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Return to the Islands

Cryptic New Friend

Cryptic New Friend

When the General whom Nape had bowled over was brought in for trial, his first act was to step up to the court table and lay his gun before me. "It is unloaded," explained the gentle-page 181manly Ellice Island constable in charge, "and he very much wanted to hand it over himself, so we let him."

"But wasn't this taken from you that day at Uma?" I asked the General, a grim-looking character much more heavily boned and muscled than the average of his fellows.

No, the interpreter told me after some talk with him: the fact was that when he and Nape and I had crashed together in the pathway he had been the first to get up (because Nape had struck his head on a rock and I was ignominiously winded, my mind corroborated him). Picking up his gun before either of us was in a state to notice much, he had slipped quietly off to the Chinese location, where the weapon had lain hidden ever since.

"But what about the search?" I spoke rather indignantly because, ten days after the riot, a landing party from H.M. sloop Veronica had helped us to comb the location for concealed arms and explosives as a preliminary to allowing the Chinese back to work again.

The interpreter smiled apologetically. "Ah … the search," he murmured "…it is to be assumed, I fear, that the prisoner did not altogether approve of that operation."

"Didn't approve …?" I repeated blankly.

There was a little more talk between the two. Then the interpreter explained, "Only the local government, in his humble opinion, is entitled to receive the surrender of his weapon."

From the impersonal stare of the prisoner I couldn't guess whether this was meant as a high courtesy or a crushing reproach; but I distinctly felt he had won the first round, either way; something queerly like an aura of authority emanated from him as he stood there barefoot in his tattered canvas shorts and stained sweat-rag.

As an indictable offence was at issue, our court was sitting with two assessors on the bench. One of these now pointed out that the prisoner had not as yet been fairly put on his defence and so ought to be told at once that nothing he had page 182so far done or said before us could be used in evidence against him.

The General listened with a strained frown while the interpreter explained this point and also the further nicety that I, as his judge, was debarred from testifying to anything I may have seen him do during the riot. I have never seen bewilderment written plainer on any face than on his as he stood in silence before replying; and I shall never forget the half tolerant, half contemptuous smile he gave me, or the odd gesture he made—as if to push aside invisible cobwebs from his eyes—as he answered, "There is my gun. You know what I did. I was a leader," and left it at that.

"Well, advise him at least to plead Not Guilty to the charge," I told the interpreter forlornly: "Sergeant Nape's the only witness for the prosecution, and he might not be able to swear to the man's identity."

"I am guilty," was his only answer to this, while the gaze he fixed on me said as plainly as if he had shouted the words, "To hell with all this hoky-poky and let's get straight to the facts." And again I felt that strange emanation of authority from him.

The only form of 'hard labour' at our headquarters gaol that qualified for so stern a name was that of humping sand and shingle from a beach near Tabiang village to the public works yard on top of the island. Every medically fit prisoner had to put in two days a week at this chore, and everyone (barring that tragic lapse of Teakai's) had always been allowed to go very easy on it. But the General wanted no such indulgence. He set so monstrous an example of industry filling bags and rushing them up the steep hillside that, before his first month was out, his all-Chinese working party was begging to be rid of his company. The warders heartily backed the petition. They too were tired to death of trying to keep him in sight uphill.

We set him next to sawing logs for firewood. (Free fuel for the kitchen stove was every local official's celestial privilege page 183in those spacious days, and great was the demand for it every morning). But the trouble here for the General was that it takes two—one at each end—to keep a crosscut saw going. It was our trouble too. We couldn't very well reproach him for putting his whole strength into the work, neither could we decently penalize his successive mates for refusing to work at his fearful speed.

If only he had taken things a bit more cheerfully all round, he might not have got himself so hated. But he just hurled himself at every task, his grim jaw set, his eyes unsmiling and aloof, as if not a warder or a fellow prisoner existed for him except to be shown up as a slacker. Feeling got so hot about him in the end that the only thing to do was to invent a special job for him absolutely apart from everyone else. I don't know who first thought of turning him loose on the so-called vegetable garden at the residency, but I found him waiting for me there with the interpreter one morning when I went up to work in Reggie's private office.

We trooped together round the desolate half-acre of flat ground between the back yard and the servants' quarters. Once upon a time, somebody had tried to start a kitchen garden there, but the hopeless battle with the sterile soil— almost pure phosphate of lime, insoluble in water—had long been abandoned. Not even the weeds grew freely in that sunsmitten square of dust and crumbling rocks.

But the General's gaze was fixed on the deep forest of calophyllum trees that marched right up to the edge of our clearing. Could he go in there and cut what sticks he liked and dig as much leaf mould as he wanted, he asked. And could he have a spade, and a fork, and a mattock, and a hoe, and an axe, and a saw? And could we spare a wheelbarrow, not forgetting some planks to wheel it on from the forest to the garden? And would we let him build a little leaf shack there for all his tools? And might he sit in it to eat at midday instead of wasting time going down to the prison cook-house? And might he get back to work again as soon as ever he liked page 184after eating? And would we this, and might he that or the other thing, and so on, and so on—he stood there forgetful of his prison clothes pelting us with endless questions, a man with suddenly shining eyes lost in a vision of himself creating a garden in a wilderness. I never saw him without a smile on his face from that day forward.

The residency orderly was supposed to take charge of him at eight every morning, and so he did in a strictly official sense for the first week or so. After that, however, it wasn't a prisoner but a master craftsman that he went to watch. He would sit fascinated for hours together on the kitchen steps while, stroke by stroke of mattock, spade and hoe, barrow by barrow of leaf mould from the forest, the General laid down the first few perches of his garden, And then, before a month was out, the orderly was down to the job himself, making mat shelters and seedling boxes for a nursery under the General's direction. And the week after that, the residency cook had joined him as a learner. I watched them both taking instructions on how to set up a cover of loose leaves on six-foot stilts over the whole new plot before the General—plainly now the officer in charge of everything—went off to dig more trenches, and cut more stakes, and cart more earth for more and more plots beyond it.

And so he continued, his daily output that of any three average navvies, until he had laid out two more plots as big as the first and was half-way towards finishing yet another. But then the plants in his original plot began to flower, and all at once he was a different man. He dug no more trenches, left the new beds to lie fallow and worked happily all day among the green things he had brought to life. It was as if the promise of their fruition had stilled at last some savage unrest in his heart and called a truce to his wild industry.

Or perhaps he felt that what they needed now to bring them into fullest bearing was an infusion of his own strong spirit. The way he talked to them as he watered their roots or simply stood silent, empty can in hand, brooding over them, page 185suggested some kind of spiritual outpouring. Or so, at least the interpreter thought, and I found his theory easy to believe when I came to taste of the fruits of the garden. The General's tomatoes and pumpkins, melons and runner beans were certainly the best I had ever eaten in the tropics.

He and his fellow Generals had served no more than eight months of their sentence when a chance came to return them to Hong Kong, and we decided not to miss it. (I was Resident Commissioner myself by that time.) They were released three days before their ship sailed so as to give them plenty of time to pack up and say good-bye to their friends. They left the prison at 6 a.m. but the General, dressed now in a neat jumper suit of dark blue denim and shouldering a small wooden chest, was back at the residency with the interpreter before midday. He asked for permission to sleep in his tool-shed for the next three nights, because that would enable him to spend a little more time with his plants and his friends.

The friends he meant were, of course, the orderly and the cook, from whom he had picked up an astonishingly fluent gabble of Gilbertese. Both were delighted at his return and the cook, a family man, insisted on taking him into his own house. That was the first and last time I ever saw an islander grant this particular honour to anyone but a relation by blood or marriage. It was an enormous success. When I looked in on the family after dinner, there was the General sitting on the guest mat with the latest baby in his arms and two little girls cuddling up to him on either side.

The day his ship sailed, he brought the interpreter to my office for an early morning farewell. He plunged without preliminaries, rather to my surprise, into a statement of his immediate plans. He had a mother, a wife and two children, he said, who lived on a piece of land that he owned outside the city of Canton. He had left them several years ago to seek his fortune alone in foreign parts. But now he was going back to them, because here, on Ocean Island, he had come to understand that they were his real fortune.

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"The clear implication is," explained the interpreter— "that this revelation had come to him through the garden you have so courteously allowed him to make and the family life into which the cook has so graciously admitted him."

"I'm delighted to hear it," I said, more than a little touched, "and I'm sure the cook would be, too."

"He has already returned thanks to the cook," replied the interpreter, "and all that remains for him to do now is to thank you too in the same manner. Being far from his native land, he is, to his sorrow, unable to bring with him the kind of gift that he would have wished to lay before you on such an occasion as this, but he begs you to accept instead the enclosed quite unworthy, nevertheless entirely sincere, token of his gratitude and respect." Having said which, he laid on the desk before me an O.H.M.S. envelope, obviously borrowed from my office, containing a £ I note

"But you know I can't take this from him," I exclaimed when I had recovered from the shock of it.

"To avoid serious loss of face on the giver's part," he replied imperturbably, "I advise acceptance with immediate and profuse expressions of appreciation. A return gift of, say, five times the value somewhat later in the day should suffice to maintain your own prestige in the matter."

So I accepted the General's gift and received for further recompense a handclasp as warm and friendly as any a brother man ever honoured me with. Some hours later he left the residency all smiles with two precious tinned hams and a sackful of other provisions from my store cupboard slung over his shoulder, while the orderly followed carrying his little box, and the cook's two children trotted alongside, weeping profusely, to see him off.

But a week or so after he was gone it was still on my mind that I had repaid him in kind instead of money. "He couldn't have saved much out of his wages," I said to the interpreter one day: "nearly half his time here was spent in prison, poor fellow."

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"It is a fact," he replied, "that the money he had could hardly be called savings. Nevertheless, 'poor fellow' is an epithet I should hesitate to apply to him. He left the island with some eight hundred £ I notes in his chest."

"Eight hundred? Impossible. Why, his pay…" I began, but he cut me short: "Not pay but winnings. Winnings at mah-jong and fan-tan. That was why he was so eager to go to prison. Nobody could win it back from him up here."

"A truly complicated character," he added as he turned to leave me, and I let it rest at that.