HE Army had only one thing to say to 29476 Cpl. Compton, J., and when it was said, he found himself on the wet pavement of the Vauxhall Bridge Road with a dull pain in his left hip, and his freedom.
It was a strange sensation. He appreciated for the first time the feelings of a bird released from its cage after three years' confinement. Not that he had anything against the cage. The Army had treated him fairly, even generously—war is war—but he knew that he was a changed man. It would be interesting to discover what was left of himself.
For a while he sat in a secluded corner of a cheap restaurant in unaccustomed "," trying to pick up the loose threads of his life where they had been dropped, and finding it surprisingly difficult. Things seemed so remote. What had he been before plunging into the maelstrom? Ah, yes, a planter of cocoa-nuts on the other side of the world. For some reason it sounded ludicrous now, yet that was what he had been, and that was what he would have to go on being; it was all he really knew, besides the machine-gun.
He supposed that Delaniva was still in existence—Delaniva of the palm groves tumbling to the sea, of yellow sunlight and deep shadow; of hard work in tropical heat, and well-earned rest in a wicker chair on the verandah, with coolie chants drifting up from the "lines," muffled to weird beauty by the eternal chorus of the surf on the barrier reef; of dear old blind Metcalf and Jill—who, by the way, must be three years older now, a big difference in a girl of seventeen—and her poisonous little brother Fred. It all seemed an unconscionable time ago, as well as being fifteen thousand miles away. Yet he remembered what Metcalf had said when he left the blessed old overseer's outhouse for Gallipoli and France: "I can't see you these days, Jim, but I know you all the better for that, and I want you to remember Delaniva as home." Then, with the suddenly changed manner of a man who has caught himself on the verge of displaying sentiment: "I have made arrangements for you to have half-pay while you're away. And I want you back, Jim; remember that."
"If I get through, I'll come," Compton had answered.
He was brought back to earth, and more particularly to the cheap restaurant in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, by his bill being slapped on the imitation marble-topped table with a vigour that sent a dagger's point of pain to his left hip. He limped into the street.
Nine weeks later he squatted in the bows of an outrigger sailing canoe, beating up the Tai Leba coast against a south-east trade, and absorbing the sights and sounds that he loved. There was something left, after all, he mused. The world was still beautiful, when it was left alone. Life was distinctly worth living, in spite of a hip that never let one quite forget it.
Out of an opalescent haze the familiar outline of the island took shape. Compton's binoculars were fastened upon it. Every volcanic crag and coral beach was known to him. At that moment the past three years were as though they had never been. He was again overseer on Delaniva. There was the bungalow, glinting white among the mangoes and mummy apples, and there was the landing, thrusting its unlovely length into the fair face of the Pacific. And there—the glasses were pressed closer to his eyes—there surely was the plantation flowing in gentle green waves down the mountain-side. The place was so clearly photographed on Compton's mind that it was a full five minutes before he could believe that his eyes were not at fault. The thing was incredible, yet there was no gainsaying it—not a palm reared its feathery head on Delaniva! What he had seen was grass—grass and prone palm trunks littering the mountain-side.
Hurricane? The thought was discarded as soon as conceived. A hurricane rends and crushes; it does not slice palms neatly a foot from the ground and stack them ready for burning. And these were palms—cocoanut palms that take seven weary years of labour before they mature! What, in the name of all that was ghastly, had happened to Delaniva?
There was no one at the landing. The copra punts lay at their moorings, green with disuse. Compton climbed the familiar sea-washed steps with difficulty, and passed through the drying-yards. There were no coolie women tending the copra. There was no copra to tend.
Compton limped up the powdered coral pathway to the bungalow, and had swung open the mosquito door, when a black hand touched his arm. It was Soon, the house-boy of doubtful origin and undoubted virtues, who had been with the Metcalfs when Delaniva was planted.
"You no can," he ordered peremptorily, before the sight of Compton's face set him gibbering and clucking like a monkey.