“Well, that’s all right,” I said rather stupidly, because one has to say something when one is frightened. “There must have been a hole there.” And then I looked around, “Everything all right?”
And then I saw that everything was far from right. The tailboard of the jinker had fallen down, and Sister Finlay’s case, and my case of sacramental vessels, were no longer in the cart with us. They must have slid out as the jinker was pulled up the bank, and they were nowhere to be seen.
“Hold on a minute,” I said to Liang. “We’ve lost the cases.” I looked under the seat, but they were not there. Darkness was falling quickly, and the water behind us looked grey and menacing, and deep enough, I knew, to hold a crocodile. My own case could lie there till the dry weather, perhaps, for in emergency I could give the Sacrament in a teacup and had often done so, but the sister’s case was essential. Without her drugs and medicines she could do little to relieve her patient.
“Wait a minute while I find them,” I said, and slipped down into the water again, absolutely terrified. Sister Finlay said, “Come back, Mr. Hargreaves!” but I did up the tailboard of the jinker and started to walk slowly back, feeling under water with my feet to find the cases, miserable with fear. When I was about waist deep down the submerged bank my foot touched one of them and I stooped down in the water and picked it out; as luck would have it, it was my own case of sacramental vessels.
“Here’s one of them,” I said. “The other one won’t be far off,” and I waded back and put it in the jinker. Liang and Sister Finlay were expostulating with me, but I was too shaken with my terror to answer them, and I started back into the pool to look for the other case. I could not touch it with my feet, and when the water was up to my shoulders I dived down, and searched for it under water with my hands among the mud and grass. When I came to the surface Liang and Sister Finlay were splashing through the water to me; they seized me one on each side and began to propel me back to the jinker.
“I’ll find it in a minute,” I said. “Let me have one more try.” And Sister Finlay said, “You’re absolutely crazy. This place is full of crocodiles. I can manage without it tonight.”
“But it’s got all your medicines in it,” I said.
She was quite angry. “Get back into that cart at once,” she said. “I don’t know how you could be such a fool.” We were all very frightened secretly, of course, or she wouldn’t have spoken to me in that way.
We all got back into the jinker in silence, and Liang touched the old horse with the whip; he strained and we moved forward. It was really getting quite dark now; we could still see the loom of the dry land ahead of us, but I could see no sign of the house. I found out soon that the land on which the house stood was a ridge a mile or so in length between two creeks, which was so high that it was never flooded; the house was at one end of this dry ridge and we were approaching it from the other.
We plodded on through the water in the dusk; the water grew shallower and the old horse went faster, and presently in the dim light the track appeared before us winding through the gum trees, and we were on dry land. And then we saw a most extraordinary sight. The ground under the trees was covered as usual with a light growth of stunted scrub and grass and bracken fern, and in this undergrowth were animals, hundreds and hundreds of them. I saw Hereford cows and bulls, and Brahmah bulls, and scores of wallabies, and several enormous black wild pigs with long faces and savage tusks. There were dogs there, too—dingoes, perhaps, or cattle dogs gone wild and breeding in the bush. There were plains turkeys there stalking about like little emus, and there were goannas and lizards and snakes upon the track ahead of us, gliding off out of our way. All these animals had swum and walked and crawled and hopped and crept to this sanctuary of dry land among the floods, and now they stood looking at us as we passed in the half light.
I said to Liang, “Do you get all these animals here every year, in the wet?”
He nodded. “Every year.” He turned and grinned at me. “I Buddhist. Animals, they know. I no eat ’um.”
We plodded on through the trees, and now I was impatient to arrive. We had sat upon the hard seat of the jinker for about three hours, and I was beginning to feel quite unwell. As I have said, my temperature had been rising every evening just a point or so, but now I was feeling hot and I was having difficulty in focusing my eyes and thinking clearly. I was very much annoyed at the thought that my fever might be coming back again; at all costs I must suppress it till I got back to Landsborough next day. I felt that if I could get down out of the jinker and have a long drink of cold water and sit quietly in a comfortable chair for a little I should be all right, and able to carry on with what I had to do that night without letting Sister Finlay see that I was not very well.
I was thankful when at last we saw the house in the last of the light. It was a poor little place of two rooms built of weatherboard with an iron roof; whatever paint there might once have been on it was now bleached and blown away, and it had weathered to the normal grey colour of ancient wood. It was built on posts as usual in that country, and a short flight of steps led up to a rickety verandah. A tumbledown fence surrounded it and stretched away into the darkness.
There was no light in the house.
Liang got down from the jinker and tied the reins to the fence and went up the steps; we followed him. It was quite dark under the roof and we heard him striking a match; a sputter of flame followed, and Liang made some kind of exclamation. Then he lit a candle that was standing in a saucer on a table; as the light slowly grew we could take in the scene.
There was a bed in the room with a mosquito net, but this net was thrown back disclosing the soiled, rumped sheet and pillow. Stevie was lying on this bed clothed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet; only the top button of the trousers was done up. On a chair beside the bed was a small spirit lamp, and a slender metal pipe with a tiny bowl, and a saucer with some brown stuff in it; there was a heavy, acrid smell about the room. On the floor beside the bed a cheap paraffin lamp, the sort that hangs upon a wall, lay overturned; the oil had flowed out of this and made a pool upon the wooden floor. Stevie did not appear to be conscious.
Liang went forward and picked up the lamp and swept away the pipe and spirit lamp and saucer, but not before we had seen them. Sister Finlay went forward to the bed. “Evening, Stevie,” she said. “I’m Sister Finlay from the hospital. What’s the matter with you?”
There was no answer; the old man was clean out, but whether from the opium or from the march of his disease I could not say. Finlay threw off her raincoat and took Stevie’s wrist to feel his pulse, peering at her wrist watch. “Would you see if you can get that lamp lit, Mr. Hargreaves?” she asked. “We’ll have to have more light than this.”
I picked up the lamp from the floor and examined it; the glass was unbroken. I asked Liang, “Where’s your drum of kerosene?” He did not answer me, but began to hunt about the cluttered room for something, and finally produced about an inch of candle end. I said, “I’ve got a torch here,” and opened my soaked case; the torch was lying in a puddle of water with my cassock, but it lit all right. Liang grinned, and led the way down from the verandah underneath the house, which stood on posts as many of these houses do.
The drum of kerosene was there, and that’s about all there was—just the drum. Somebody—it could only have been Stevie—had left the tap running, and there was paraffin all over the earth floor, soaking in and running away with the water. We shall never know exactly how he did it, but I think he must have gone down to refill the lamp, and probably a spasm of his abdominal pain took him while he was down there, so that it was all that he could do to get back to his bed. Anyway, the barrel was just about empty.
Liang picked up a can and made me hold it while he tilted the drum forward, but only about a teacupful ran out into the can because the drum had already been tilted down a little as it lay. “Is that all you’ve got, Liang?” I asked. “Have you got another drum?”
He shook his head. “No more drum.”
“No more kerosene than this?”
“No more.”
It was bad, but there was nothing to be done about it. He produced a funnel and we emptied the can carefully into the lamp, filling it about a quarter full. We went back up into the house, and I explained the position to Sister Finlay. “I’m sorry, Sister,” I said, “but this is all the kerosene there is. I shouldn’t think it would last through the night, but it may. We’d better turn the wick down when you’ve finished—make it last as long as possible.”
I helped her to get Stevie’s trousers off so that she could examine him. We laid him on his back, and he did not wake, and then I held the lamp while she examined the man’s abdomen. There was a swelling which was evidently tender, because when she pressed it gently he stirred and complained even in his deep, drugged sleep. Presently she pulled the sheet over him to the waist, and stood there looking down at him in silence. “Peritonitis, I should think,” she said at last. “He’s so heavily doped there’s not much we can do.”
She turned to Liang. “Show me the things that were on this chair, Liang,” she said, and there was no acrimony in her tone. “The pipe, and the opium.”
He brought them out and showed them to her in silence.
“Does he smoke much of this?” she asked.
“Three,” he said. “Three, when it is dark, to sleep. Not good smoke more.”
“You smoke it yourself, I suppose?” I asked.
He nodded.
Sister Finlay asked him, “Do three pipes send a man to sleep like that?”
He shook his head. “He smoke more yesterday, today. Good for pain.”
“How many pipes do you think he’s had today?”
He picked up the saucer and looked at the remnant of brown, treacle paste smeared on the bottom. “Ten—eleven,” he said. “I not know. I think when he wake up he smoke one, two pipes, good for pain, and then he sleeps again, one, two hours.”
She leaned over the patient and raised one eyelid carefully; I held the lamp for her while she looked at the eye. Then she stood back again from the bed. “It’s not a bad thing, in a way,” she said at last. “We’ll have to get him to the aerodrome tomorrow somehow, and get the ambulance to fly him to the Curry. There’ll have to be an operation. If I’d had my case with me I’d probably have had to give him a dope, and now he’s doped himself. In a way, and in the circumstances, it may be rather a good thing.”
I nodded. “What is opium?” I asked.
“It’s morphine,” she said. “I don’t know what else it is, but that’s the element that works in it. It’s what I should have given him in any case, so far as the narcotic goes.”
There was nothing to be done, and I sat down wearily on a packing case beside a table that was littered with the remains of a meal; my head was swimming and I was very hot. From a great distance I heard Finlay say, “We’ll just have to watch him tonight, and hope we can get him out of this tomorrow, somehow.”
I forced attention to what she was saying. “The water will be higher, with all this rain,” I said.
“I know. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.” There was a pause, and then she said, “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Hargreaves?”
“I’m all right,” I said. The next thing that I knew was that her hand was on my wrist taking my pulse. “You’re not all right at all,” she said. “You’ve got a temperature.”
“Not bad,” I said. “I’d like a drink of water, though.”
She spoke to Liang, and in a dream I heard her arguing about something with him, but I could not comprehend what it was all about. Then she was giving me a glass of water, thick in colour and tasting of the floods, but it refreshed me, and I felt more myself.
Presently Liang appeared from the other room, where there was a wood fuel cooking stove, and began to lay the table for a meal. He produced three large wooden bowls, three cheap spoons, and bread that was mis-shapen and home made as a sort of a flat bun. Lastly he brought in from the other room a copper saucepan full of hot, steaming soup, thickened with many vegetables. This was our supper, and very good it was; I had two bowls of the soup and felt a great deal better. At the end of the meal there was a cup of black tea, without sugar.
It was while we were drinking our tea, sitting at the table in silence, that the rain stopped. The drumming on the iron roof had made a background noise that we had been unconscious of, but now it reduced, and finally stopped altogether. I raised my head and looked at Sister Finlay, and she looked at me.
“That’s better,” I said. “I was beginning to get a little bit worried about getting him away tomorrow.”
“I was thinking of that, too,” she said. “If it gets any deeper we shall have to have a boat.”
“They’ve got a boat at Dorset Downs,” I said. “Donovan knows we’re here, and he’ll organise something for us in the morning.” I turned to the Chinaman. “How far are you from Dorset Downs homestead, Liang?” I asked.
“Ten—fifteen miles, maybe,” he said. “Not far.”
There was nothing much for either Sister Finlay or myself to do; Stevie lay in a coma, though he stirred once or twice. I got up presently and went out on to the verandah; it was cooler there, with a faint whisper of a breeze that cooled my fever. The clouds were breaking up and a full moon was showing now and then, illuminating the natural clearing in which the house stood and the gum tree forest beyond.
I stood there letting the light breeze play through my clothes, while my eyes gradually adjusted to night vision. And then I saw a most extraordinary sight.
The animals were there, standing or sitting at the far edge of the clearing, grouped in a rough semi-circle round the house, their heads all turned in our direction, watching. The cattle were there, and the wild dogs, and the dingoes, and the wild pigs, and the wallabies, all at a distance of about a hundred yards from the verandah. They did not seem to be grazing or moving about much, although they were not motionless; one or two of the dogs were scratching and the cattle were changing their position a little. They were just standing or sitting there in a semi-circle round the house, watching us.
I turned and went back into the room, and said to Sister Finlay, “Come and look at this.” She came out on the verandah, and when her eyes became accustomed to the moonlight she saw them too. “It’s the lamp,” I said. “I suppose they’ve been attracted by the light.”
Behind us, Liang grunted; he had come out quietly, and I had not realised that he was there. The sister turned to him. “Do you often get them like this?”
He said something that neither of us could quite understand, and then he turned and went back into the house. We stayed on the verandah watching the animals for a time, and because Liang was not with us I could speak more freely to the sister. “What’s the position with Stevie?” I asked her. “Do you think he’ll get through?”
She said, “I doubt it. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I think it’s peritonitis by now; if it is, I doubt if he’ll get as far as Cloncurry. It’s quite possible that he might die tonight.”
I nodded; I had been thinking the same thing. “I’m very sorry about your medicine case, Sister. I ought to have looked after the things better.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It doesn’t look as if I’ll have much use for what was in it.”
We stayed out on the verandah for a time. I was still hot and it was cool there and refreshing, but presently I got a cold spell and began to shiver a little, and I made some excuse and we went back into the room. Liang was not there, and now there was a faint odour of fragrance in the room that I had not noticed before. I went and looked into the other room, to see what was there.
It was lit by the candle, now burnt down quite low. There was a small, tawdry little shrine set up in one corner of the room, with dirty Chinese hangings; in it was a battered Chinese Buddha mostly painted red and very dirty. There was a stick of incense burning in front of this, a joss
stick, I suppose, and Liang was kneeling in front of it in silent prayer. I withdrew quietly.
“He’s in there, praying,” I whispered to the sister. “In front of an idol.”
She raised her eyebrows, but there was nothing we could do about it, and it was none of our business. We turned the lamp low to conserve the kerosene, and settled down to wait for something to happen. I sat dozing on a chair, hot and feverish; my clothes were dry by that time, but I was very uncomfortable. From time to time I got up and drank a glass of the muddy water, and sat down again.
I don’t know what time it was when Stevie came to; perhaps about eleven o’clock, or midnight. We had been there for several hours. I was dozing in my chair, and woke to see Sister Finlay get up and go to the bedside. I got up also, and went over to the bed. She was feeling the pulse, and Stevie was now restless. Once or twice the eyes opened and shut. He had drawn his knees up tight against his stomach, evidently in pain.
“He’s coming round,” she said quietly. “This is where our job begins, Mr. Hargreaves. We could have done with that case, after all.”
I crossed to the table and turned up the lamp, and then went back to the bed. Liang came out of the next room, roused, perhaps, by our movements; he stood with us in silence for a time watching the gradual return to consciousness and pain. Then he went softly to the verandah and stood looking out.
There was nothing I could do, and so I went out with him, and stood there while my eyes became accustomed. It was intermittent moonlight and darkness as the thick clouds parted and drifted across the moon, and in the passing, silvery light I saw that the animals were still there watching us, much as I had seen them before. I said to Liang again, “Do the animals usually come around like this, in the wet?”
He said, “Stevie die tonight.”
“I hope not,” I replied. “Well get him to the hospital tomorrow.”
He shook his head. “Animals, they come. I think he die.”