The Absolute at Large/Chapter 27
Chapter XXVII
A Coral Island in the Pacific
"Well, I'll go to blazes," said Captain Trouble, "if that lanky fellow over there isn't their leader!"
"That's Jimmy," remarked G. H. Bondy. "He used to work here at one time. I thought he was quite tame by now."
"The devil must have owed me something," the Captain growled, "or I shouldn't have had to land here on this wretched . . . Hereheretua!!! Eh?"
"Listen," said G. H. Bondy, laying his gun on the table on the veranda. "Is it the same as this in other places?"
"I should say so," boomed Captain Trouble. "Not far off, on Rawaiwai, Captain Barker and his whole crew were eaten. And on Mangai they had a banquet on three millionaires like yourself."
"Sutherland Bros.?" asked Bondy.
"I think so. And on Starbuck Island they roasted a High Commissioner. Is was that fat MacDeon; you know him, don't you?"
"No."
"You don't know him?" shouted the Captain. "How long have you been here, man?"
"This is my ninth year," said Mr. Bondy.
"Then you might well have known him," the Captain said. "So you've been here nine years? Business, eh? Or a little home of refuge, is it? On account of your nerves, I suppose?"
"No," said Mr. Bondy. "You see, I foresaw that they were all going to be at loggerheads over there, so I got out of the way. I thought that here I would find more peace."
"Aha, peace! You don't know our big black fellows! There's a bit of a war going on here all the time, my lad."
"Oh well," G. H. Bondy demurred, "there really was peace here. They're quite decent chaps, these Papuans or whatever you call them. It's only just recently that they've begun to be . . . rather disagreeable. I don't quite understand them. What are they really after?"
"Nothing special," said the Captain. "They only want to eat us."
"Are they as hungry as all that?" asked Bondy in amazement.
"I don't know. I think they do it more out of religion. It's one of their religious rites, don't you see? Something like communion, I take it. It takes them that way every now and then."
"Indeed," said Mr. Bondy thoughtfully.
"Everyone has his hobby," growled the Captain. "The local hobby here is to eat up the stranger and dry his head in smoke."
"What, smoke it as well?" Mr. Bondy exclaimed with horror.
"Oh, that's not done till after you're dead," said the Captain consolingly. "They cherish the smoked head as a souvenir. Have you ever seen those dried heads they've got in the Ethnographical Museum at Auckland?"
"No," said Bondy. "I don't think . . . that . . . that I'd look very attractive if I were smoked."
"You're a bit too fat for it," observed the Captain, inspecting him critically. "It doesn't make so very much difference to a thin man."
Bondy still looked anything but tranquil. He sat droopingly on the veranda of his bungalow on the coral island of Hereheretua, which he had purchased just before the outbreak of the Greatest War. Captain Trouble was glowering suspiciously at the thicket of mangroves and bananas which surrounded the bungalow.
"How many natives are there on the island?" he asked suddenly.
"About a hundred and twenty," said G. H. Bondy.
"And how many of us are there in the bungalow?"
"Seven, counting the Chinese cook."
The Captain sighed and looked out to sea. His ship, the Papeete, lay there at anchor; but to get to her he would have to go along a narrow path between the mangroves, and this did not precisely seem advisable.
"Look, here, sir," he said after a while, "what are they squabbling about over there, anyway? Some boundary or other?"
"Less than that."
"Colonies?"
"Even less than that."
"Commercial treaties?"
"No. Only about the truth."
"What kind of truth?"
"The absolute truth. You see, every nation insists that it has the absolute truth."
"Hm," grunted the Captain. "What is it, anyway?"
"Nothing. A sort of human passion. You've heard, haven't you, that in Europe yonder, and everywhere in fact, a . . . a God, you know . . . came into the world."
"Yes, I did hear that."
"Well, that's what it's all about, don't you understand?"
"No, I don't understand, old man. If you ask me, the true God would put things right in the world. The one they've got can't be the true and proper God."
"On the contrary," said G. H. Bondy (obviously pleased at being able to talk for once with an independent and experienced human being), "I assure you that it is the true God. But I'll tell you something else. This true God is far too big."
"Do you think so?"
"I do indeed. He is infinite. That's just where the trouble lies. You see, everyone measures off a certain amount of Him and then thinks it is the entire God. Each one appropriates a little fringe or fragment of Him and then thinks he possesses the whole of Him. See?"
"Aha," said the Captain. "And then gets angry with everyone else who has a different bit of Him."
"Exactly. In order to convince himself that God is wholly his, he has to go and kill all the others. Just for that very reason, because it means so much to him to have the whole of God and the whole of the truth. That's why he can't bear anyone else to have any other God or any other truth. If he once allowed that, he would have to admit that he himself has only a few wretched metres or gallons or sackloads of divine truth. You see, suppose Dash were convinced that it was tremendously important that only Dash's underwear should be the best on earth, he would have to burn his rival, Blank, and all Blank's underwear. But Dash isn't so silly as that in the matter of underwear; he is only as silly as that in the matter of religion or English politics. If he believed that God was something as substantial and essential as underwear, he would allow other people to provide themselves with Him just as they pleased. But he hasn't sufficient commercial confidence in Him; and so he forces Dash's God or Dash's Truth on everybody with curses, wars and other unreliable forms of advertisement. I am a business man and I understand competition, but this sort of . . ."
"Wait a minute," interrupted Captain Trouble, and aimed a shot into the mangrove thicket. "There, I think that's one less of them."
"He died for his faith," whispered Bondy dreamily. "You have forcibly restrained him from devouring me. He fell for the national ideal of cannibalism. In Europe people have been devouring each other from time immemorial out of idealism. You are a decent man, Captain, but it's quite possible that you'd devour me on behalf of any fundamental principle of navigation. I've lost confidence even in you."
"You're quite right," the Captain grumbled. "When I look at you, I feel that I'm . . ."
". . . . a violent anti-Semite. I know. That doesn't matter, I had myself baptized. But do you know, Captain, what's got hold of those black idiots? The night before last they fished out of the sea a Japanese atomic torpedo. They've set it up over there under the coco-nut palms, and now they are bowing down before it. Now they have a God of their own. That's why they must devour us."
War-cries sounded from the mangrove thicket.
"Do you hear them?" muttered the Captain. "On my soul, I'd rather . . . go through the geometry examination all over again. . . ."
"Listen," Bondy whispered. "Couldn't we go over to their religion? As far as I am concerned . . ."
At that moment a gun boomed out from the Papeete.
The Captain uttered a low cry of joy.