Archipelago, Page 4

  “Oh yes. There'll be Shaw. That's my uncle Shamus McGregor. We call him Shamus because he works for the Royal Imperial Dominion Detective Agency. He's a night watchman. Then there'll be Dryden. That's my uncle Dry Dennis Donovan. We call him that because he's always — yes, we are also — two more, Katie. Did you know I was engaged, Katie?”

  “A blind woman could see, and I'm not. Two coming.”

  “ — because he was always dry, Hans. And then there's Jules Verne. Oh go ahead. Ask about Jules Verne. Play fair.”

  “Tell me about him, Marie.”

  “My uncle Shoeless Veronese van Rijn, my Dutch Uncle. You may have heard the phrase Dutch Uncle before. And we call him Shoeless because — ”

  “You stretched a point and pronunciation for Shoeless, Marie. Because he goes barefoot?”

  “You thought you had me there. Nothing so prosaic. Not only does he go barefoot, but he paints with his feet: watercolors, oils, charcoals. He is a master. He is possibly the finest foot-painter in the world. He travels with carnivals.”

  “I will have to leave within a week, Marie.”

  “I know it. It will be as soon as we can, maybe Monday. This is a thing I hardly thought possible, that I could be so in accord with any person. It is one of the great things and it is to a purpose. We will have a place in ministering to a broken world, you and I, Hans.”

  They sat for many hours and talked. And it never got any later. For the clock on the wall was a painted clock and it did not move, and the calendar was of only one date and it said the thirty-first of spring. The sun in the picture was painted too, with a sleepy face in the middle of it.

  “A little later, a little later,” said Marie, “we will not drink so much. We cannot celebrate forever, and we have been doing it for a long time. It will be the undoing of at least one of us or of our friends. But today we will eat and drink, for both the Bride and the Bridegroom are here. That isn't blasphemous, is it?”

  Katie kept their glasses filled. And after a very long time, when they finally rose to go, it was still afternoon in the Lotus Eaters.

  But in the street outside it was late at night.

  8.

  Nobody knew how Stein got on the picnic. No one had asked him or told him about it. But Stein had ears (physically they were as conspicuous as the nose of Finnegan) and he heard everything everywhere. Nobody but Hans would have invited him. Hans often did kind things unthinkingly. But Stein was very easy to be unkind to; and Hans didn't remember asking him. But Stein was there and was going to organize the thing. Casey said he wouldn't go if Stein went, and he didn't. He stalked off and took the prettiest of the three new girls with him. Tom Shire and Freddy Castle were there. Virginia and Dorothy were there. These also were red-headed town girls.

  At the Bay Hotel they moved a double table onto the terrace for them and stacked it up. They all played softball on the lawn between the terrace and the beach. Later they changed and tried the surf.

  Hans and Marie were the only real swimmers, and they went out till they disappeared.

  “They'll swim all the way to America if he can keep up with her,” said Finnegan. “Why don't they use the Canal; it's shorter that way. They're headed straight for the Horn. They can do it in five weeks if they don't get tired.”

  They all lay on the grass after they had been in the bay a couple of times. Stein went to work with a crock of ice and some bottles of Gilbeys and served them. He made the Flying Steinmetz and the Steinheim Stinger. He made the Stein Zombie (how descriptive of its great Originator, said Finnegan); he made the Stein Collins and the Ein-Stein (only one to a customer, they were strong), and the Stein Julip. And he mixed up some of Dr. Stein's Barnacle Remover. The gin was good and the ice was cold and “Stein,” said Stein, “is nothing if not a good mixer.”

  But not always. Sometimes Stein would stand apart and watch them with a look that had in it half amusement, half compassion, a fraction of envy, a smaller fraction of contempt, and a full quarter of proprietorship. And if that adds up to more than unity, why then it was an overflowing look.

  After several hours, Marie and Hans came back out of the water. Hans was a little wearied, but Marie was fresh as a Marigold.

  “We thought you had swum to America,” said Loy.

  “We touched,” said Marie, “and then we swam back. We didn't want to throw you late.”

  The waitress brought them eleven gigantic seafood platters piled with armored creatures with claws and pincers and forceps. There were hot rolls as big as loaves, with butter and honey and tear; and they ate till the sun went down.

  There isn't anything like the air there. Like the Australian wine, it may be better or it may be worse than the northern,” but it is not the same. The air and the sunset here is not the same as in the North.

  The hotel would not let them build a bonfire on the lawn, but the girl brought out a trencher-plate two feet across with charcoal briquettes, and lighted it. They all sat around it and sang campfire songs from their childhoods: Clementine and Ivan Scravinski Scravar, Red Wing and Casey Jones, the Camp Town Race Track and Rye Whiskey; the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, Frankie and Johnny, Stardust, Waltzing Matilda, and There's a Long Long Trail A-Winding.

  Finnegan sang:

  “Vecchia zimarra senti

  Lo resto al pian

  Ascendere — ”

  It was from some opera. Finnegan's voice seemed better when it was something foreign and you didn't have to understand the words.

  Then Hans played Taps on his mouth organ, and they all got in the car and went back to town.

  9.

  John Gottfried Schultz and Marie Anna Monaghan were married on Monday, February 15th, 1943 in the Annunciation Church of Sydney, Australia. None of the boy or girl friends were there as John did not have permission from the army to marry, and it was all to be kept secret for a while. There were twenty or thirty persons present, all of them related to Marie. Then they went for several days to the farm of one of Marie's uncles about seventy-five miles out-back.

  And on Thursday, February 18th, Hans and the rest of the boys reported to the Troop Movement Office and were sent back to New Guinea.

  10.

  ANTIPODAL ODE OF FINNEGAN TO LOY LARKIN

  For bright remains of urchin joy

  With borrowed echoes from the Bards,

  I build me like a house of cards

  An Antipodal Ode to Loy.

  I spin the spirants and the surds,

  And stir Sienna in the gold;

  I mix them molten in mold;

  I love to weave a web of words.

  Your hair is like a pinkish joss

  That fits you as a tipsy crown:

  It lends a grace to Sydney Town:

  O quam beata Civitas!

  And gaiety from life did quaff,

  And from your mother Shandygaff;

  And cut your teeth on riming cant.

  Nor yet indulged we but the vine,

  Nor nettles grasped, nor tempted rue

  With Chamberings as Worldlings do,

  Nor took the musty with the wine.

  There is a magnitude we missed,

  Nor know we why it could not be

  That comes to lesser folks than we.

  Terribilis est locus iste!

  In other days at other doors

  May we be otherwise redressed,

  And in the dimness put to rest

  The ghosts of all our metaphors.

  And you like some remembered dawn

  Grow goldener when you are gone,

  Who like the lithic wife of Lot

  Was saltier when she was not.

  The fog is fast about the trees,

  And I will watch the midnight sea

  And in the dark remember thee

  With antipodal thoughts like these.

  Finnegan would always miss it. That was the point about him.

  Chapter Two

  The Gre
en Islands

  1.

  “Of the old writers,” said Finnegan, “Strabo had a sense of the Islands; but he never saw an Ocean Island. Nor did St. Paul. Xavier was the Apostle to the greater Archipelagoes. He knew it was a miracle that, after the end of the world was reached, there was still a whole oceanful of Islands. For these are the Constellations of the Oceans and they prefigure the Skies. Oh, I didn't realize I was talking out loud.” “That is all right,” said Hans. “Many people talk out loud. You were talking of the archipelagoes?”

  “Of how they were born. In the Aegean, a cup of Electrum was smashed and the pieces became the islands, white, gold, silver. Off Malaya, a bowl of bronze was broken and the pieces were the long islands; for bronze shatters so in long pieces. And down here, it was a woven mat. This fell into the ocean and was torn to pieces by the great sea turtles. Then each of the pieces put down roots, and these are the green and fiber-colored islands. Guinea was the center of the piece that the turtles left; this stitched center is the spine of mountains that ridge the whole length.

  “These are the legends, the mythologies of their creations; but in the beginning, each of the Archipelagoes was a Pentanesia, a five-island cluster. In the Aegean there were Andros, Tinos, Paros, Amargos, and a fifth one whose name I forget.”

  “Naxos,” said Hans. “But archipelago originally meant a great sea, and not the islands in it.”

  “I know what it meant, and what it means now. But it was always so that five was the magic number. It is hard to be an island alone, but in an archipelago it is not hard.”

  Coming from the south, past the end of the great reef, then after a day and a night in the clear skirting of the d’Entrecasteau and the Trobriands, through the little China Straits, they came home to the bay. This was all primary colors, the blue so bright it was nearly a glare, and the gold that belies the belief that the air has no color. There was the other blue of the water, turning into witch-green in the shallows, and the bright blue, green, brown of the land.

  But on the land itself it is darker. It is the ocean and the air that are bright. The green is the very tops of the foliage. From the ground it is like the dark underside of a wharf, the trees bare to a height, the lower fronds dead and dangling, and always deep shade below.

  “We use the phrase ‘The Coefficient of Scenic Density,’ ” said Casey. “I've just invented the phrase; it is not yet accepted. But here the coefficient is high.”

  And it is so. The creeks are close together. In one mile, twelve of them go into the bay, all rushing full. But in-shore it is hard going from one to another. The bluffs rise many feet above them, and often overhang. The tangled roots can be climbed like ladders, but the growth on the steep sides is thick and thorny. There are side chasms and cuts and canyons that fill the entire area like a maze. There is no level ground, only the vertical faces and bluffs.

  And the tops are only uncertain spines falling down the other side to the next foamy creek. The terrain is so dense that it would take weeks to explore, with over fifty waterfalls in one square mile, and a rise of eighteen hundred feet; with deep holes and wonderful swimming pools, not ten yards across, three times as deep.

  There are dozens of miles of caves that run like spongework through the hollow cliffs, a thousand kind of lizards there, a million kind of birds.

  In this square mile, there are three dozen native families who speak three different languages, and who seldom see each other. And there may be a fourth small tribe in this space whose very existence is in doubt even by the other tribes. There is a ghost falls very far up that foams every morning after the rain, and in an hour it is gone.

  All this in a space no bigger than a square mile of West Kansas, where you can count the fence posts a mile away, and nothing bigger between.

  This is Black Papua.

  Black Papua is full of spooks. All the stories of the Blacks are ghost stories. Every night they die and go to purgatory, and in the morning they are shaken by the experience: but through the day they await the return with both eagerness and dread. They bring back elaborate instructions from the dead, and many things are forbidden to them. They are apathetic in the daytime, seeming always to wait for the night and the ghost life.

  They are an unsmiling lot, much different from the happier Malays and Tagalogs the boys would meet further on the way. They are neither good farmers nor craftsmen. Their lodges are built for them by the Kiriwinans and other people from the islands offshore and out in the bay. The Papuans themselves cannot build.

  They are, however, the Well of the World. They have a bottomless unconscious. All other peoples and lands of the world are but entities in the unconscious of the Papuans. The Kiriwinans and other nearby people understand this, that they live only on the sufferance of the Papuans, that they will vanish if the Papuans no longer maintain them in the vast cavern of their under-persons. Further peoples of the world, however, do not understand this.

  2.

  Henry Salvatore was glad to have the rest of the Dirty Five back. “I have been running this army entirely by myself,” he said. “You boys aren't much help, but you are some. I will again delegate the details. I won't say I haven't missed you. I have. “I've been reading you mail to keep abreast. There's a couple of letters from that Show Boat, Vincent. She says that she loves me too. I am easy to love for those who haven't seen me. Casey, there's a long letter from your friend Duffey. I didn't understand all of it.”

  Casey was irritated. He was the only one who didn't like others to read his mail before he had seen it. In many ways he was more touchy than the others. “Togetherness is the only god of the seculars,” he used to say, “and they are sticky about it. But we as Christian men should keep it in perspective.”

  “And now,” said Henry, “I am sure that you have each brought me a bottle. Set them on the table so I can thank you all at once.”

  And the boys set them out and paid homage to the Emperor Henry. Henry, the fifth member of the Dirty Five, had not been to Australia with the rest. He was the fat Frenchman. He stood four or five inches above the rest, and he slouched; and height was not his greatest measure.

  He was stronger than Hans who lifted weights an hour a day, and up to fifty yards he could beat either Finnegan or Vincent on foot. He was a giant, an ogre. He frightened little children and he frightened little soldiers. His hands were bigger than some whole people.

  He had refused the furlough to Australia: he thought he was safer where he was. “I'm a lecher, a drunkard, a glutton, and a brawler,” he'd say. “I ought to be chained up for the public protection. But I'm better in the jungle than I would be in town.”

  Now the Five were together again after some weeks, all in one pyramidal at dusk. (Henry had returned to the Sacraments during their absence, and now they would live always together for a while.)

  The Dirty Five was a mystic society, something like the secret brotherhoods of the black boys around them, very close and unsunderable:

  Henry F. Salvatore (The Fat Frenchman) (Who was also Euphemus, the real master of the Fleet.)

  John G. Schultz (Who was Hans) (Who was Orpheus).

  Vincent J. Stranahan (Who was Meleager).

  Kasmir W. Szymansky (Who was Casey) (Who was Peleus).

  John A. Solli (Finnegan) who was a changeling, who was of the other blood or the double blood (and who was Iason).

  All five of these had lived before, and mythology knows them as:

  Friar Tuck, or Pantegruel, or the Giant of the Beanstalk (Henry).

  Apollo, or Dr. Faustus, or Aquinas Redevivus (Hans).

  Dionysus, or Ulysses, but who was also a Terras or Arracht (Finnegan).

  Mercurius, or Don Vincent de Ollos, or Austin (Vincent).

  Kasmir Gorshok (Casey the Crock) a ninth century scholar and necromancer.

  These five, these of the special pentanthropy, were not of the World: they were, in their fleeting moments, of the Wonder. Between them they knew everything, had thought all thoughts, had done
all things, or at least had them in mind to do. They were a brotherhood, and yet the most alienated of them was the most brother. They had done great things long ago, but an amnesia has since sealed them off.

  Now the boys drank together as they caught up on the mail and papers from home. For lanterns they used beer bottles filled with gasoline, and tightly twisted rags for wicks.

  Vincent had letters from Theresa (Show Boat) Piccone, and from his mother.

  Casey had letters from his mother, a long screed from Melchisedech Duffey, and two letters from Mary Catherine Carruthers in Chicago.

  Hans had only a half-page letter in German from his father. But after he had read it, he did a strange thing. He set to it and wrote two letters. These were the first letters he had written since he had been in the army.

  Finnegan had only letters from a Dorothy Yekouris in New Orleans.

  Casey was troubled by passages in Duffey's letter:

  ‘There is a problem here which I will have to live with. The peculiar people are after me. They are rocking the Crock. I have only been bringing it out once a month. They have tempted me, threatened me, and cudgeled me. They have offered me the riches of the world (as Satan once offered), and all the kingdoms. I would have funds and distribution, and the Crock would come out once a week. They would corrupt it and make it an organ of the infiltrates. And when I would not do it, they struck.

  ‘My wife left me, for a time, when I would not be blackmailed, for they brought up more dirt from my past than I remembered. Though she is back now, it will never be the same. Then they cudgeled me literally and broke my nose. My right hand is also broken, and my side is taped. I used to love a good fight. Now I am older.