CHAPTER TWO

 

Suddenly the bird ceased to be articulate and started to scream.  A small shrill human voice said, "Mynah!" and then added something in a language that will did not understand.  There was a sound of footsteps on dry leaves.  Then a little cry of alarm.  Then silence.  Will opened his eyes and saw two exquisite children looking down at him, their eyes wide with astonishment and a fascinated horror.  The smaller of them was a tiny boy of five, perhaps, or six, dressed only in a green loin cloth.  Beside him, carrying a basket of fruit on her head, stood a little girl some four or five years older.  She wore a full crimson skirt that reached almost to her ankles; but above the waist she was naked.  In the sunlight her skin glowed like pale copper flushed with rose.  Will looked from one child to the other.  How beautiful they were, and how faultless, how extraordinarily elegant!  Like two little thoroughbreds.  A round and sturdy thoroughbred, with a face like a cherub's - that was the boy.  And the girl was another kind of thoroughbred, fine-drawn, with a rather long, grave little face framed between braids of dark hair.

      There was another burst of screaming.  On its perch in the dead tree the bird was turning nervously this way and that, then, with a final screech, it dived into the air.  Without taking her eyes from Will's face, the girl held out her hand invitingly.  The bird fluttered, settled, flapped wildly, found its balance, then folded its wings and immediately started to hiccup.  Will looked on without surprise.  Anything was possible now - anything.  Even talking birds that would perch on a child's finger.  Will tried to smile at them; but his lips were still trembling, and what was meant to be a sign of friendliness must have seemed like a frightening grimace.  The little boy took cover behind his sister.

      The bird stopped hiccupping and began to repeat a word that Will did not understand.  "Runa" - was that it?  No, "Karuna".  Definitely "Karuna".

      He raised a trembling hand and pointed at the fruit in the round basket.  Mangoes, bananas ...  His dry mouth was watering.

      "Hungry," he said.  Then, feeling that in these exotic circumstances the child might understand him better if he put on an imitation of a musical-comedy Chinaman, "Me velly hungly," he elaborated.

      "Do you want to eat?" the child asked in perfect English.

      "Yes - eat," he repeated, "eat."

      "Fly away, mynah!"  She shook her hand.  The bird uttered a protesting squawk and returned to its perch on the dead tree.  Lifting her thin little arms in a gesture that was like a dancer's, the child raised the basket from her head, then lowered it to the ground.  She selected a banana, peeled it and, torn between fear and compassion, advanced towards the stranger.  In his incomprehensible language the little boy uttered a cry of warning and clutched at her skirt.  With a reassuring word, the girl halted, well out of danger, and held up the fruit.

      "Do you want it?" she asked.

      Still trembling, Will Farnaby stretched out his hand.  Very cautiously, she edged forward, then halted again and, crouching down, peered at him intently.

      "Quick," he said in an agony of impatience.

      But the little girl was taking no chances.  Eyeing his hand for the least sign of a suspicious movement, she leaned forward, she cautiously extended her arm.

      "For God's sake," he implored.

      "God?" the child repeated with sudden interest.  "Which God?" she asked.  "There are such a lot of them."

      "Any damned God you like," he answered impatiently.

      "I don't really like any of them," she answered.  "I like the Compassionate One."

      "Then be compassionate to me," he begged.  "Give me that banana."

      Her expression changed.  "I'm sorry," she said apologetically.  Rising to her full height, she took a quick step forward and dropped the fruit into his shaking hand.

      "There," she said and, like a little animal avoiding a trap, she jumped back, out of reach.

      The small boy clapped his hands and laughed aloud.  She turned and said something to him in their incomprehensible language.  He nodded his round head, and saying "Okay, boss," trotted away, through a barrage of blue and sulphur butterflies, into the forest shadows on the further side of the glade.

      "I told Tom Krishna to go and fetch someone," she explained.

      Will finished his banana and asked for another, and then for a third.  As the urgency of his hunger diminished, he felt a need to satisfy his curiosity.

      "How is it that you speak such good English?" he asked.

      "Because everybody speaks English," the child answered.

      "Everybody?"

      "I mean, when they're not speaking Palanese."  Finding the subject uninteresting, she turned, waved a small brown hand and whistled.

      "Here and now, boys," the bird repeated yet once more, then fluttered down from its perch on the dead tree and settled on her shoulder.  The child peeled another banana, gave two-thirds of it to Will and offered what remained to the mynah.

      "Is that your bird?" Will asked.

      She shook her head.

      "Mynahs are like the electric light," she said.  "They don't belong to anybody."

      "Why does he say those things?"

      "Because somebody taught him," she answered patiently.  What an ass! her tone seemed to imply.

      "But why did they teach him those things?"  Why 'Attention'?  Why 'Here and now'?"

      "Well ..."  She searched for the right words in which to explain the self-evident to this strange imbecile.  "That's what you always forget, isn't it?  I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening.  And that's the same as not being here and now."

      "And the mynahs fly about reminding you - is that it?"

      She nodded.  That, of course, was it.  There was a silence.

      "What's your name?" she inquired.

      Will introduced himself.

      "My name's Mary Sarojini MacPhail."

      "MacPhail?"  It was too implausible.

      "MacPhail," she assured him.

      And your little brother is called Tom Krishna?"  She nodded.  "Well, I'm damned!"

      "Did you come to Pala by the aeroplane?"

      "I came out of the sea."

      "Out of the sea?  Do you have a boat?"

      "I did have one."  With his mind's eye Will saw the waves breaking over the stranded hulk, heard with his inner ear the crash of their impact.  Under her questioning he told her what had happened.  The storm, the beaching of the boat, the long nightmare of the climb, the snakes, the horror of falling ... He began to tremble again, more violently than ever.

      Mary Sarojini listened attentively and without comment.  Then as his voice faltered and finally broke, she stepped forward and, the bird still perched on her shoulder, kneeled down beside him.

      "Listen, Will," she said, laying a hand on his forehead.  "We've got to get rid of this."  Her tone was professional and calmly authoritative.

      "I wish I knew how," he said between chattering teeth.

      "How?" she repeated.  "But in the usual way, of course.  Tell me again about those snakes and how you fell down."

      He shook his head.  "I don't want to."

      "Of course you don't want to," she said.  "But you've got to.  Listen to what the mynah's saying."

      "Here and now, boys," the bird was still exhorting.  "Here and now, boys."

      "You can't be here and now," she went on, "until you've got rid of those snakes.  Tell me."

      "I don't want to, I don't want to."  He was almost in tears.

      "Then you'll never get rid of them.  They'll be crawling about inside your head for ever.  And serve you right," Mary Sarojini added severely.

      He tried to control the trembling; but his body had ceased to belong to him.  Someone else was in charge, someone malevolently determined to humiliate him, to make him suffer.

      "Remember what happened when you were a little boy," Mary Sarojini was saying.  "What did your mother do when you hurt yourself."

      She had taken him in her arms, had said, "My poor baby, my poor little baby."

      "She did that?"  The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement.  "But that's awful!  That's the way to rub it in.  'My poor baby,'" she repeated derisively, "it must have gone on hurting for hours.  And you'd never forget it."

      Will Farnaby made no comment, but lay there in silence, shaken by irrepressible shudderings.

      "Well, if you won't do it yourself, I'll have to do it for you.  Listen, Will: there was a snake, a big green snake, and you almost stepped on him.  You almost stepped on him, and gave it such a fright that you lost your balance, you fell.  Now saw it yourself - say it!"

      "I almost stepped on him," he whispered obediently.  "And then I ...” He couldn't say it.  "Then I fell," he brought out at last, almost inaudibly.

      All the horror of it came back to him - the nausea of fear, the panic start that had made him lose his balance, and then worse fear and the ghastly certainty that it was the end.

      "Say it again."

      "I almost stepped on him.  And then ..."

      He heard himself whimpering.

      "That's right, Will.  Cry - cry!"

      The whimpering became a moaning.  Ashamed, he clenched his teeth, and the moaning stopped.

      "No, don't do that," she cried.  "Let it come out if it wants to.  Remember that snake, Will.  Remember how you fell."

      The moaning broke out again and he began to shudder more violently than ever.

      "Now tell me what happened."

      "I could see its eyes, I could see its tongue going in and out."

      "Yes, you could see his tongue.  And what happened then?"

      "I lost my balance, I fell."

      "Say it again, Will."  He was sobbing now.  "Say it again," she insisted.

      "I fell."

      "Again."

      It was tearing him to pieces, but he said it.  "I fell."

      "Again, Will."  She was implacable.  "Again."

      "I fell, I fell.  I fell ..."

      Gradually the sobbing died down.  The words came more easily and the memories they aroused were less painful.

      "I fell," he repeated for the hundredth time.

      "But you didn't fall very far," Mary Sarojini now said.

      "No, I didn't fall very far," he agreed.

      "So what's all the fuss about?" the child inquired.

      There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication of blame.  She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called for a simple, straightforward answer.  Yes, what was all the fuss about?  The snake hadn't bitten him: he hadn't broken his neck.  And anyhow it had all happened yesterday.  Today there were these butterflies, this bird that called one to attention, this strange child who talked to one like a Dutch uncle, looked like an angel out of some unfamiliar mythology and within five degrees of the equator was called, believe it or not, MacPhail.  Will Farnaby laughed aloud.

      The little girl clapped her hands and laughed too.  A moment later the bird on her shoulder joined in with peal upon peal of loud demonic laughter that filled the glade and echoed among the trees, so that the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.