The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [46]
2
They stood on the jetty next morning: the first light lay in cold strips along the eastern sky. The huts in the village were still shuttered with silver. At two that morning there had been a typhoon - a wheeling pillar of black cloud driving up from the coast, and the air was cold yet with the rain. They stood with coat-collars turned up watching the French shore, and the carriers squatted on the ground behind them. Mrs Perrot came down the path from the bungalow wiping the white sleep from her eyes, and from across the water very faintly came the bleating of a goat. ‘Are they late?’ Mrs Perrot asked.
‘No, we are early.’ Scobie kept his glasses focused on the opposite shore. He said, ‘They are stirring.’
‘Those poor souls,’ Mrs Perrot said, and shivered with the morning chill.
‘They are alive,’ the doctor said.
‘Yes.’
‘In my profession we have to consider that important.’
‘Does one ever get over a shock like that? Forty days in open boats.’
‘If you survive at all,’ the doctor said, ‘you get over it. It’s failure people don’t get over, and this you see is a kind of success.’
‘They are fetching them out of the huts,’ Scobie said. ‘I think I can count six stretchers. The boats are being brought in.’
‘We were told to prepare for nine stretcher cases and four walking ones,’ the doctor said. ‘I suppose there’ve been some more deaths.’
‘I may have counted wrong. They are carrying them down now. I think there are seven stretchers. I can’t distinguish the walking cases.’
The flat cold light, too feeble to clear the morning haze, made the distance across the river longer than it would seem at noon. A native dugout canoe bearing, one supposed, the walking cases came blackly out of the haze: it was suddenly very close to them. On the other shore they were having trouble with the motor of a launch; they could hear the irregular putter, like an animal out of breath.
First of the walking cases to come on shore was an elderly man with an arm in a sling. He wore a dirty white topee and a native cloth was draped over his shoulders; his free hand tugged and scratched at the white stubble on his face. He said in an unmistakably Scottish accent, ‘Ah’m Loder, chief engineer.’
‘Welcome home, Mr Loder,’ Scobie said. ‘Will you step up to the bungalow and the doctor will be with you in a few minutes?’
‘Ah have no need of doctors.’
‘Sit down and rest. I’ll be with you soon.’
‘Ah want to make ma report to a proper official.’
‘Would you take him up to the house, Perrot?’
‘I’m the District Commissioner,’ Perrot said. ‘You can make your report to me.’
‘What are we waitin’ for then?’ the engineer said. ‘It’s nearly two months since the sinkin’. There’s an awful lot of responsibility on me, for the captain’s dead.’ As they moved up the hill to the bungalow, the persistent Scottish voice, as regular as the pulse of a dynamo, came back to them. ‘Ah’m responsible to the owners.’
The other three had come on shore, and across the river the tinkering in the launch went on: the sharp crack of a chisel, the clank of metal, and then again the spasmodic putter. Two of the new arrivals were the cannon fodder of all such occasions: elderly men with the appearance of plumbers who might have been brothers if they had not been called Forbes and Newall, uncomplaining men without authority, to whom things simply happened. One had a crushed foot and walked with a crutch; the other had his hand bound up with shabby strips of tropical shirt. They stood on the jetty with as natural a lack of interest as they would have stood at a Liverpool street corner waiting for the local to open. A stalwart grey-headed woman in mosquito-boots followed them out of the canoe.