South of the Line/The Inevitable Ingram

by Ralph Stock

 

The Inevitable Ingram

THERE was something going on out there to the westward. The sunset was the same miracle of beauty that it usually is near the Equator, but below and beyond them there hovered a gray-green void that slowly spread like some disfiguring disease over the fair face of the sky. And the heat! It was slow asphyxiation.

200px|frameless|left Ingram had seen and felt all this before. Once, in his overseeing days, it had heralded the wiping of a vast estate from the face of the earth. And again, only six years earlier, it had spelt the mowing of a neat swathe through three bungalows, a medley of "labour lines," and five hundred acres of young rubber. It had not meant very much to him in those days; the devastated properties were not his, and as a spectacle it had been magnificent. But now——

He leant out over the veranda railing, a gaunt, anxious figure in the encroaching gloom. Twice he looked back over his shoulder before speaking. Through the mosquito door streamed a flood of homely yellow light. His wife sat beside the wicker table, sewing. Ingram's grip of the veranda railing tightened.

"Olive!" he called softly.

She came, a pale wisp of a woman in the loose, flowing wrapper of the Islands, and stood beside him at the rail.

"Yes?" she said.

"There's something coming up," said Ingram, staring over the sea. "It may be something, and it may be nothing, but it's the season, and we ought to be ready."

"What had I better do?" she asked him in a low, colourless voice.

"Take whatever you value on to the hill," he told her—"Roko, the sewing-machine, anything. I'll be there in a few minutes."

She went into the living room and stood for a moment looking about her. "Anything she valued!" She smiled. It was so like Bob to imagine there was anything—on Tahao.

Roko, the fox terrier sybarite, was engaged in lethargic fly-catching operations on his favourite mat. The sewing-machine in its intensely varnished case with gold lettering reflected the lamplight with customary brilliance. A dog and a sewing-machine! She took them to the "hill" as directed, and sat in the sand with her alleged valuables on either hand, waiting.

Tahao was an atoll, and what Bob persisted with ludicrous gravity in calling the "hill" was the highest point on it, at least ten feet above the level of the sea. From its summit one commanded a view of perhaps a mile more ocean than could be seen from the beach. Also it afforded a refuge for those who wished to cling to the last delectable moments of life if the sea saw fit to inundate Tahao, which was entirely probable.

Through the stagnant darkness sounds filtered up to the "hill"—Bob's deep-toned exhortations to the two "boys," their jabbered response, the methodical thud of a maul, the crackle and scrape of corrugated iron. Olive knew precisely what was going on. They were driving pegs deep into the ground at the four corners of the house, and passing wires over the roof to hold it down. This, their home, must be anchored to Tahao at all costs. Bob would see to that. He invariably saw to everything. Life, even on Tahao, was of such immense importance to him.

Olive sat with hands clasped about her knees. She had thought her mind long since numb, but to-night, in face of the omnipotent threat hovering on the horizon, she found herself piecing together the twisted fragments of her married life like an ineffectual puzzle.

 

No one could have faced heavy odds with more fortitude, more thoroughness, and less avail than Bob Ingram. As incapable of recognizing defeat as of accomplishing victory, he staggered to his feet after each reverse and fought on with an ox-like stolidity that Olive knew to be heroic and blamed herself for finding exasperating.

For three years he had striven to make a home for the woman he loved. It was here—on Tahao. Then had come the vanilla boom. According to Bob, there was nothing like vanilla. The demand was unlimited. In five years, or less, they would be in a position to install a manager, and live in God's country. Well, either vanilla did not like Tahao, or Tahao did not like vanilla. After eighteen months of precarious existence, as wearing to the nerves of its attendants as that of an exacting invalid, it died.

But what of that? A trading cutter was the thing! Freight rates were fantastic. The vessel would pay for herself in a year, and then——These were the days when Bob's enthusiasms were infectious. With considerable pomp the cutter was christened Olive and reduced to matchwood a month later on a neighbouring reef.

This was a calamity. There was no denying it. For a whole day Bob patrolled the veranda in subdued fashion, but at breakfast the next morning he returned to the attack with redoubled vigour. It appeared that he had explored Tahao lagoon as never before, and there was bêche-de-mer there, quantities of it. He explained, with the rekindled light of enthusiasm in his pale eyes, that bêche-de-mer was rapidly coming into favour as the most nutritious of table delicacies, fetching untold wealth per ton delivered in Papeete. He had figured it out, and if he worked with the "boys," there was a fortune in it within two years—or was it three? He consulted an old envelope, disfigured with pencilled calculations, and found it to be three.

Olive watched them set out in the whale boat, saw through the telescope their pigmy figures splashing through the lagoon shallows or clambering over the reef, and toward evening the return of the heavily laden whale boat. Then, after a hasty meal, smoke boxes were erected on the beach, and the task of curing the bêche-de-mer was carried on into the night.

When the day's work was done, Bob flung himself, exhausted, unspeakably begrimed, but happy, into a cane chair on the veranda.

"We're on to it now, little woman," he grinned. And Olive smiled back, wondering, as she did so, why it was so impossible for her to share his faith.

She could not watch him for long and remain inactive. On the third evening she donned a work-worn overall and plunged her hands into the revolting mess. It was necessary to impale each sea slug on a little stick before placing it in the smoke box. Surely she could do this! But no. Bob seized her wrist on the instant and conducted her to the house like a wayward child. It was the first time she had seen him really angry.

"I won't have it!" he stormed. "Whoever heard of such a thing?"

Argument she knew to be worse than useless. It worried him, and that was the last thing Olive wished to do.

"Don't you see?" he pleaded later. "If I can't keep my end of things going, I'm no good. The house is yours."

And with the house, and its predominating features of a dog and a sewing-machine, Olive was forced to be content.

"Ten tons!" he informed her triumphantly at the end of the month. "At this rate——"

At this rate, and by recourse to the mathematical envelope, he was able to prove that the length of time required to make a fortune had been over-estimated. It was two years, after all, not three. In the meantime, he had reduced himself to the resemblance of a skeleton, and there was a feverish light in his eyes that Olive recognized with secret dread.

The arrival of the schooner that condescended to call at Tahao every three months was always the event that may be imagined, but on the next occasion, and after two months' intimacy with bêche-de-mer, it was nothing short of thrilling.

The captain, a hard-headed, soft-hearted Scot, came ashore in the whale boat with his customary contributions of rum and cigars, and settled down on the veranda to make his brief visit the pleasant thing that it invariably was. Papeete was booming, it appeared. There was talk of a tramway—a tramway in Papeete! Copra was soaring; shell was rocketing——

"Ye hae nothing for me this trip?" he suggested at last. It was the invariable signal that he must be going. He always said it, and always with the tactful addition of "this trip," though he knew that not on this trip, nor on any other, would Tahao supply his schooner with a cargo.

And it was here that Bob sprang his child-like surprise on the visitor. Without a word, and labouring under intense excitement, he led the captain to the stores shed and flung wide the doors.

From earthen floor to corrugated iron roof the place was stacked with bêche-de-mer, representing a work comparable with the pyramids. Had he anything "this trip"? Well, he had, that was all.

The captain advanced into the gloom, selected an immaculately cured slug from the pile, and turned it slowly on a horny palm.

"Is it all like this?" he inquired shortly. He was talking business now.

"All," stammered Bob.

The captain shook his head sadly.

"Too bad, too bad," he muttered absently. "They're 'chalk fish', ye ken. Wouldn't pay freight these days. Now, if they'd been 'deep-water blacks'...."

At this juncture he stopped, because it was necessary to lift Bob Ingram from the ground and carry him to his bed, where he remained, in a state of alternate coma and delirium, for upward of a week.

This surely was the end, Olive told herself, with a secret and guilty joy. There was nothing more on Tahao to be undertaken, persisted in, and failed over. It was her turn now. She would nurse him back to health and, in the subtle ways known only to a woman, persuade him to abandon ambition for the less harried paths of content. A new interest had come into her life. Her manner changed, and Bob noticed it.

"Olive," he said one evening, during his convalescence on the veranda, "Olive, I've been thinking."

"You mustn't—yet," she said. "Try and rest. There's plenty of time."

He turned in his chair and looked into her eyes. "But that's just it," he said; "there isn't. I've been thinking about you."

"About me?"

"Yes. I haven't thought enough about you. You—you've been splendid."

"Good gracious, is that all?"

"Not quite. You need a change. Tahao is no place for a woman."

So he realized that. After three years Bob realized that much. Olive's head bent lower over the needle-work in her lap.

"What's the matter with clearing out for a while?" he droned on. "Sydney, San Francisco, anywhere you like?"

"Nothing that I can see," said Olive in a carefully controlled voice. "It would set us up."

"Ah, I didn't mean that," he objected gently. "I can't very well get away—just now. Later, perhaps, when—when I've really got things going here." He stirred uneasily. "I've been thinking about that, too," he went on absently. "I see now where I've been going wrong. Too much of a hurry. Too much get-rich-quick. It can't be done outside of a city office, and we're on an atoll. When you come down to bedrock, there's only one thing—copra."

He paused. Olive made no comment, and presently he went on.

"Listen!" And she listened, with the old, prophetic instinct of fatal futility, to the praises of the cocoanut palm. There was no doubt about the dried kernel of the cocoanut. It was currency, and it was indigenous to Tahao. He was a fool for not having planted up the island with it at the outset. Nothing could hap- pen to copra.... And at the end of it all she said:

"But doesn't it take seven years for the trees to bear?"

He admitted it—admitted it with a smile on his lips and the lust of battle in his eyes. But this was not what they had started out to discuss. What of the proposed holiday for Olive?

She went down to the beach and stood staring across the waste of waters at her feet. She knew that if she once left Tahao, she could not bring herself to return. She knew that she should never have married a pioneer, even loving him as she loved Bob. She was not of the type to thrive on adversity, to find each obstacle a spur to fresh endeavour. Equally, she was not of the type to abandon a ship in distress.

And so she stayed, while Bob feverishly planted cocoanuts, and raved of their rapid growth, and made calculations on envelopes, and one brazen day succeeded another until Tahao was transformed from a glaring strip of coral sand into a promising plantation of three-year-old palms, and Olive sat on the "hill" with Roko and the sewing-machine, waiting.....

 

They had finished fastening the house to Tahao, and silence closed down until there filtered through it a sound, faint, yet seeming to fill the world. Roko whined and snuffed the air suspiciously. The sound grew in volume, and far off the darkness was slashed with a thin ribbon of phosphorescent light. The sound was wind, the light was a wave, and with sudden, demoniac violence the awful pair descended on Tahao.

The roof of the bungalow snapped its puny fastenings in the first gust, and Olive heard it rattling off into the darkness like ineffectual stage thunder. Then she felt Bob's arm dragging her down to the sand. Water enveloped her. It was cool and quiet after the turmoil overhead. She hoped that it would remain. She prayed that it would remain... But no. Bob saw to that. He invariably saw to everything. He clung to a pandanus root with one hand, and his wife with the other, and after an eternity dragged her to her feet.

They stood on the summit of the "hill," waist-deep in swirling water. There was nothing else in all the world. Tahao was gone. Olive swept the hair from her eyes and laughed, and Bob did his best to calm her hysteria. But it was not hysteria. It was just that Tahao was gone!

Tahao was gone for little more than an hour. Thereafter Olive watched it reappear as the sea fell, inch by inch, foot by foot, under the paling sky. First the summit of the "hill" on which they stood, and a few battered treetops, then the beach with its chaos of débris that had once been a plantation of three-year-old palms. The eternal sun shone. The Pacific subsided into a drowsy swell.

By noon the "boys" had returned in the whale boat, to which they had clung all night, and already Bob was superintending the erection of a pandanus lean-to.

"You've been properly through it, little woman," he said, preparing her palm frond bed for the night. "Try and sleep."

"I'm not tired," she said, raising herself on to an elbow. "And, Bob——"

"Yes?"

"What are we going to do?"

"Do?" He stared at her dully. His face was lined with exhaustion. "Wait for the schooner."

"And then?"

It was torture to question him now. Olive knew it, and persisted. She felt that she must know, or never sleep again. "Then you're going to get out of here, if I know anything," he answered her shortly.

"And you?"

He stretched himself at length on his rough couch, and stared at the crazy roof, through which glimmered the stars.

"I hardly know," he said, "yet. Haven't had time to think." He swept the lank hair from his forehead with a weary gesture. "Pretty heart-breaking, isn't it?"

Olive did not answer.

"It hasn't done for the lot, though," he went on presently. "Somewhere about half, I should think——"

"Ah, about half," repeated Olive mechanically. "And if it had 'done for the lot', it would have been the end."

"The end—of what?"

"Of Tahao."

He stared at the roof for a space. "I suppose so," he said slowly, with the air of one to whom such a contingency had never presented itself. "There's nothing I hate like a quitter, but I'm getting on a bit to wait another—another seven years."

"It's a long time," said Olive.

Then she saw that he was asleep. And she had been going to tell him, persuade him into seeing what manner of man he was, destined, inevitable. That there are men like that, and that it is better for such to leave the scene of their failures and start at the bottom of the ladder, if need be, so long as the chain of fatal futility be broken. But it was too late now. He was asleep. To-morrow he would wake with a fresh store of his inexhaustible, bull-headed pertinacity. He would agree that she must go, but he must stay. "There was nothing he hated like a quitter." Would she have him lie down and admit he was no good?

And so Olive said nothing the next morning, but watched him and the "boys" scouring the lagoon shallows for oddments of salvage. He was as pleased as a child when they found two sheets of the bungalow's corrugated iron roof, the sewing-machine less ornate but intact, and a promiscuous assortment of tinned provisions.

So the sun-drenched days came and went as of old. Olive found it increasingly difficult to sleep, and of a night she had taken to creeping from the lean-to, past the "boys," sleeping soundly beside the dying embers of the campfire, and up to the "hill."

From here, under a vivid moon, it seemed to her that Tahao lay outspread like a grinning skeleton, with flesh, in the form of the surviving palms and tangle of brush-wood banked against them, still clinging to the bones....

Tahao was a bonfire, ready laid! The thought sprang at her one night like a beast of prey. Here was an end! Even he had said so. She thrust it from her, but it returned with the force of irrefutable logic. It would be better for him—in the end. She was certain of that. A flame, a mere spark, with the trade wind behind it, and the thing was done. It could so easily happen ... the campfire ... no one would guess ... and after a time, when he had found his niche back there in the world, she would tell him—she would have to tell him—and he would laugh. They would laugh together over Tahao.

What was it that made her pause for a single instant? She did not know. But neither did she move from the summit of the "hill."

And it was while she sat there, her hair streaming in the wind, her eyes transfixed on space, that the miracle happened, though in reality it was no miracle, but the most natural occurrence in the world. A gust caught the embers of the campfire and scattered them wide. Olive did not see it. All she saw was a light on the beach. For a moment she stared at it spellbound, incredulous, the next she had sped down the slope with a warning cry and was trampling on a serpent of fire that writhed ahead of her through the tangle of brush, always ahead, always just beyond reach.

How long the battle lasted she had no notion, but this she knew—that it was Bob, Bob himself, who first cried a halt. Sweating, begrimed, he burst through the smoke and bore her out of the inferno.

"Olive," he kept muttering, "Olive!"

Tahao was a semicircle of leaping flame. He took her to the "hill" and together they watched it burn itself out.

"There's nothing to be done," he said, "nothing. This is the end."

And he spoke truth.

He left with his wife by the schooner, and has long since ceased to be the Inevitable Ingram.