Tales of the South Pacific Part 12

"Two-fifty!" the SeaBee persisted.

At this Mary went into a paroxysm of rage. Tonkinese profanity ricocheted off the surprised SeaBee's head. When he could stand no more of Mary's cursing and the Marines' laughter, he bundled up his wares and moved away. But Mary kept after him. "G.o.ddam stinker!" she screamed hoa.r.s.ely, following that with bursting Tonkinese epithets, and ending with the Marine Corps' choicest vilification: "So and so b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

Then composing her placid face, the old harridan ignored the Marines' applause, smiled sweetly at the next SeaBee, and began fumbling his skirts. When he drew back, she patted him on his shoulder and rea.s.sured him in Pidgin English, "Me look, me look, me buy."

On the way home Atabrine Benny told me how Mary had acquired her vocabulary. "After the new laws she sneaked out here. Does a very good business, although I expect they'll close her out one of these days. Well, after she had been here a little while, this bunch of Marines from Guadal moved in. Rest cure. They came to like the old devil." Then Benny went on to tell of how the Marines, with nothing better to do, would hang around the betel-stained old Tonk and teach her their roughest language.

"Stand up like a man, and tell them to go to h.e.l.l, Mary," the old, tough Marines would tell the old, tough Tonk. Mary would grin, not understanding a word of what they were saying, but after they came to see her for many days in a row the old miracle of the subdued races took place again. The yellow woman learned dozens of white words but the white men learned not one yellow word. When she had mastered their vilest obscenities, they made her an honorary Marine, emblem and all.

The words Mary learned were hardly ones she could have used, say as a salesgirl in Macy's or Jordan Marsh. For example, if a sailor just off a boat asked her the price of a gra.s.s skirt, she would smile sweetly and say, "Fo' dolla'."

"'At's too much for a gra.s.s skirt, baby."

Then Mary would scream at him, thrusting her nose into his face, "Bulls.h.i.t, brother!" She wasn't quite sure what the words meant, but from the way new men would jump back in astonishment as if they had been hit with a board, she knew it was effective. And so she used it for effect, and more men would come back next week and say, "Four bucks for that? Not on your life!" just to hear the weathered old Tonk scream out some phrase they could report to the fellows in the saloon back home, "and then, by G.o.d, maybe those guys would know us guys was really seein' somethin' out here!" And for Mary the best part was that after she had cursed and reviled them enough, the astonished soldiers and sailors usually bought what she had to sell, and at her price.

When it became apparent that b.l.o.o.d.y Mary was not going to abide by the island order, plantation owners asked the government to intervene with the American military authorities.

"Would the island command place b.l.o.o.d.y Mary's kiosk out of bounds?"

"Certainly!" An order went out forthwith, and two military police were detailed to see that no Americans visited the kiosk.

But who was going to keep the kiosk from visiting the Americans? That was a subtle problem, because pretty soon all that the military police were guarding was an empty chunk of canvas strung across a pole about five feet off the ground. Mary wasn't there any more.

She was up the island, hidden among the roots of a banyan tree the Marines had found. She was selling her gra.s.s skirts to more men than before, because she was the only woman who dared defy both the civil and military governments.

"But commander," the civil representative protested. "Your men are still trading with her. The whole purpose of the law is being evaded."

"What can we do? We put her place under restriction. But she doesn't live there any more. It seems to me that's your problem."

"Please, commander! I beg you. Please see what you can do. The plantation owners are complaining." The civil representative bowed.

The island commander scratched his head. His orders were to keep peace and good will, and that meant with plantation owners, not with Tonkinese or sailors off stray ships. Accordingly he dispatched an underling to seek out this d.a.m.ned b.l.o.o.d.y Mary what's her name and see what the score was.

The officer, a naval lieutenant, went. He found Mary under a tree with a half dozen admiring Marines around her. They were teaching her new words. When the lieutenant came up, he bowed and spoke in French. Mary listened attentively, for like most Tonks, she knew French fairly well. The lieutenant was pleased that she followed his words and that she apparently understood that she must stop selling gra.s.s skirts not only at the kiosk but everywhere else as well. He smiled courteously and felt very proud of himself. Dashed few officers hereabout could speak French. He was not, however, prepared for Mary's answer.

Standing erect and smiling at her teachers, she thrust her face into that of the young lieutenant and screamed, "So and so you, major!"

The officer jumped back, appalled! The Marines bit their lips and twisted their stomach muscles into hard knots. Mary just grinned, the reddish betel juice filling the ravines near her mouth. When she saw that the lieutenant was shocked and stunned, she moved closer, until she was touching him. He shrank away from the peach-basket brim, the sateen pantaloons, but he could not writhe away from the hoa.r.s.e, betel-sprayed shout: "Bulls.h.i.t, major!"

All he could say was, "Well!" And with that austere comment on Marine-coached Tonkinese women, he walked stiffly away and drove back to the commander, who laughed down in his belly the way the enlisted men had.

The upshot was one of those grand Navy touches! By heavens, b.l.o.o.d.y Mary was on Marine property now. She was their problem! She wasn't a Navy problem at all! And the curt, very proper note that went to the Marine Commandant made no bones about it: "Get the Tonkinese woman known as b.l.o.o.d.y Mary to h.e.l.l off your property and keep her off." Only the Navy has a much better way of saying something like that to the Marines. The latter, of course, aren't fooled a bit by the formality.

Next morning First Lieutenant Joe Cable, USMCR, from Philadelphia, was given the job of riding herd on one b.l.o.o.d.y Mary. Before he saw her for the first time he wrote home to his girl in Germantown, a lovely fair-haired Bryn Mawr junior, "If you knew my next a.s.signment, you would not believe it. I imagine the fellows at Princeton will vote me their favorite war hero when the news is out. I have been ordered to stop an old Tonkinese woman from selling gra.s.s skirts. I understand the entire Navy tried to stop her and failed. I shall send you daily communiques on my progress." Joe signed the letter and then thought of the disparity between the unknown Tonk and the lovely girl in Germantown. The unreality of the comparison overwhelmed him, and like many fighting men stationed in the South Pacific the terrible question a.s.sailed him once more: "What am I, Joe Cable, doing here?"

Cable brushed the gnawing, unanswerable question from his mind, jumped into his jeep, and drove out to where b.l.o.o.d.y Mary had set up her new kiosk. It was a strip of canvas, supplied by admirers and tacked by them onto a large banyan tree. In the amazing recesses of the remarkable roots she hid her wares, bringing out only those items which she thought she might sell at any one time.

"Haloo, major!" she said, grinning her best betel juice smile. Lt. Cable winced. What could men see amusing in such an old beast?

He did not return her smile. Instead, he kicked at the gra.s.s skirts. "No!" he remonstrated, shaking his forefinger back and forth across her face. "No!"

He spoke so firmly that b.l.o.o.d.y Mary withheld her storm of profanity. The men were disappointed.

"You men," Lt. Cable said sharply. "Take down the canvas."

Reluctantly, Mary's tutors stepped forward and grabbed the canvas, gingerly at first. But they had no need to be afraid. b.l.o.o.d.y Mary had nothing to say. Slowly, sorrowfully, the Marines pulled down her kiosk, bundled her souvenirs together in a box the lieutenant provided. They just didn't understand. After the way Mary had handled that d.a.m.ned naval lieutenant, too! They would have given a lot to have seen Mary take a fall out of stuck-up Lt. Cable, who claimed he was from Princeton.

But Mary saw something. Just what it was, neither she nor anyone else could ever say. But with her sure instinct, she knew that here was no Atabrine Benny, no pusillanimous French official delegate, no conniving SeaBee, no bored Marine with a few hours and dollars to spend. Here was a man. She smiled at the lieutenant, a real, human, warm smile. Her old face, weathered in Tonkin China and the seas between, hardened in the plantations, beamed. She touched his collar devices with a firm, knotted finger. "You big stuff!" she said. "You no so-and-so G. I."

It would be difficult to say why Lt. Cable kept coming back to check on b.l.o.o.d.y Mary after he closed out her kiosk. She was giving no one any trouble. Plantation owners were content with the new arrangement whereby they received their fair cut of the gra.s.s-skirt bonanza. The government was pleased. The naval commander was happy that everything was satisfactory, and besides he had a wonderful story about that upstart a.s.sistant of his who was such a d.a.m.ned pain in the neck... or was it elsewhere?

But Lt. Cable did keep coming back. He rather suspected that Mary was doing a bigger business than ever after dark, and some officers were beginning to wonder exactly where all this bad gin was coming from. Officially, of course, Cable knew nothing and said nothing. He wasn't paid to deal in suspicions. Perhaps it was b.l.o.o.d.y Mary's frank hero worship that attracted him. Whenever Cable appeared, she would jump up, brush her clothes, straighten her ridiculous hat, knock the sand out of her shoes, and smile pleasantly. It was almost as if she were standing at attention. When Cable tried to make her give up her Marine device, which was sacrilegious around her neck, she refused. "Me no so-and-so G. I." she protested.

"No, no! Mary!" Cable shouted at her, wagging his finger again across her face. "Bad! Bad word!"

Mary knew the Marine word was bad, but she, like the Marines, also knew that it was effective. But Cable spoke with such authority that she willingly forswore the word and its fellows when he was around.

And Cable was around a good deal. He used to drop by in the hot afternoons. Even the flies would be asleep, and cattle would be in the shade. No birds would sing, and from the cacao trees no lorikeets would fly. It was tropic midday, and b.l.o.o.d.y Mary with her lieutenant would sit in the cavernous shade of the banyan tree and talk.

"It would be difficult to say what we talk about," Cable wrote to the Bryn Mawr junior. "I can't speak Tonkinese and Old Mary can't speak English. We can both speak a good deal of French, of course, and I've learned some Pidgin English. It is surprising how well we get along. We talk mostly about Tonkin, where Mary lives far inland among the mountains that border China proper. It is very interesting, out here, to talk to human beings."

For myself, I think Lt. Cable hit the nail on the head when he made that observation. It was sometimes terrifying to me to see the mental hunger that men experienced for companionship in the islands. At the laundry on my base, for example, the men had a little banjo-footed dog. They raised him from a pup, and while he was still a pup, a truck ran over him. That afternoon those men could not look at one another. That night none of them wrote letters home. Next morning they stared at the ceiling above their bunks. And I am not fooling when I say that for several days the salt had gone out of life. On the third day one of them bought another pup from an Army outfit. After lunch he hesitatingly presented the scrawny little dog. The laundry workers looked at it. "G.o.ddam skinny little pup," one of them observed, but that dog made a great difference.

So far I have seen men tame pigs, goats, a jacka.s.s, a coconut tree cuscus, two chickens, cats, and a bowl of ultramarine tropical fish so beautiful that it was difficult to believe they lived. Pigs were the best pets, after dogs, because you could never look at them without laughing. And when they lived in a hut right along with you, they were surprisingly clean. One man could even housebreak pigs!

Throughout their existence on the edge of a foreign and forbidding jungle, perched right on the edge of the relentless ocean, men lived in highly tense conditions. Throbbing nature was all about them. Life grew apace, like the papaya trees, a generation in five months.

And in all this super-pulsating life there were no women. Only half-scented folded bits of paper called letters.

As a result, sensible men shoved back into una.s.sailable corners of their souls thoughts that otherwise would have surged through and wracked them. They very rarely told dirty jokes. They fought against expressing friendliness or interest in any other man. From time to time horrifying stories would creep around a unit. "Two men down at Noumea. Officers, too. Dishonorable discharge! Couple years at Portsmouth!" And everyone would shudder... and wonder.

And so men in the tropics, with life running riot about them, read books, and wrote letters, and learned to love dogs better than good food, and went on long hikes, and went swimming, and wrote letters, and wrote letters, and slept. Of course, sometimes a terrible pa.s.sion would well up, and there would be a murder, or a suicide. Or like the time a crane fell over and crushed a poor dumb fellow too stupid to operate a crane. All morning a stolid farm boy stood by the body, and no one could move him until the heavy machinery was lifted off the mangled man.

"Come on," the MP's would shout. "Get away from there! Break it up!"

And the stolid fellow would reply, "He was ma' bes' buddy." Then everyone left him alone.

I doubt if Lt. Cable ever thought about himself in just those terms, but he knew very well that he mustn't brood too long over that tousle-headed girl in Germantown. He knew-even though his tour of battle duty on Guadalca.n.a.l had been short-that consuming pa.s.sions are better kept in check. They burn you out too d.a.m.ned quick, otherwise.

And yet there was the need for some kind of continuing interest in something. He'd had a pup, but the d.a.m.ned thing had grown up, as pups will, and it was off somewhere on another island. He'd done a lot of reading, too. Serious stuff, about mechanics, and a little history, too. But after a while reading becomes a bore.

b.l.o.o.d.y Mary of course was different. She was old and repulsive, with her parched skin and her jagged teeth. But finer than any dog or any book, she was a sentient being with a mind, a personality, a history, a human memory, and-Lt. Cable winced at the idea-a soul. Unlike the restless tropical sea, she grew tired and slept. Unlike the impenetrable jungle, she could be perceived. Unlike the papayas and the road vines, she lived a generation, grew old, and died. She was subject to human laws, to a human rate of living, to a human world. And by heavens, she was an interesting old woman.

"She has a husband," Lt. Cable wrote his sweetheart. "She says he is on another island where the French have moved all the young girls. She lives here to trade with the Americans. I think if the French knew this they would deport her to the other island, too. But since she stays here and behaves herself, I have no mind to report her. In fact, I find talking French and Pidgin English with her amusing and instructive. I may even arrange to take a few days off and visit the other island with her when she takes money to her husband. She says he will be surprised, for she has not less than nine hundred dollars. That will be a great deal of money in Tonkin. In fact, it would be a lot of money right in Philadelphia."

It was about two weeks after this letter that Atabrine Benny arranged a boat trip to the island upon which b.l.o.o.d.y Mary's husband lived. Benny had to see to it that all Tonks had their supply of atabrine, and he visited the outlying islands monthly. This time he agreed to take b.l.o.o.d.y Mary along, and at the last minute Lt. Cable decided to join them. He brought with him a mosquito net, a revolver, a large thermos jug of water, a basket of tinned food, and a bottle of atabrine tablets.

"My G.o.d, lieutenant," Benny said. "I got a million of 'em."

Everyone laughed, and the boat shoved off. I was down in the predawn dark to bid Benny farewell and instruct him to pick me up a wild boar's tusk, if he could. That was when I first met Lt. Cable. He was a tall fellow, about six feet one. He was lean and weighed not more than one hundred and seventy-five pounds. He had not the graceful motions of a natural athlete, but he was a powerfully competent man. I thought then that he would probably give a good account of himself in a fight. He had a shock of unruly blond hair. His face, although not handsome, was masculine; and he carried himself as if he were one of the young men to whom the world will one day belong. To this quiet a.s.surance he added a little of the Marine's inevitable c.o.c.kiness. He was an attractive fellow, and it was clearly to be seen that b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, the embattled Tonk, shared my opinion. Ignoring Atabrine Benny completely, she sat in the bows with Cable and talked French in barbarous accents.

The island to which Benny was going lay sixteen miles to the east. It was a large and brooding island, miasmic with malaria, old fetishes, sickness and deep shadows. It was called Vanicoro, and in the old times was known as a magic place. Four peaks lined the center of the island. Two of them were active volcanoes. Only the bravest natives dared live on Vanicoro, and they were the last to give up cannibalism.

As the small boat drew near the island b.l.o.o.d.y Mary pointed at Vanicoro and a.s.sured Cable, "You like! You like very much!" The Marine studied the volcanoes. Upon them the red glow of sunrise rapidly lightened into the gold of early morning. Mists rose from them like smoke from writhing lava.

"That's right pretty," Benny called back. "Look at them hills smoke!"

Lt. Cable watched the mists of Vanicoro surrendering to the early sun. And then, as a child, while playing with an old familiar toy, sees a new thing from the corner of his eye, Cable suddenly saw, without looking at it, the island of Bali-ha'i.

"Benny!" he cried. "There's another island!"

There was another island! Bali-ha'i was an island of the sea, a jewel of the vast ocean. It was small. Like a jewel, it could be perceived in one loving glance. It was neat. It had majestic cliffs facing the open sea. It had a jagged hill to give it character. It was green like something ever youthful, and it seemed to curve itself like a woman into the rough shadows formed by the volcanoes on the greater island of Vanicoro.

From two miles distance no seafarer could have guessed that Bali-ha'i existed. Like most lovely things, one had to seek it out and even to know what one was seeking before it could be found.

It was here on Bali-ha'i, within the protecting arm of Vanicoro, that the women of the islands lived. The French, with Gallic foresight and knowledge in these things, had housed on this haven of the seas all young women from the islands. Every girl, no matter how ugly or what her color, who might normally be raped by Americans was hidden on Bali-ha'i.

The little boat swung into the channel. "Look!" Cable gasped. Below him the white coral beach of Bali-ha'i slipped down by slow degrees until twenty fathoms of green water rested over it. But still it could be seen. The entire bay glowed from the whiteness of the sand and the golden sunlight now piercing and probing through the valleys of the volcanoes.

Coconut trees lined the sh.o.r.e of Bali-ha'i. Behind them banyans, giant ferns, and strange tropical trees grew in profusion and smothered the slopes of the hill. Through clearings in the jungle, gra.s.s of wondrous green appeared, and through both gra.s.s and trees peeped flower gardens of dancing color. Lt. Cable had to close his eyes. The gardens of Bali-ha'i were like the gardens at home. He knew those flowers in the infinite jungle had been planted by women.

His thoughts were jarringly broken when Atabrine Benny tugged at the bell of the small boat and sent loud peals echoing through the narrow channel. Violently he swung the clapper back and forth until the islands fairly sang with music. Even then he continued in sheer exuberance, and melody piled upon melody so that even the peaks of Vanicoro seemed to dance.

From every hut and hovel on Bali-ha'i people poured forth. First the watchful sisters from the hospitals appeared in front of their sickrooms on the hillside. Next a host of screaming children, all boys, all naked, ran down to a rickety pier built by Tonkinese laborers. Then older native boys, perhaps nine and ten years old, piled into their own small outrigger canoes and started paddling furiously across the water. Two old men, in statelier outriggers, sedately plied their paddles and swept with leisurely speed past the frenetic boys.

Then came the girls! There were native girls with conical b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and red sarongs about their hips. There were inquisitive Chinese girls who were pulled back by equally inquisitive Chinese mothers. Tonkinese girls, as yet unmarried, stood close to their distinctive white and red shacks. And in the distance, properly aloof, a few French girls demonstrated their inherited superiority by looking with disdain upon the entire proceedings. They wore white dresses, and you could not discern whether their b.r.e.a.s.t.s were conical or flabby.

At this moment people on sh.o.r.e were satisfied that Benny was in the boat! Someone cried, "It's the doctor!" and the happy call was echoed up and down the beach. The children shouted it to one another, for it meant that they would have sweets from the big, green candy tin. Old men laughed for to them Benny meant cigarettes. Young girls giggled, for they knew that if they b.u.mped against the jovial fellow and let him pat them on the bottom, he would give them some more of the good red cloth. White women were pleased to see him, for he brought endless and delightful gossip from the home island. And the sisters in the hospital were ready to welcome him, for they knew him to be a kindly fellow who could, by one way or another, get them almost any medicine they might need.

So everyone on Bali-ha'i laughed and whistled; and someone at the school started ringing a bell, whereupon Benny rang his louder. But all this time, on Vanicoro across the channel not a sound was made. Not a leaf rustled. Not a voice raised welcome. High in the hills at least three hundred men and women watched the boat come into the channel, make a ringing of bells, and tie up to the wharf of Bali-ha'i. In fact, the watchers of Vanicoro had seen the boat when it was six miles out, and all silently they watched it come... almost to their own island. Silently, they would watch it while it was there, and in the late afternoon they would watch it until it was eight or nine miles out to sea.

Atabrine Benny always visited Bali-ha'i with mixed emotions. On the one hand he enjoyed anything strange and recondite. He loved seeing brown young girls, black girls with firm bosoms, trim French girls with white frocks, sedate sisters in long black. The tragically slim strip of land was part of the South Pacific, and he reveled in its strangeness. But even as he did so, he thought of Waco, Texas, and his wife. Brusquely, he dismissed the thought. In Waco he was a druggist's helper. On Bali-ha'i he was a doctor. A consulting doctor, and he was happy.

As the boat touched the quivering dock, Benny leaped out. It seemed as if his pudgy stomach would pull him forward onto the wet boards, but he was amazingly agile. "h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo!" he called out to everyone who cl.u.s.tered about the dock. He patted all the Tonks on the head, tried to pat the shy black girls on the bottom, and smiled at the sedate sisters who stood on the stone steps.

"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo!" he cried, waving his atabrine bottle. "Here comes the doctor!" In his exuberance, in the tireless, sweaty, steaming friendliness and at-homeness of the man everyone could see why Americans were the way they were. Atabrine Benny was all the traveling salesmen of Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California rolled into one. Even the suspicious sisters liked to take atabrine when he dispensed it!

When Benny jumped from the small boat onto the dock, Lt. Cable wondered what he should do. In the excitement of seeing old friends, Benny had completely ignored him. He studied the crowd that had gathered both on the pier and in the water. The little boys were delightful. He wondered how they managed their boats so well. The older boys were adolescently aloof, but there was much shoving amongst them. They professed not to look at the Marine, but subdued whispers sped along the sh.o.r.e.

"Jay-gee! One bar. Silver."

"No! No! Marine! See the little round ball. Marine!"

"Basil is right. Marine. First lieutenant!"

"Jerome is right. Marine. Jerome is right!" The Melanesian boys still refused to look at First Lt. Joe Cable, but every one of them saw that he was armed, that he was sunburnt, that he wore the Guadalca.n.a.l patch, that he was not an aviator, and that he didn't quite know what to do. All of the boys liked him on sight, and were prepared to talk with him or trade with him, or show him the trail to the cliffs. But he made no move of friendship, so they scowled all that day along the fringes of the crowd and pushed one another. In the afternoon there was one fairly rough fight.

Of course, Lt. Cable saw the boys. He even wondered what kinds of games they played. But he soon forgot his interest, pa.s.sing as it was. For this was the first time in his life he had seen so many women... in fact, any women... walking about with no clothes on above their hips. He was not a prurient fellow, but the natural interests of any young man demand that he know as much about women as he properly can; and since there is not enough time in one man's life to learn all there is to know, one had better study when the opportunity presents. So, purposing each moment to call after Benny, he stood there in the boat bewildered by the scene on the small pier. Above him stood not less than thirty native girls ranging in age from twelve to twenty. They bore melons and pineapples and bananas and mangoes and split coconuts and yams and breadfruit and everything else that grows in such prodigal quant.i.ties in the South Pacific.

Cable was truly enraptured. The frieze of women looked like models awaiting the immortalizing brush of Gauguin. Unaware of their forbidding ugliness by American middle cla.s.s standards, they were equally unaware of their surpa.s.sing beauty by the artist's immortal standards.

Cable, being neither exclusively an artist nor an American, had no consistent thoughts as he looked up to the dark faces with their gleaming teeth. Their b.r.e.a.s.t.s disturbed him mightily, and when one girl clutched anew at a melon, throwing her gingham sarong awry, he both blushed and found himself unable... or unwilling... to look away. Like the jungle, like the fruits of the jungle, adolescent girls seemed to abound in unbelievable profusion.

"You like? You like? You like?" they called in musical cadences.

He did like. He liked very much, and before he could stop himself he had bought the stern of the boat full of fruit. When he went to sort out some lengths of red cloth to pay the girls, who were now scrambling over the boat itself, he happened to smell his hands. They were redolent with the gorgeous scent of true tropical pineapples ripened on the ground. Unaware of any change in himself, he discovered that he felt very happy. And from the hills of Vanicoro the watchers looked at the boat and then at one another! It could not be believed that for a few pineapples, for some papayas, and such little papayas, one could get cloth!

It was at this moment that b.l.o.o.d.y Mary rescued her lieutenant from more fruit, more b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and more thighs. "Psssst!" she exploded at the girls. "You go! You go! Bimeby you come. Bimeby you come. Bring chickens." With masterful gestures and determination she pushed the native girls away, motioned to the men in the outriggers to leave, discouraged the naked boys so that they dropped from the sides of the boat. It was only proper that as a Tonkinese she should exercise her endowed rights over the inferior Melanesians. Like a true grande dame she cleared the way for the greater n.o.bility, a white lieutenant, to step ash.o.r.e.

But as he did so, as he walked down the pier in front of b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, he entertained a persistent question that neither he nor any other American fighting man has ever really answered: "What am I doing here? How did I, Joe Cable, of Philadelphia, wind up out here? This is Bali-ha'i, and a year ago I had never heard of it. What am I doing here?" The question pounded upon his ears in exactly the same way it does upon the ears of a commuter from New Roch.e.l.le some morning as he stands in Grand Central Station. He has stood in that station daily for nineteen years, and yet on some one unpredictable morning the meaninglessness of it all bursts in upon him, and he asks, "What am I doing here?" It is certain that Herod of Judea asked himself that question, too. Like Herod, like the man from New Roch.e.l.le, like Alexander in Afghanistan, Joe Cable could find no logical reason to explain why he was on Bali-ha'i that morning.

But being there, he was disposed to enjoy his experience to the full. He was not, however, prepared for what b.l.o.o.d.y Mary had in store for him.

She took the lead as soon as Cable reached the sandy beach. "We go! We go!" she said at every intersection. She took him past the native huts, and the native girls stayed behind. She took him through the wild coconut trees to the climbing path that led through the loveliest tropical gardens he had ever seen. They were the gardens of the Chinese, filled with fruits and flowers. She took him past the small hospital where he heard Benny laughing with the hard-working sisters. Then she beckoned him around a corner, and suddenly he was on a plateau from which he could see the bay, and the boat, and endless blue of water upon coral sand. Between him and the bay stretched the coconut trees, the gardens, the little huts, and the spotless beach. It was impossible to think that a year ago, before the j.a.ps threatened the islands and Americans threatened the girls, Bali-ha'i was a wilderness.

"We go!" insisted Mary, and Lt. Cable stopped his inspection of the bay, but even as he turned his eyes away, they rested upon the peaks of Vanicoro. They, too, were clean and lovely that morning as if the old volcanoes had burned them white.

Cable now followed Mary along a narrow footpath. Up to this moment he had not wondered where she was taking him. Probably to some Tonkinese hut, he concluded, and he had no time to reconsider before the waddling old woman stopped short, stepped aside, and pointed proudly at a clean, whitewashed house beneath a protecting cl.u.s.ter of four large jungle trees. The earth around the house was packed flat. At the door stood an old Tonkinese man, a younger man, and his wife.

Cable stood where he was and watched Mary greet her friends. They talked furiously, but they did not kiss. They grabbed one another's shoulders, but they did not shake hands. Yet when Mary brought them over and jabbered in Tonkinese, each one sedately shook Cable's hand and promptly walked down the path he had just climbed.

At this moment Mary beckoned him to follow her, and he watched her disappear into the open door at which a moment before her three friends had stood. Cable entered behind her, stooping as he did so. When he had blinked once or twice, he saw that he was standing on an earthen floor, miraculously clean. There were few articles of furniture, but against one wall stood a young Tonkinese girl, perhaps seventeen years old. She was a small girl, slender, with very black hair which was smooth about her head. She wore the Tonkinese white blouse and black trousers. She was barefooted, and her face was a lovely oval, yellow, finely modeled. When she smiled, her teeth were as white as the native girls' had been.

As in a trance, Cable sucked in his breath audibly. The girl smiled, and at that moment Cable heard a hissing noise. He turned around, frightened. But it was only b.l.o.o.d.y Mary. She had her peach-basket hat in her left hand. Stains of betel juice were drenching the ravines of her mouth, which was grinning, broadly. Her broken teeth showed through, black, black as night. She winked her right eye heavily and asked, "You like?" Then she turned and fled down the path.

Cable stood in complete embarra.s.sment, looking at the little Tonkinese girl. He was pretty sure that b.l.o.o.d.y Mary and her kinfolk would not return to the hut for a long time, and that bewildered him. The silent girl, standing straight against the wattled wall, confused him still more. But counteracting all of this uncertainty was a tremendous driving force, deep within him, that resolved all doubts and dispelled faint-heartedness.

"h.e.l.lo!" he said, stepping toward the quiet, straight girl. She kept her hands pressed to her sides, but she was not afraid. She looked at the tall Marine, and had to raise her head slightly to do so. Standing thus, her fine b.r.e.a.s.t.s were outlined by her white smock. Through force of habit, she smiled at the stranger.

As she did so, her oval face looked exquisite against the dark hair and wattled wall. Her white teeth shone clearly. Her firm chin looked resolute. She was altogether delectable, and Cable knew it. From that moment there was no uncertainty.

With two long steps he was before the unfrightened girl. He smiled down at her, then enveloped her in his right arm and kissed her feverishly upon her thin, hard lips. She sighed, like a child, and the motion of her sighing thrust her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against Cable's hand. Eagerly he sought for them, and in a moment he had drawn the white smock over her head. In rare beauty she stood proudly against the wall, naked to the waist, incredibly feminine. It was then that she spoke to Cable, in French.

"You speak French?" he asked, mumbling as he removed his brown shirt and spread it on the clean, foot-hammered floor. Upon his own shirt he placed hers and then slowly pulled her down to rest upon it. Her bare feet left a reluctant trail along the coral sand, leading from the wall to her nuptial couch.

"So you speak French!" Cable whispered into her tiny, pellucid ear.

"The sisters taught me," she replied, quietly. "They would be angry with me now. They taught me not to do this." She did not smile as she spoke, nor did she turn away in modesty. She was merely informing Cable that in spite of what her mother, b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, had advised her in hurried Tonkinese when Cable first entered the hut, she knew that she was doing wrong.

"You speak very good French," Cable whispered hoa.r.s.ely, his hands seeking her slim, pliant ankles. Slowly he grasped the legs of the black sateen trousers and began to pull them from her frail body. As he did so, he could hear in his mind's recesses the warnings of the sisters, the old preachments of all who had instructed him. But as the sateen trousers pulled free, he clasped the little girl to him with a convulsive motion, and all preachments, old or new, died away.

Later, when the Tonkinese girl was crying softly to herself, Cable found incarnadine proof that he was the first who had loved her. The white smock would have to be washed. "What can you do?" he asked in broken French.

"I'll wash it," she said tearfully.

"Have you another?" he inquired.

"Oh, no!" she responded, as if that were the farthest impossibility in the world. "It will dry." And she proceeded to wash out both her smock and Cable's shirt. Then she placed them side by side on the roof of the red and white hut, on the slope of the roof longest hidden from the path. Cable, who helped her, one hand clasping her breast as he did so, felt the sun pull the water from the cloth.