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The Birds of Paradise

A Novel

The University of Chicago Press

The Wheeling Horsemen

1

If Melba interrupts her South American love song and squawks, "Wurrah Yadoor-a!" I take no notice, simply carry on with whatever I happen to be doing, but if the squawk is followed by the tinny sound she makes with her beak and claws when she tangles with the wire netting of her cage I leave the hut and go into the clearing to calm her down by tickling her stomach and ruffling the top of her head. It is always sunny on these occasions because Melba never sings when it is raining or when rain threatens. At night I bring her indoors and put her into the same small steel cage she was in when I first saw her and which she had to travel in when I brought her with me to Manoba. I cover the cage with a cloth because the light from the pressure lamp distracts her. The cloth is an expensive square of green silk decorated with pictures of monkeys and tigers—a scarf, in fact. I say good night to her and she says good night to me, but she says good night only to lull me into a false sense of security. When she thinks the silence has gone on long enough she shrieks at the top of her voice: "William Conway! William Conway!" I've nearly upset many a glass of whisky hearing my name called like that. She catches me a few seconds after my alertness has gone. Perhaps she has X-ray eyes and can see through the scarf.

I say, "Shut up, Melba. Go to sleep," and upon the degree of annoyance in my voice depends the length and tenderness of the song she then sings to me, a song of the Paraguayan hills, punctuated by little rollings and trillings of the tongue. Gradually she hypnotizes herself into a state of such enchantment that sleep falls on her as gently and swiftly as the night falls here on the tropical ocean.

The cage in the clearing is a curious affair and got built in this particular form more by accident than design, although the design was in my mind right enough and obviously imposed itself upon the process of construction right from the beginning until at the one-third finished stage I recognized its ramshackle kinship to the stout iron cage that stands on the lake isle in the grounds of the Jundapur palace back in India, which, a month or so ago, I found unchanged after thirty years. It was then just a question of consciously finishing what I had subconsciously begun.

Two lads from the beach settlement helped me to make it in return for a full quarter-pound tin of Kwikkaffy. They cut the bamboo for the uprights and thatched the roof in the shape of an onion dome, as I instructed, with fronds that were green but are already going brown. The wire netting which is tacked to the uprights, and which Melba sharpens her beak on and clings to with her claws, pressing her pale green breast and stomach against it so that she looks as if she's holding on for dear life but, with that wild light in her parakeet eye, daring you to touch her, was given to me by Griffin.

Griffin is an Australian. He lives down on the beach and runs the trading post for the Straits, Islands and Archipelago Trading Company which is known from Singapore to Cooktown as SIAT. He had the wire netting tucked away at the back of his store's godown which stands at the beach end of the jetty and smells like all such places do, of dust and tin and nutty fibres. I disliked keeping Melba confined in the small steel cage so I asked Griffin whether he had anything I could use to build something larger. There was a moment in which he looked as if he would say no. He was suspicious that the bigger cage for Melba was proof of my intention to stay in Manoba longer than I told him I was going to. Before I came, he and Dr. Daintree were the only two white men on the island.

The island of Manoba is volcanic in origin. No one has ever measured its rainfall, so far as I know, but it is probably in the region of one hundred inches a year. The island rises above five thousand feet, not high enough to produce the moss forest that can be found on the mainland of New Guinea which, on a clear day, I can see from my veranda. Apart from the boats that sail long distances and anchor beyond the reef to off-load stuff from and into Griffin's lighter, a mainland launch arrives fairly regularly to remind us, as Griffin puts it, that you can't get away from Them even on an island like this; although I expect he would fret if They stopped coming because there would then be almost nothing for him to complain of.

I'm told that the people of the interior live isolated from each other in tribal valleys and grow sweet potatoes, green vegetables, bananas, sugar cane. SIAT supplies them with what Griffin calls cargo, civilized amenities like tins of Kwikkaffy, clothing, ornaments, tobacco, novelties, and takes from them amongst other things native craftwork which ends up in the shops of Port Darwin and Melbourne, and a dye that comes from the root of a plant and is much sought after by the Chinese and the Malayans. In the old days there was trade in the plumes of the species of Great Bird of Paradise which is found in the higher reaches of the hills.

The people of the shore are fishermen and there is a small plantation of coconut palms which Griffin oversees and which adds to the sum total of all the copra in the world. When I first saw the island from the rails of a boat anchored off the reef it looked to be nothing but bunched up hills rising sheer out of an oily yellow sea, hills whose formations merged one into the other and were entirely covered with what the travel books call virgin jungle; but at eye level, riding the lighter into the lagoon, I saw how the hills might hide interior valleys. The beach is a narrow strip of silver sand, silver because the volcanic foundations have been overlaid with coral. A fringe of palm trees leans inland, blown into that position by the prevailing wind. Behind the palms are the huts of the settlement and these are built up on stilts as a protection from high tides when storms set in. I can just see the beach from the veranda of the hut I live in, where Daintree's last assistant used to live. Daintree has lived and worked alone now for over a year.

When I arrived, having climbed from the lighter onto the jetty and introduced myself to Griffin who was standing there like a port official on the lookout for undesirable aliens, shading his eyes from the glare, splashed with rippling lozenges of light reflected up from the sun-struck water, and walked at his direction towards his bungalow along the hot, hollow-ringing boards of the jetty, followed by the two men who had come out to the boat in the lighter and touted my three suitcases, myself carrying Melba who was shrieking and swearing in her cage, outraged it seemed by the very smell of Manoba, I had to march past a row of male Manobaons who stood on one side of the jetty (as they always do when a boat comes in, a lingering instinct from the days when strangers weren't welcome), brown, flat-nosed men in trousers, others in loin cloths, some with spikes stuck in their nostrils which I think are porcupine quills. One of them (the local clown, I've discovered since) wore only the phallic horn. I had seen photographs of this and in real life found it less untoward than I would have expected, but wondered nevertheless what it felt like to go around all the time with an encased decorated and artificial erection.

These men, and the view of the island, the situation in general, made me feel like an actor of contemporary drama who found himself miscast; in this case as a Victorian explorer; but not for long. Griffin has a sending and receiving set. He uses it to communicate with the mainland and between whiles lets it play music. The sound of jazz and rock-and-roll comes drifting up from the beach; and the beach, the settlement, even the paths in the forest, are littered with old Kwikkaffy tins which the Manobaons, after they've drunk the contents, fill with pebbles and shake, to make a kind of mambo-mambo.

Griffin is not much impressed with the tale that it is only to see the birds of paradise that I came to Manoba, particularly as I came armed with a letter of introduction to Daintree from a man called Cranston. I met Jim Cranston over eighteen years ago as a fellow prisoner-of-war in a camp in the north of Malaya that was called Pig Eye. Cranston has been to Manoba several times in the past few years but his only connection with the island is Dr. Daintree. Cranston is ten years younger than Daintree but he is Daintree's boss. Griffin knows this and suspects that my interest in Manoba is also Daintree, that I'm here to do something Cranston isn't prepared to do. This isn't quite true, but I don't blame Griffin for thinking it might be. He has never heard the expression Sabbatical Year and I'm neither his idea of a bird watcher nor his idea of a man in business in London taking time off, which is what I happen to be.

Whenever I go down the hill to the beach settlement to pass the time of day with him he looks my white, drip-dry suit up and down and says, "How's Doc Daintree today?" and only half believes me when I tell him that I don't know. Once he offered me a pair of field glasses which he said he had found in the go-down. I told him I already had a pair to watch the Paradisaeidae at close quarters if I was lucky enough to see them at all. He nodded and said, "Good on you," and then glanced up at the western arm of the hill where Daintree's dispensary is, which Griffin knows can be seen from my own hut. He was wondering how often I spied on Daintree. When he talks sneeringly of Them, meaning mainland authority, authority of any kind, he does so with the look of a man testing you by verbal ordeal. He thinks I'm an investigator from the European Foundation that finances the Manobaon health service and which therefore employs not only Daintree but Cranston as well.

Griffin is a tall, broad-boned man, with sandy hair. We eye each other levelly but he is the heavier. His stomach bulges his shirt out above the waistband of his washed-out blue trousers. I judge him to be about forty-five, a few years older than myself. He married a Chinese girl in Singapore just after the war. She died about four years ago and was buried in the Timor Sea. He has three children, two boys and a girl who go around stark naked and have faces that perhaps remind him too much of their mother whom he loved very much. He says that it was only in places like Manoba that they could live together without being reminded every day of civilization's faint disgust, and when she died he found that such places had become a habit. He has been here three years, a year longer than Daintree. He talks of taking the children to Sydney when the eldest boy is ten.

The first "a" in Manoba is short, the second long; the "o" is hardly pronounced at all. You begin to pronounce it and then swallow it. The whole, spoken quickly, sounds like Man'Bah, but with this little break, this whisper of sound dividing the syllables. Before the war the Manobaons of the interior lived in almost total isolation. They were contemptuous of the people of the coast who have their living mostly from the sea. The missionaries tried to get at them once or twice but in those days there was no permanent trading post, no established or accepted white man through whom the missionaries could claim any kind of authority or on whom they could rely for protection, and their attempts at salvation were pretty much hit-and-run affairs. It is to a different kind of religion the Manobaons have now succumbed: the religion of goods, what are called consumer goods, what is sometimes called cargo—a cult rather than a religion; the cult of the happiness that must follow in the wake of the tins of Kwikkaffy which have already made the white man rich and powerful and lie on the sands, the paths and the tracks, like shiny manna fallen from heaven, gone rusty, but no less potent for that.

My sabbatical year began several months ago, in the April of 1960, six months after the final decree in the divorce suit brought by my wife Anne, to whom I was married for just over ten years and who is the mother of my son Stephen, now getting on for eleven. He and Anne live on with Anne's new husband in the house in Surrey called Four Birches which used to belong to my Uncle Walter and Aunt Ethel.

The idea of taking a sabbatical year only occurred to me last January but I had no real plans until my partners in London said, "Where will you go?" Before I quite knew what I was saying I said I'd go somewhere warm, perhaps to India where I was born. It was a mistake to mention anywhere. In business there is hardly a square mile of land where there isn't some man, firm, body or institution you should look in on if you happen to be passing. There is always some tentative proposal to explore even on holiday, some suggestion to make and leave simmering, some idea to be picked up; and there is always this man: Our Man at the Source of the Amazon.

My sabbatical year was planned for me from the moment I opened my mouth; at least its opening stages were planned. Telephones rang, cables were sent, seats reserved on jet aircraft which flew God knew how many thousand feet above the oceans I'd rather hoped to chug across slowly in a banana boat—not, I imagine, that I should actually have gone in a banana boat if left to myself. A man of forty-one is not much given to the stench of oil and ripening fruit if circumstances haven't made him get used to them. When I go down to the beach to see Griffin and I smell the stink of the petrol he keeps to run his generator, the odour of things going bad at the water's edge, and climb the steps of his wooden bungalow with its notice board hanging from the roof: Straits, Islands Archipel. Trg.Co, Manoba Division, Lew Griffin; grin at his naked children, Tony, Len and Lucille (who, when first I arrived, covered their private parts with grubby hands as if this were a form of salutation), when I push through the bead curtain that suggests an old-fashioned South Seas interior but actually gives on to a living room furnished with a plastic-topped table, steel and canvas beach chairs, a studio couch and a flight of china ducks fixed to the wooden walls, I settle for the fact that here in Manoba is as much the likeness of my banana boat as I should care to have. I gratefully accept a glass of beer cold from Griffin's refrigerator, a meal of packet minestrone and tinned breast of chicken with asparagus heads (both heated up on an electric hot-plate) followed by strawberries and cream; and acknowledge my thankfulness that all is not as I might once have wished it to be, long, long ago.

The hut I live in is primitive enough, although that—because it is practically empty—is tidy and borrows its atmosphere less from the jungle on one side and the view of the sea on the other than it does from my white suits, tropical mesh shirts, wild silk ties, gold cufflinks, Schaeffer fountain pen, sharkskin swimming shorts and my hide suitcases which one of the lads from the beach polishes every day with Wren's to keep green mould at bay.

I swim every morning and brown my body before the sun rises too high for comfort, return to the hut to do my exercises, for I take the sight of Griff's sagging stomach and flabby chest muscles not as stirring proof that a man can still look derelict, still look in the latter half of it like an early twentieth-century remittance man from the fiction of my boyhood, but as a terrible warning of what can happen to him after forty if he lets himself go. Afterwards, I go out to the makeshift shower, pull the string and wash away salt and sand and dirt, dry myself on a fluffy white towel which I have to forgive for never really being dry, and deodorize with a preparation called Clipper Tang. There is a boy in the settlement who cuts hair European style and I have him up to trim mine once a week. One acquires habits of comfort.

Griffin gives me meals, a service I pay for both in money and in time spent coaching the eldest boy in the technique of keeping a straight bat. He has a spirited square cut but a tendency otherwise to scoop everything off his legs. We play on a length of matting in the flattened compound behind their bungalow and for this period the boy consents to compromise his sense of proper manhood by wearing a pair of shorts.

From Griffin's bungalow I can see whatever men, women and children climb the hill to Daintree's dispensary for treatment and I can judge circumstances by the time that passes before they come down again and by the manner in which they come—in ones and twos or as a group. If they come down in ones and twos I count them and when they've all returned sometimes go up the hill myself, past my own hut and on up the steep winding track which rises through forest to the cleared plateau where Daintree lives and which, when I went there on the day of my arrival just as the sun was setting, seemed in its air and on its ground to glow with a tangible pinkness, as if flocks of invisible flamingos had just flown over shedding minuscule particles of their pigmentation. But if the people come down as a group I carry on bowling to Tony until it is time for another swim, another shower, and lunch, and the drowsy pleasure of rest and sleep and desultory reading.

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Excerpted from The Birds of Paradise by Paul Scott. Copyright © 1962 Paul Scott. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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