months, and when we’re having a rainy season. Then, perhaps. At present the super-ego is unchallenged. Not all your genius for flirtation, nor Miss Curricle’s sense of responsibility to the species, nor yet the glamour of that great black piano appassionato–”

  “That what?”

  He sighed. “Just a very allusive way of referring to Unumunu. Such ingenuity shows I’m running to seed. For I’m a policeman, you know. I hunt burglars and murderers.”

  She looked at him round-eyed. “And spies?”

  “And spies. Until I am bundled across the world to help organise a back-of-beyond CID. And now this – shipwreck and the tangles of Neaera’s hair. Don’t you think I would relish the appearance of your absurd maddened men? I’ve known a good homicide give me something to bite on for weeks. Whereas, my dear, you–”

  “I think,” she said, “you must be like so many of the English nowadays – hankering after being the American version of the same thing.”

  He stood up. “You are a demon. I could believe you capable of anything.”

  “I could beat any homicide you’ve tackled. I could.” She had sprung up too, brown and gold. “I could take you and run you for years, John Appleby.” She became a flashing arc and vanished.

  He hitched decorously at his pants and dived too – a sound but inferior performance. The setting was all hers and perhaps she was right; with sun and sea and beach about she commanded invisible armies and could possibly have it all her own way. Or at least here he was, diving as instinctively as a bull seal after a favourite cow… He rose to the surface and rebelled. “I wish,” he said to the appalling emptiness about them, “this was all different. I wish the story would take a quirk, the key change, the canvas grow.”

  Diana’s laugh, ringing from the unexpected quarter to which she had swum underwater, mocked his prayer. “I’ll race you,” she called out, “right across the bay. Go!”

  The idea had come to her, characteristically, because she saw she would have a start; and as she spoke she was off at a spectacular crawl. Reduced to the same deplorable mental level, he gave a moment to estimating whether he could win, and then swam powerfully after her. The water was warm and limpid, deep but – they had discovered – locked by shallows from the hazards of the main lagoon. So one could just swim straight ahead and hope to avoid the two kinds of jelly-fish: those that stung and those that gave a mild electric shock. There was no danger – “John, go back! Shark!”

  He felt a stab of horrible fear; it must be true, for this was the one fool trick she would not play. He plunged ahead. And then her voice came again. “It’s OK! It’s stranded! And it’s not a shark; it’s a porpoise – a stranded porpoise!” She was as absurd, as eagerly exclamatory, as a child who has found a dead cat. “John, do come on!”

  He swam forward vigorously. Heroism was off and the idyll on again; the shark had evaporated and the siren grown more alluring from the shock. “All right,” he called – and added, as automatically one does to the very young: “Don’t touch it till I come.”

  Just ahead now the water was eddying over some barely submerged rock; he saw the black oily curve of the creature half awash. Gulls rose in air and sharply broke the silence with their cries; a shoal of tiny, long-snouted fishes flashed by his nose. He raised himself in the water. The sheen of the stranded porpoise was beautiful in the sunlight. And somewhere – recently – he had seen it before. He caught his breath. It was Unumunu’s body that lay sprawled on the rock. The sea lapped lazily over the thighs, covered the head. Only the torso was exposed. The black man was dead.

  Another shoal of fish flashed past, swerving with the precision of an automobile in knock-about comedy. Somewhere on the island a kookaburra cackled; another and another took up the sound; the air was filled with a brief and diabolic laughter which ebbed to a silence in which there was only heard the faint slap of the water against the dead man’s flanks.

  “Diana, it’s Unumunu; he’s drowned. Go ashore and I’ll try to bring him in.”

  But she was swimming forward still, although she must have realised the truth before he spoke. Now she turned round and trod water; she was pale and opened her lips cautiously, as if doubting what would emerge. “I’ll help.” She tossed water from her hair and the sound of her voice seemed to give her confidence. “It’s difficult, a body. Even if it’s well gassed-up.” She was groping for a foothold on the submerged rock.

  For Appleby a dead man was scarcely an event, and he was still chiefly interested in the girl. So this, perhaps, was the Song the Sirens sang – bodies well gassed-up being
a natural region of their singing. “Don’t get worried,” he said by way of discounting his thoughts. “And if we go one on each side–”

  “No.” Whether worried or not, Diana abruptly took command. And her instructions were efficient in the extreme; they had the body and were making headway towards the shore.

  A current caught them momentarily and Appleby had a first glimpse of Unumunu’s face. The sight hurried him into speech. “You seem to know about it,” he said.

  “John?” She turned her head, startled.

  “Handling a body in water.”

  “Too right. I mean, yes. We have lots of this on our beach. And I’ve belonged to the life-savers for years. It’s great fun.” She paused, perhaps feeling this an inappropriate truth, perhaps because the current, catching them again, made it necessary to conserve her breath. “But I never thought it would come to bringing in poor old Ponto.” She twisted round to look at the black man’s face with the innocent interest of a child examining a dead canary.

  “John!”

  “Yes.”

  They got the body to the beach and laid it on its back; they dropped down exhausted beside it. And Appleby looked again. Unumunu’s face would soon be dust. But now it looked like something utterly permanent, like a piece of sculpture that would have great value in a museum, like the effigy of a divine being infinitely remote in the primitive consciousness of mankind. Such things are brought from the Gold Coast, from the Congo, and they rebuke every hope, negate every category of the Western mind. The dead Sir Ponto, with Eton and anthropology evaporated from his clay and his eyes open without expectation on the sky, looked like that. And the effect of sculptural fragment was increased because he had no back to his head. The back of his head had been bashed in.

  “Has he been dead long? I thought I saw him, you know, across the lagoon.” Diana’s wondering eyes travelled the length of the ebony body. “The fish have been nibbling his toes.” She stopped, her eyes widened. “So if he had nibbled me–” Abruptly she sat up and began to cry. She cried for a long time, while Appleby stared at the sea. “I think,” she said obscurely, “he was jolly decent. Considering he was a black.” The idyll was over; the fantasy – in which she was to marry a black and he was to marry the Curricle – was broken; the story had taken its quirk and the key was changed. He stood up. “We must find the others.”