Читать книгу Lost Island - James Norman Hall - Страница 4

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I’m going all the way back to boyhood for the start ... not of the story, such as it is; for my start, our start, the three of us sitting here. Phil, you were speaking at dinner of the so-called lost generation, the post-World-War-I generation that left its teens, or was about to leave them, just as the century was leaving its own. They made quite a noise about being lost, those youngsters; it became a kind of profession for them. But it strikes me that men of our vintage—women too for that matter—now in their late or middle fifties, have a better claim to the doubtful distinction of being lost. We were in the unhappy position of passing boyhood in one era and manhood in another, with a gulf of change between the two such as, I believe, has never before separated the youth and manhood of individuals in all the history of the human race. Who could have guessed, say around eighteen ninety-five, how soon and how swiftly the change was to come? We had another ten years to know the land of life our fathers and grandfathers had known. Call it fifteen years. Centuries are never clear-cut divisions between eras. The nineteenth, as I see it, ended at the close of the first decade of the twentieth. Our roots were firmly embedded in the soil of the nineteenth.

I don’t mean to lament here the passing of “the good old days.” As a matter of fact, there never was a young man more content than myself to see them pass. Miracles in the worlds of physics, chemistry, engineering, mechanical achievement of every sort, were happening all around us. We were, as you know, in a state of perpetual awe, wonder, delight, and expectation. It was at this time, nineteen twelve, that I graduated from the engineering school at Massachusetts Tech. I’d passed my boyhood on a farm in Michigan. Detroit wasn’t so far away, and it was natural that I should want to return to that growing expanding heaven for engineers, draughtsmen, and machines with internal-combustion engines. And so I did, but the boy of the eighteen-nineties, of the horse-and-buggy age, came too. He hadn’t much to say, and he had less and less to say as time went on; but he was still there.

Enough about the past. All I need to add is that, with the exception of the year the three of us spent in France during the last war, Detroit has been my home.

It was in March last year that I left for San Francisco and points southwest in the Pacific. No need to remind you of what was happening at that time. Hong Kong had fallen, Manila had fallen, Singapore had fallen. MacArthur was still holding out on Bataan Peninsula but the end of that resistance against hopeless odds was in sight. The position of the stouthearted Dutch in the East Indies had been equally hopeless; they could receive no effective aid from us, after Pearl Harbor. It then seemed by no means impossible that the sea route from Canada and the U.S.A. to Australia via Honolulu, Samoa, and Fiji would be lost as well, or, if not lost, rendered so dangerous as to be all but useless until such time as the U.S.A. could build up strength to hold and protect it. An auxiliary route across the Pacific had to be planned and prepared for. A glance at a large-scale chart will show you how that improvised lifeline would have to run, and by what islands and archipelagoes ships, planes, troops, and supplies would have to be routed should the other more direct sea lane be lost. There were vast water gaps that few planes could cross, under their own power, but this problem was to be met in ways I forbear to mention.

I was one of many, I suppose, sent out on this work of hasty improvisation. Actually, there was not a day, not an hour to be lost. I had been a captain in the Eighth Engineers, National Guard, for some years. First thing I knew I was kicked upstairs to a colonelcy and sent on my way at six hours’ notice. This advance in rank was merely a matter of expediency, to give me standing with the authorities in the place to which I was being sent; but I was told to fulfill my mission in civilian clothes so as not to attract undue attention to the military aspect of it.

There was nothing political in the assignment; that part of the business had been taken care of in advance. My job was an engineering problem of a quite simple kind. A certain island, a coral island well south of the Equator, was to be transformed into a naval and military base. Upon arriving at this place I was to have a clear two weeks to make my survey and perfect plans against the arrival of the freighter which was to follow loaded with men and equipment to begin work. The freighter was already lying at a pier in Oakland, ready for cargo, on the day I took off by sea plane from the Treasure Island airport.

There was something faintly comical about our hasty departure from San Francisco. Ominous, too: one felt in an almost physical sense the pressure of disastrous events. The plane for the special mission had been commandeered from the Pan American Line; apparently, there were no Army or Navy planes available at that time. There were eighteen passengers. I could detect in the manner of most of them something of the surprise and incredulity that I myself felt at being sent airpost-haste to hitherto unheard-of or undreamed-of destinations. Nearly all of us were last-minute arrivals and the plane had to be held over twenty minutes for the latest comer, a leather-necked Middle Westerner from St. Louis who came by taxi from the San Mateo airport. He had the seat across the aisle from me, and just as we were taking off he leaned over to say: “Guess I was the last of us visiting firemen to come, wasn’t I? Damned if they would even give me time to go home for my toilet kit! I’ll have to buy a new one in Honolulu.”

I was mighty favorably impressed by my fellow passengers. No confidences as to our particular jobs or destinations were exchanged, but there was a tacit taking it for granted that we were all going out on the same general kind of emergency war work. “Visiting firemen” about hit off the situation, I thought. We were being sent out into the widespread conflagration flaming up at scattered points all over the Pacific; not, to be sure, to help extinguish fires already raging, but, if possible, to prevent them from spreading. I had the feeling that these fellows would prove equal to whatever tasks were assigned to them. They appeared to be men used to meeting emergencies, the kind that can be depended upon to make quick decisions and get quick results. I hoped that I was half as competent as all of them looked. However, I wasn’t worrying much. I knew what was expected of me and that I was well equipped to handle the job. Only one thing gave me concern: ordered off on such short notice there had been no time to learn anything of the outfit that was to follow by ship. I had been assured, though, that all these matters were in competent hands and that the freighter would carry equipment for whatever kind of engineering problem we might have to cope with.

I didn’t know why I had been selected for this job. I had done little engineering work outside the U.S.A. and Canada and had never set foot in the tropics. I decided that there was a kind of providence in the event. All my life I had nursed a secret longing to visit the islands of the South Seas. I’d never confessed this to any of my fellow Detroiters. Maybe I was a bit ashamed of it as too romantic a dream for an engineer to cherish. But the dream was always there, under the surface of consciousness.

Strangely enough, at this time I was not at all concerned about the island itself and what was to happen to it. I didn’t even try to picture it except in a vague way and never so much as wondered whether it would be inhabited or not. I must have assumed that it was uninhabited, a sort of Wake Island, or Midway, as these had been before the coming of the Pan American Line. Coral islands had played no part in my life. All that I knew about this one was that it had an excellent passage through the reef, wide enough and deep enough to accommodate any ship in the U.S. Navy. I also knew that the lagoon was so many miles long by so many wide, with various islets scattered along the encircling reef. In the mind’s eye I saw the place merely as so much reef, land, and water, to be converted for the first time in history to a practical use. I call this curious because of those romantic dreams of islands. I suppose it was the boy of the eighteen-nineties who had indulged in them. The engineer on assignment completely forgot them.

This was my first oversea plane journey. I gained for the first time, so vividly, a sense of the rotundity of the earth: the ocular conception as opposed to the imaginative one, and I began to feel how small the planet really is. I’ve heard men who have done vastly more traveling by air than I have say that flight only increases one’s sense of the vastness of the globe. I don’t find it so; least of all did I find it so in this seventy-two-hour journey during which, with various stops en route, I was carried from San Francisco to what is, veritably, one of the ends of the earth. No, I had a growing, sobering realization of limitations. Little more than a century ago the seas were walls months high, even years high. Now they are intervals between lunch and dinner, or breakfast and dinner, shrinking visibly as one looks down upon them like the spaces between the numerals upon the dial of a watch as the minute hand moves from one to the next.

Honolulu was our first stop. There we deposited four of our passengers, all those in uniform, and took on three more. We stopped only long enough to change planes and plane crew; then we were away again. Both arriving and departing we had a clear view of Pearl Harbor. It was an appalling sight. I wondered what had become of those watchdogs, Kimmel and Short. In fact, I’m still wondering, together with some one hundred-odd millions of other Americans. But it’s just as well, perhaps, that no scapegoats have been chosen to bear the guilt of what happened at Pearl Harbor. If one is to be selected let it be Uncle Sam himself. All of us Americans, from the greatest to the least, are responsible for that disaster.

I soon lost my sense of direction except in a general way. During the next twenty-four hours it seemed to me that we had zigzagged all over the eastern Pacific, on both sides of the Equator. Our cargo of visiting firemen thinned out: we dropped one here, two there, another somewhere else. I remember vividly the desolate island where the last of my fellow passengers was left. It was nothing more than a sickle-shaped sandbank about half a mile from end to end, protected by fringing reefs, with clumps of starved scrub making shadows black as ink in the midday sun. The fellow from St. Louis was the one to be left there. As we circled over the place in preparation for a landing, with the shadow of the plane circling beneath like the ghost of some prehistoric flying monster, my companion said: “I might have spared myself the trouble of buying that toilet kit.” I thought so, too. Water would be far too precious to be used for shaving and brushing his teeth. However, he was furnished with two twenty-five-gallon drums of it from the plane, as well as with a small tent and some cases of food. He was to be picked up again in a week’s time. A lonely figure he looked as we took off, standing by his little heap of stores in the blob of shadow made by his broad-brimmed hat. He was the right sort, that fellow. He didn’t even bother to turn and wave to us but set out at once to look over the place. A moment later we were miles away.

Six hours after leaving the sandbank we reached my destination. I was not, in fact, set down at the actual destination but at an island some four hundred miles from it. I was to go on from there by sea.

I’ll not identify the island. All that need be said here is that it did not seem to belong to our exploited, blasted, war-wrecked planet. If you’ve done any high-seas flying you will remember how rapidly an island, or group of islands, takes on form and distinctness as you approach at a speed of two hundred and fifty miles per hour. At one moment it is a faint bluish blur against the empty sea, scarcely to be distinguished from the sea itself. The next moment, there it is beneath you, outlined in the most exquisite detail: mountains, deep shadow-filled gorges, reef-enclosed lagoons with every shoal in them a splotch of vivid color. You’ve not had time to prepare yourself for the incredible sight. A wafer-like film of cloud hung over the very center of this island with the peaks of the two highest mountains thrust through into the clear air above. They gave the impression of floating detached, in a sea of golden light, above the greater island beneath. We passed directly above them, and I had a picture of lonely beauty, of unsullied primitive wildness, that I shall treasure in memory to the end of my days.

The sun was near to setting as we lost height in a long descent out to sea; then we banked to come in over the little port town. We circled it twice and turned once more to skim over the barrier reef that looked so close to the land from high above, so far distant at this near view. The pilot set the plane down as gently as a wild duck settles on a Wisconsin lake; then we taxied to a mooring buoy half a mile from shore to wait for the port doctor.

You know the sudden change in point of view at the end of a journey by air. As the land rushes up to meet and enclose you, the impersonal detached feeling of being a mere spectator of earth, outside the lives and interests of your fellow men, is immediately lost. You are again caught and enmeshed with them, one atom amongst the millions that people the earth. Five minutes earlier the island had looked scarcely large enough to stretch one’s legs over in an after-dinner stroll. Now I was gazing up at mountains that looked remote and immensely high, rising as they did so abruptly from sea level. They hemmed in the little town with its strip of foreshore, fronting the lagoon. I had a happy sense of strangeness, of “otherness,” so to speak, due to the fact that I had traveled in so brief a time from a great continental city to a crumb of land lost in the midmost Pacific; to a little world as different as possible from anything I had ever known before. Twenty or thirty schooners, cutters, and other small craft were moored along the sea wall. It was a charming place, what I could see of it from offshore, with the fronts of scattered shops, public buildings, warehouses and dwellings, all in various pale colors, taking the westering light. I caught glimpses of old-fashioned horse-drawn vehicles: carts, buggies, surreys, and the like, moving slowly along beneath the trees. It gave me the feeling of having flown straight back to boyhood. The sound of a clear-toned bell, striking the hour from a church tower hidden amongst the trees, was as golden as the air it traveled through.

One of the co-pilots came back to open the door in readiness for the doctor, and we stood together, looking toward the beach.

“Guess we’re making quite a stir here, Mr. Dodd,” he said. “Look at the crowd along the waterfront!”

I asked if he had called here before.

“Never,” he said, “and I don’t know any other pilot that has. This place is away off any transpacific air lane. Shouldn’t wonder if we’re making history. This is probably the first plane that’s ever landed here.”

“Did they know we were coming?” I asked.

“Yes, but not what day; not even what week. We wirelessed them a couple of hours ago; our orders were not to wireless until we were two hours off. But they’ve got aviation gas here for us. That was arranged for well in advance.”

I gathered from this information that the preparations made from Washington were not as hasty as I had thought, at first.

“Are you spending the night here?” I asked the pilot.

He shook his head. “You’re the lucky one. What a pretty little place! I suppose this is the way Honolulu looked in the old days.... No, we’ve got to go on as soon as we fill up and give the engines a quick once-over.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“I said, ‘on,’ ” he replied, with a grin.

I was sorry to be leaving them. I’d gotten well acquainted with the plane crew that had taken over at Honolulu; both plane and crew were still of the Pan American service. There were two pilots, of course, a navigating officer, and one engineer. We even had one of those engaging little stewardesses, as pretty as she was competent. All of them were mere kids in comparison with myself, but they had a maturity that impressed me, owing, I suppose, to the nature of their work. But it seemed to me that they had lost the faculty for wonder. This far-reaching special mission could have been no routine flight for them, but they took it all as a matter of course, as young people take everything in these days. However, I may be wrong about this. They carried a burden of responsibility that was off my shoulders. They lacked the free mind I had to wonder and enjoy. Now they were away again for Lord knows where, but the pilot said they would reach the place a little after daylight next morning. They were to have a real “spell” there.

It did look as though all the population of the island had gathered at the waterfront. About ten minutes later a skiff put off to us from the landing steps. The man at the oars was a husky native; the other two were the doctor and an aide to the governor of the place. The medical examination was a half-minute formality; then I said good-bye to the plane crew and got into the skiff to go ashore. The governor’s aide informed me that the governor had gone to the far side of the island and there’d not been time, after receiving the wireless from the plane, to get word to him. He was expected to return early next morning.

The crowd by the landing steps opened up to let us through. They were natives, mostly, with a sprinkling of whites and Chinese. They thought I was somebody all right, the only passenger in a huge plane like that. I shouldn’t wonder if they considered me a special envoy of President Roosevelt himself. I could see, from the expressions of astonishment on all their faces, that the arrival of the plane was an extraordinary event here. The face of the governor’s aide fairly shone with reflected glory as he conducted me along the street to a near-by hotel. We chatted there for a moment or two; then he took his leave, saying he would call for me a quarter of an hour before the time set for the meeting with the governor next morning. It would probably be at ten o’clock.

The hotel was just what I thought it should be for that far-off island. It didn’t belong to the twentieth century. I got a great kick out of the place and the landlord who ran it. There were wide verandas upstairs and down running the length of the building with spacious high-ceilinged rooms opening upon them. I was the only guest and the first one, the landlord said, in more than a year. The war had stopped all tourist traffic long since. I had my choice of rooms and selected one opening on the front veranda having a glorious view across the lagoon to the westward. The landlord brought up his battered old hotel register, dating from 1902, for me to sign, and in the next ten minutes he gave me a large slice of his family history, going back nearly a century to the time when his great-grandfather, a Scotchman, had settled in the islands. I could see that there had been a bounteous infiltration of Polynesian blood since those days, but the landlord seemed as proud of his Scotch ancestry as though he had been born at Inverness.

My room contained a lumpy double bed, a marble-topped washstand with a bowl and pitcher on it, a built-in wardrobe, an old-fashioned bureau, two chairs upholstered in faded green plush, and a strip of matting on the bare floor. Over the bed hung a large oil painting of a stag against a background of wild heathy mountains. I got a whiff of genuine emotion from that painting, and the inscription on a brass plaque beneath it stirred me even more:—

The stag at eve had drunk his fill

Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,

And deep his midnight lair had made

In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade.

There was another vivid reminder of boyhood days. “The Lady of the Lake” had been my first unforgettable introduction into the world of poetry.

The hotel was as clean as it was bare, but floors, walls, and ceilings had been so riddled by termites that little more than the paint was holding it together. As I walked gingerly down the back stairway to the shower bath I more than half expected the building to collapse gently in a heap of wood dust with me in the middle of the heap.

Except for morning coffee no meals were served in the hotel, so I went along to a restaurant for my dinner. The street was quite deserted now, everyone having gone to the wharf where the plane was refueling. The restaurant was a frame building built on piles over the lagoon. It was somewhat past the dinner hour but there were still half a dozen people at their meal. All of them, it seemed to me, had an unmistakable island stamp upon them. The peace and quiet of that lonely place seemed to be written upon their faces and their movements were those of people who have never known what it is to hurry.

I had a table by a window giving a wide view of the harbor. I’ve often read, and heard, that night comes swiftly in the tropics, but it was not so here. The sun had set a good half hour before but the afterglow was still glorious. When I thought it was dying away, came a spectacular resurgence of light as though the sun had changed its mind about setting for good. Wisps of ribbed cloud high in the west and the sky between them took on again the most gorgeous coloring. I had never before seen such an amazing renewal of the afterglow. It was due, I suppose, to some peculiar atmospheric condition.

Just as I was finishing my soup came the roar of the motors of the plane: first one, then another, then all four together, ripping the silence of that peaceful little place into a thousand shreds. I felt suddenly awestruck, and the thunder of such mighty engines is in all truth an awe-inspiring sound wherever heard. Even when accustomed to it one can scarcely grasp the ominous fact that man has been able to harness such power.

The pilots had wasted no time in refueling so that they could take off while there was still light enough to see by. The huge plane moved slowly away from the wharf and when just opposite the restaurant turned westward; then they gave her full motor. I thought the restaurant would be blown right off its foundations. Hats, tablecloths, napkins, and menu cards flew every which way in the powerful backwash from the propellers, and they had scarcely settled to the floor when we saw the plane far in the distance, a black silhouette as it rose swiftly across a band of ashy crimson light. Then it was gone.

There was an event in the history of that crumb of land in the backwaters of the Pacific: an event of evil omen, but I did not think of that at the time. From the abashed glances thrown in my direction by the other diners, you might have thought that I was the man who had dreamed, invented, perfected, and super-perfected that great bird; and I was human enough and American enough to enjoy the moment. However, I went on with my dinner with commendable modesty for such a great man. I had a dish of excellent fresh-water shrimps with French dressing, and roast pork with baked bananas and breadfruit to follow. I didn’t know what the latter was until the waiter enlightened me, and at the first taste I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not; but doubt vanished with every additional mouthful. It went very well indeed with the good pork gravy. Then I had my first heart-of-palm salad with a mango for dessert. Of all the tropical fruits I’ve eaten, give me a grafted mango for preference. I certainly enjoyed that first one. I had a double portion sliced from either side of the flat oblong seed, and I ate both down to the rind.

By the time I’d finished dinner the place was empty except for one man seated at the table next to mine. I’d noticed him looking me over pretty closely during the meal and when the others had gone we fell into conversation.

“No need to ask if you came by the airship,” he said. “Couldn’t have been anyone else.”

“Airship” gave me an added sense of remoteness from the world I’d left three days earlier. I was reminded of a time that seemed to belong to a previous existence, when Santos-Dumont was making such a stir in the world by his flights in the first crude dirigible, and “airship” began to have some currency in common speech.

“Are strangers here as scarce as that?” I asked.

He nodded, without speaking again for some time; then he said: “My name’s Boyle. I’ll be seeing you at the governor’s tomorrow. It’s my island you’re going to.”

I pricked up my ears at that, but expressed only polite interest. You wouldn’t have set him down as being the proprietor of anything much, least of all an island. His suit of white drill was clean, but collar and cuffs had been frayed with long use and both coat and trousers had been patched and darned in many places. He looked like a superannuated bookkeeper, and he spoke in a slow, hesitating manner as though he found it hard to collect his thoughts even for a simple statement. I judged him to be in his late seventies; his hair was silvery white with a yellowish tinge, and face and hands had the waxen pallor of a man who has aged badly. He rarely gave me the direct glance but when he did I had the impression of vitality slowly and painfully gathered up to be shot out in the fraction of a second when his eyes met mine. His were as blue and cold as polar ice.

“I’m an American, too,” he volunteered, presently. “Been out here forty-five years. Don’t know as I’d want to see another forty-five; or even five more. Looks to me as if this was the end of things as I’ve known them.”

“The end? How’s that?” I asked.

“That airship ... What do you think, yourself? No place too far for ’em to go, is there?”

“No; not in these days,” I said.

“Won’t they be flying all over the Pacific in a few more years?”

“It strikes me as likely,” I replied. “Wouldn’t you like that? Suppose you want to go to San Francisco: you can have your dinner here in the evening and land at the Oakland airport in time for breakfast next morning.”

“Don’t know as I’d relish the breakfast much. I’d be thinking of all the tourists and trippers flying this way at the same time, leaving their Sunday newspapers and lunch boxes and paper napkins all over the place. This is the only world we’ve got. I don’t believe in makin’ it so small.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing you and I can do about that.”

When he spoke again, his voice had more heat in it than I had supposed his dry old carcass contained.

“No, we can’t,” he said. “That’s the hell of it!”

A moment later he gave me a curt nod and went out.

A lamp with an old-fashioned china globe stood lighted on the bureau when I returned to the hotel. I was tired after my long journey but upon examining the lumpy bed with the springs making hillocks of the thin mattress, I decided to sit up for a while. The painting of the Stag at Eve looked even more beautifully romantic by lamplight than it had by daylight. I don’t know whether it was an original or a copy, but whoever the artist, he had worked with love and deep feeling. My thoughts went traveling farther and farther away from the present moment; all the way back to boyhood. I saw our sitting room at home, as it was in those days, lighted by the hard-coal burner and just such a china-globed lamp as the one before me; the family seated around the table, my mother darning stockings, my brothers and sisters reading or studying next day’s lessons. I saw myself with my father’s fine illustrated edition of Scott’s Poems on my knees as I read “The Lady of the Lake” for the first time.

Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung

On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan’s spring ...

Nothing read in all the intervening years has ever stirred me as those lines stirred me in boyhood. Then, in the curious instantaneous way in which one memory calls up another, I saw myself at school with Tilson’s Geography open on the desk before me. “Atoll—a Coral Island,” the inscription read, and the engraving above showed such an island as it was supposed to be. A perfect circle of reef-connected islets were geometrically spaced around the enclosed lagoon, with clumps of coconut palms growing here and there and sea fowl skimming over the breakers piling high along the reef. I don’t believe that I had once recalled that sketch since boyhood days, but here it was again, floating bright and clear on the surface of consciousness. And not only that. A moment later another entrancing landscape came into view, an illustration for the lines of a poem in Appleton’s Fourth Reader, I think it was: either that or McGuffey’s:—

Great wide, beautiful, wonderful world,

With the wonderful waters round you curled,

And the wonderful grass upon your breast,

World, you are beautifully drest.

You friendly Earth, how far do you go

With your mountains and plains and the rivers that flow;

With cities and gardens and wonderful isles

And people upon you for thousands of miles?

I’m not sure that I’ve quoted exactly, but the wording isn’t far off. I doubt whether the children of these days have that feeling of awe and wonder and delight, when they think of Mother Earth, that was common to us as kids. They know only too well how far the planet goes, or doesn’t go, and the precise number of hours and minutes needed to reach any part of it. These memories thronging back so unexpectedly gave me a strange, confused emotion, happy and unhappy at the same moment. I’d been too busy with engineering problems; with life as it was, and is, and, I suppose, as it will continue to be, only more so, in our industrialized world, to think often of life as we knew it in boyhood. It was on this same evening that I became uneasily aware of the thickness of the shell, or crust, I’d grown after thirty years of engineering. It was a crust composed of oil, cement, emery dust, steel filings, rust, carbon-monoxide gas, and all the soot and thick greasy smoke belched from the chimneys of hundreds of smelters and refiners. It had been proof against any vivid memories of the past. Perhaps it was Monan’s rill glittering in the moonlight that washed this first channel through it.