Visitants by Randolph Stow Read Free Book Online Page A

stood on end.
    But more must have called and passed on, and spread the news of Kailuana. So settlers then, with wives, food-plants, livestock. Making their gardens and burying their dead. Simple people, the first ones, but the next wave more sophisticated. They took the fruit-trees and pigs of the earlier people, declared themselves an aristocracy, made the others stoop. Because, they said, the world is divided into four clans, and we are the top people. So everyone in the world knew his place, and things went tidily.
    Try to imagine all that when the first ship, the French one, bore down under full sail. The terror. Yet they coped, they cope with everything. ‘The world is divided into four clans.’ The Frenchmen fitted, they parted friends.
    And the same, next century, with the sailors, traders, missionaries, Government officers. They dropped in for a day or two, never came back, but they fitted. And the same, fifty years ago, with young MacDonnell and his partner. They arrived and announced that they owned the islet. Nobody sweated. It was all in the scheme of things.
    It’s a comforting institution, that scheme of things. When the Japs dropped a bomb on the MacDonnell’s copra shed, Kailuana laughed. Not that they wanted to see the MacDonnell done out of anything, but a copra shed exploding, that was funny. No one said: ‘What about me?’
    Keep thinking about time, vast stretches of time, so as not to think: ‘What about me?’ Where was I when the mountains came out of the sea. Seize hold of that moment, concentrate on it, meditate on it. Then I know where I stand with time and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Alistair, Alistair, she said, it doesn’t matter. Don’t think about it, it doesn’t matter.
MACDONNELL
    The huge pink youth stared and stared at me, with the bird on my hat, and I took him for a fool, as so many of them are; but he was never a fool, only innocent, a little innocent, as he thinks I am too, and he told me so one night, on the veranda, in that very place. He stared and stared at the bird, and then the wind-burnt face opened up on the big teeth and he said: ‘Do you always wear that?’
    ‘Not if I can help it, old man,’ I said, ‘but he comes to have a look at the visitors and I don’t see him coming. Go away, Popu,’ I said, shaking my head, and the bird flew out screeching into the grove.
    ‘I am Dalwood,’ the boy said. ‘I go around with Misa Kodo doing good.’
    ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘Popu means excrement. The women named him that because of his habits in the house. I am MacDonnell. But call me Mak. Where has Cawdor gone?’
    ‘He is there,’ Dalwood said, and I turned and saw Cawdor at the other end of the veranda, looking down on my village, against the thicket of frangipani glowing pink in the last sun.
    ‘Cawdor,’ I said, ‘you haven’t introduced us, old man.’
    ‘Sorry,’ Cawdor said, coming back to us, his skin very dark. I used to wonder if there might be a touch of the tar-brush there, but that is not possible, he was a son of the manse, a dark Scot. ‘Tim Dalwood,’ he said, ‘the MacDonnell of Kailuana.’
    ‘Do you want a rinse, old man?’ I said to Dalwood.
    ‘Do I want a what?’ he said.
    ‘If you need to pumpship,’ I said, ‘do it over the veranda rail, planter’s privilege here.’
    ‘“Pumpship,”’ Dalwood repeated. ‘Hey, Batman, listen to the words.’
    Cawdor said, looking absent: ‘Mak’s always a year ahead of
Time
magazine with the slang.’
    ‘I haven’t been off the island for seven years, old man,’ I said, ‘or out of the Territory for fourteen, and I haven’t spoken English, except to the wireless, since the
Chinampa
came three weeks ago, if you want to know.’
    ‘That’s fantastic,’ Dalwood said, and I saw his fingers playing with the strap of the camera that he had slung over his left shoulder (is it part of the uniform of the new breed?) and his eyes arranging me in some grotesque pose, and