Round the Bend by Nevil Shute
“Is all this Hinduism?” I asked uncertainly.
He shook his head. “It’s something much older—animism, I think you’d call it. It’s not got much to do with the daily worship, although, of course, it all gets a bit mixed up. What Madé here is making”—she looked up at the mention of her name, and smiled—“is offerings for the shrines here in the house. Those are for the Hindu gods in the shrines. The one in the big shrine in the corner is the kingpin—that’s Surya, the sun god. Then there’s Brahma, and Vishnu, and Shiva, and Ganesh, and half a dozen others. Madé doesn’t know them all. The only ones she knows are Surya and Shiva. She picked Shiva when she was a little girl, because the shrine was the fourth from the left and she liked that one best. Perhaps she was four years old. She’s always said her prayers to Shiva ever since. She asked the pemangkoe once—he’s the local priest—she asked him who lived in that one and he told her Shiva, so she says her prayers and makes her offerings to Shiva.”
I asked, “Is there an image in the shrine? I didn’t see one.”
He smiled. “No image. Shiva likes to come down and live in a bit of quartz. She got the pemangkoe to show it to me the other day. He keeps it in a sort of cupboard with a lot of other bits of things—a piece of coral, a bit of lava, a bit of carved ivory, one for each god. Shiva’s spiritual home is this bit of quartz. On holy days the priest takes them out and puts each in its own shrine, and then the god comes down and takes possession of it. The soul of the god, that is. She works for days before that holy day to make offerings that will please the god. Not only palm lamaks like these—she’ll kill a duck and roast it and dress it up nicely as a cold roast duck, with little sweet rice cakes all round. She mustn’t smell it, if she can avoid it, because that takes the essence of it, that’s reserved for the god.” He paused. “When the great day comes she takes her offering and lays it down before the shrine, roast duck and all, and kneels down to say her prayers. The priest comes along and sprinkles it and her with holy water while she prays. And the soul of the god comes down out of the shrine while she is praying, and he takes the soul of the roast duck, and the soul of the rice cakes, and the soul of the lamaks. She stays there praying for an hour or more than that, and she feels good after it, so she knows that the god is pleased with her. Shiva doesn’t want what’s left of the roast duck and the rice cakes; he’s taken their soul, and so only the husks, so to speak, are left. She can have those, and so she picks them up when she’s done praying and takes them away to eat, and has a feast with her friends. I got a bit of Shiva’s offering for supper the day before yesterday.”
I couldn’t make out if he was making a joke of it all, or not. I said uncertainly, “That sounds like a very debased sort of religion.”
“Is it?” he said thoughtfully. “I’m not so sure. It keeps her praying.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to that one. “What does she pray for?”
“All the usual things,” he said. “She prays for her mother, for her good health and long life. She prays for her father, that he may rest quietly and that his ghost shan’t come and trouble them. She prays for a good rice crop and for good fishing, and she prays for her brother and for her cousins who are children, that they may grow up clean and good. And because she’s a girl, she prays for a man that she can love and respect, and she prays for children by him, and that she may stay faithful to him, and he to her, until they die. She probably spends an hour upon her knees in prayer each day, and double that on holy days, apart from the amount of time she spends in making up the offerings. I don’t know that you can say that it’s a bad sort of religion.”
“I don’t know that you can say it’s a good one,” I replied. “It seems to me that these people are naturally devout, and that’s all about it.”
“Maybe so,” he said thoughtfully. “Somebody once said it doesn’t matter much what you believe in, so long as you believe in something. These people here believe that their religion helps them to lead better lives. If we think that the impulse is from their own nature, not from the religion—does it matter? Does it matter much if they believe in Jesus, or Shiva, or Mahomet, or Guatama, so long as the results are good?”
“Blowed if I know,” I said. “Perhaps it doesn’t. I don’t know.”
“Nor I,” he said. “I only know that the results here are good, and I like to see it.”
I glanced at him. “You like this place all right?”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I like it here.”
“I was afraid there might not be enough work for you,” I said. “Enough interests in training and directing other people, which is what you’re good at.”
He smiled. “Can’t you believe that I’m a normal man, and that I like to draw my pay for doing nothing, and be lazy?”
“No,” I said. “It would be all too easy if you were like that.”
“Why do you think I’m not?”
“You’d be living with Madé Jasmi, if you were as you say,” I remarked. “Phinit hasn’t wasted much time.”
He sat silent for a little. Behind his hut the sun was going down; the small buildings were casting long shadows, and the air was golden with the light of sunset. “I was very tired when I came here,” he said at last. “It was time for me to get out of things and sit quiet for a time, and think where I was going. These weeks have been very good for me, I think.”
“And where are you going, Connie?” I asked him. “Do you want to go back into the active life again, or to stay here?”
“What do you think I ought to do?” he asked. “You know me well enough by now to say.”
Perhaps it was as Nadezna had said; he wanted someone to advise him. I said, “Well, this job is pretty stable, far as one can see. I’ll probably be getting a small passenger machine before long, a Dove perhaps, and then we’ll run that down here turn and turn about with the Tramp. That means there’ll be an aircraft down here every week within a few months, and you’ll have a bit more work then.”
I was talking to gain time, and he knew it. “I think you ought to settle down here,” I said quietly. “Take what’s given you, and be happy with it. Marry Madé Jasmi and raise a family, like any ordinary man.”
He smiled. “And you,” he said. “Are you an ordinary man?”
I wasn’t ready for that one. “You mean, I’m a fine one to talk?”
“I know that you have been married,” he said, “and that it ended in a tragedy. But is that any reason why you should not marry again? Will you ever be really happy till you do?”
“All very well to swing it over on to me like this,” I said. “It’s you that I was talking about. You and Madé Jasmi.”
He smiled. “And I was talking about you.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “Stick to the subject.”
“She would marry you if you asked her,” he observed. “I knew that, of course, when I lived in Bahrein, and Gujar Singh, he tells me that she is in love with you.”
Gujar, it seemed, was something of a two-way street. “I wouldn’t ask any girl to marry me and raise a family in the Persian Gulf,” I said. “The summers are too bad. If I did that, I should want to give up everything and go and find another job in a cold climate, in England or America perhaps. I don’t know that I’m ready to do that yet. I’ve started something, and I’ve got to see it through.”
“So the work comes before the chance of marriage and children, and a quiet home,” he said.
“If you put it that way,” I said, “—yes, I think it does.”
“And so it does with me.”
There was a pause. “We are two men of the same temperament,” he said. “Madé would marry me tonight if I should say the word.” I don’t think she knew what he was saying, but she heard her name and knew that we were talking about her, and she looked up, smiling. “If we did that, I should stay here, of course, probably for ever. Living is cheap and easy here, and while there are aeroplanes, and an airstrip upon Bali, there will be casual work
We sat silent for a little, and then he went on, “This power of the job, so much greater than we ourselves! When you came to Bahrein with one Fox-Moth to do a little charter work, you never thought that you were setting up a power that would rule your life, impede your marriage, dictate where and how you were to live. When a good man employs others he becomes a slave to the job, for the job is the guarantee for the security of many men. So when a man speaks candidly in the hangar of the things, the ethics of the work, that he believes in, he may bring others to believe in those things too, and to depend upon his words. Then he, too, is a slave to his own job, because if he relaxes his endeavours to teach men proper ways of work and life, he may destroy the faith he has created in them, and so throw them back into an abyss of doubt and fear and degradation, lost indeed.” He paused. “I think that we are very much alike, you and me. Both in our own way, in the same boat.”
“Both going round the bend a bit, if you ask me,” I said, a little bitterly.
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps the road has a curve in it. Perhaps it is necessary to go round the bend a little before you can see clearly to the end.”
“Nadezna would be very happy if you were to marry Madé,” I said. It was my last argument. “She wants to see you married, very much indeed.”
He smiled gently. “She’s been a good sister, Tom. Not many women would have left California to come to the Persian Gulf, to live as an Arab woman in the souk, merely to look after me. Will you give her a message from me?”
“Of course I will,” I said. “What is it?”
“Tell her that I should be very happy if she were to marry you.”
“I can’t tell her that.”
“I think you can.”
I hedged. “I might in my own time, but not just yet.”
“Tell her in your own time,” he said. “But be sure that you tell her.”
It was nearly dark. The girl got up from beside our feet and said something to Connie; he exchanged a word or two with her, and she went away. “Supper,” he said. “We have it soon after dark here. I usually go to bed after that, and get up before dawn. It’s the best routine in a place like this, I think.”
I said something or other agreeing with him, and then I said, “Nadezna was going to come down with me on this trip, for the holiday. But then she thought she’d better keep away, till things were settled between you and Madé.”
“Things are settled now,” he said. “But not the way she wanted them to be.”
“Madé knows that, does she?”
He nodded. “If it looks like being difficult for her, I shall go away. Live in Den Pasar perhaps, and buy a bicycle, and come to work on that.” He paused. “But very soon, I think that there may be a change.”
“What sort of change?” I asked.
He said vaguely, “A change. I don’t know what sort of change, but I think perhaps a change is coming, and quite soon.”
“I see,” I said.
He glanced at me. “Have you got any other message for me, that you have not told me yet?”
“Not exactly a message,” I said slowly. “But there is something you’ll have to know. I had a visit a few days ago from Wazir Hussein. The Sheikh of Khulal is a very old man now, perhaps dying.”
He nodded. “I know that he is near his time.”
“He’s very anxious to see you before he goes,” I said, and then I hesitated. It seemed such a stupid thing to say to my chief engineer. “He—well, he wants to get your blessing. He’s chartered the Tramp, and he’ll be coming here to visit you on the next trip. He’ll be here in about ten days from now.”
“He’s liable to die upon the journey, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know. If he is, it’s a risk that they’re prepared to take. We’re rigging up a bed for him in the fuselage.”
“Is the Imam coming with him—the Imam from Baraka?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I know there’s quite a party coming to look after him, seven or eight of them, at least.”
“I would have gone to him,” he said. “Why strain an old man to come all this way?”
“I offered that, Connie, but they wouldn’t have it,” I told him. “They seemed to think that he should come to you.”
He nodded. “You see the workings of the job,” he said. “Once you start something, you must see it through. I am as much enmeshed in my net as you are in yours. Only by an act of treachery to those who believe in us can either of us escape.”
CHAPTER NINE
And God shall make thy soul a Glass where eighteen thousand aeons pass,
And thou shalt see the gleaming Worlds as men see dew upon the grass.
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
I LOOK back on the ten days that we spent in Bali before the Arab party came as one of the happiest periods of my life. For the first time in many years it was impossible for me to control events in any way. That of itself might not have freed me from the worries and the strain of my responsibilities, but being with Connie did. We had no more serious conversation. There was little to do in the workshop except painting and distempering, which was being done by a couple of Balinese boys from the village, who were doing it very well. Each morning soon after dawn we would stroll over to the hangar and see them started working under Phinit, and as the sun got warm we would go off and go down to the beach and bathe. It would have been just perfect if Nadezna could have been with us.
We didn’t go far from Pekendang. There are forty thousand temples in Bali, I believe, but I only saw the one. I never was much of a sightseer; Connie had wandered fairly widely inland and had been up to the central volcanic mountain, Kintamani, but transport wasn’t easy and he seemed to think that when one had seen and absorbed Pekendang the rest was largely repetition. We went once or twice to a place the other side of the strip called Sanoer where a Belgian artist was married to a very fine Balinese woman. I think that was the most wonderful house I have ever been in, the walls covered with paintings of the Balinese and their way of life, and full of Balinese young men and women so that it was difficult to say in memory which of the scenes remembered from that house were real ones and which were paint.
We saw a good deal of the headman of the village, Wajan Rauh. He used to come and sit and talk to us sometimes, about the crops and the fishing, and about the Dutch and the full-scale war that they were waging against the Indonesians in Java and Sumatra. I could not understand these conversations, and I used to sit back, smoking, watching the old man and his friends, watching Connie as he talked with them.
One did not need any interpreter to see how greatly they valued his advice. All through my life I had seen him gain this influence over people; it had been the same story even in Cobham’s circus as a boy, I think, and certainly it had been so in Damrey Phong, in Rangoon, in Bahrein. I do not think he ever worked for it, or sought this influence. When simple people came and told him things that troubled them, which they did very often, he gave them straightly what advice he could, and his manner of doing it encouraged them, so that they came back with more important and more intimate matters for his ruling. I think that’s all there was to it.
He told me that they thought little of the war in Java. They did not greatly care who ruled them, whether the radjas who had ruled before the Dutch came and who still ruled them in name, or whether the Dutch. The Balinese had no national ambitions. All they wanted to do was to get on with their farming and their temple festivals and let the world go by them; they had no desire whatever to become involved in great events. If the Dutch or the Indonesians or anyone else want
Because they thought so very highly of Connie, and because I was his guest, the village went out of their way to show me all their arts. They put on a dance one evening, a most complicated and picturesque affair of stylized dancing by little girls eleven or twelve years old, dressed heavily in gold embroidered skirts and jackets sewn with tiny mirrors, and enormous golden head dresses. This dance was called Legong; it was danced to the music of an orchestra of bamboo xylophones and small brass gongs. It went on for over three hours and seemed to be an affair for the whole village; when one xylophone player tired another took his place and the little dancers danced in relays too, though the two chief ones danced the whole evening with only short pauses for rest. The village sat around in a rough square that formed the stage, and children played about among the dancers who avoided them skilfully, and dogs walked through; from time to time a mother would get up and go out on the floor to adjust the clothing of a little dancer that was slipping, and the dance went on. At about ten o’clock at night it stopped quite suddenly and for no particular reason, and the people all streamed away to bed, gossiping and chatting, well-content.
Cockfighting was a sport of the men, and they held a main in my honour. I had never seen it before although it still goes on in England, quietly and illegally. It is a cruel sport, of course, because the fight is to the death and usually bloody. It was not the sadist angle that appealed to the Balinese, though, but the opportunity for betting. They are tremendous gamblers, and bet furiously on their cockfights, though I think that this is general in Southeast Asia. Phinit told me that in his mother’s village in Siam they breed small fish, three or four inches long, that will fight fiercely to the death when put together, and the people bet on those.
They put on a play for me one night, entirely incomprehensible to me and, I think, to Connie also. It was quite colourful, and it was amusing to sit in a deck chair and watch. Madé Jasmi, I think, didn’t understand much of it either, because it dealt with very highborn people, kings and princes, who for the sake of verisimilitude spoke a regal dialect called Kawi which nobody of common clay can understand. Madé Jasmi evidently thought I needed sustaining through this entertainment because she kept bringing me glasses of Toeak, palm juice beer. In the end the performance came suddenly to an unexpected finish, as the dance had done, and people and actors melted quickly away.