To the Islands by Randolph Stow Page B

drinking.
    ‘I know a prayer,’ Heriot said into his blanket. ‘A very old prayer.’ He whispered it to the ground.
    ‘Fittingly is now my coming
    Into this world with tears and cry;
    Little and poor is my having,
    Brittle and soon y-fallen from high;
    Sharp and strong is my dying,
    I ne wot whither shall I;
    Foul and stinking is my rotting—
    On me, Jesu, thou have mercy.’
    The rain shattered on the roof with tireless tropical zeal, eager to have the job done and over, violently intent. If it could deliver three inches in an hour or two, that would be raining, it could rest then until the morning.
    Dixon, rising wet and gasping from the darkness like a fish, fetched up at the hospital door and leaned in, looking for Helen, who was marooned on an island of lamplight in a dark room. In the shadow, vaguely, he could see the humped whiteness of Rex’s bed. She had put out the electric light and sat removed from him, reading from a solid blue book.
    ‘Helen,’ he whispered to her.
    She looked up, not seeing him at first, then came quietly out with her book to the veranda. The iron roof roared with rain.
    ‘Is something wrong, Terry?’
    ‘No—least, I hope not. You seen Heriot?’
    ‘Not all day.’
    ‘I took your telegram over there to send to the doctor, but it was too late for the sched, and the old man wasn’t there. I felt the wireless and it was cold. I don’t think he listened in.’
    ‘Is it working?’
    ‘I’ll check up later. The thing is, he wasn’t at church either. Ways haven’t seen him, nor’s anyone else, and when I went over to his house his bed had been pulled to bits and the blankets taken. Looked like he’d shot through.’
    She was deeply silent. ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘aren’t you surprised?’
    ‘Terry—I don’t know anything.’
    ‘Where would he go, on a day like this? Any day, come to that.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
    ‘Aren’t you scared he might have been knocked down by something, like Rex was? I am.’
    She was clutching her book unhappily to herself as Gunn came leaping and dripping on to the veranda. ‘The Wet’s over,’ he said bitterly. ‘Get an eyeful of the Dry.’
    ‘You seen Heriot?’ Dixon asked.
    Gunn shook his head with a shower of drops, and the silence came down on them again. ‘Come into the dispensary,’ Helen said, to break it.
    The yellow-lit room was airless, a feeling of damp lay on chairs and table and skin, and moths were mad with light. ‘Better out there, really,’ Gunn said.
    Dixon wiped his face. ‘Well, what are we going to do about the old man? Can’t just forget about him.’
    Gunn said: ‘You knew he’d gone, didn’t you, Helen?’
    ‘Yes, I went to his office, and then to his house. I noticed the same things Terry noticed.’
    ‘Anything else? You’re probably more observant than we are.’
    She hesitated. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘The top rifle from the rack in the office was gone. It’s always been there. Always.’
    Dixon’s puzzled eyes went from her to Gunn, who had stiffened in his chair. ‘What is all this?’ he asked loudly. ‘What’s the secret?’
    Gunn said quietly and quickly: ‘Just a minute, Terry, we’re working things out. You cleaned the wound, Helen. The one on the forehead.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What was it like?’
    ‘Ragged,’ she said. ‘Fairly deep.’
    Dixon shifted impatiently. ‘So what?’
    ‘It wasn’t the iron,’ Gunn said. ‘Couldn’t have been. It didn’t look right to begin with. If the wind was strong enough to carry it on so far after hitting him it would have carried it over his head in the first place. And the wound didn’t look right either, as far as you could see it. If the iron had hit him flat on you’d expect his nose to be broken and not so much blood on the forehead. And if it had hit him with a corner or edge—well, God knows what it would have done, but it would have been worse than it was.’
    ‘It was a stone,’ Helen said flatly. ‘I’m