Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [91]
From every hut and hovel on Bali-ha'i people poured forth. First the watchful sisters from the hospitals appeared in front of their sickrooms on the hillside. Next a host of screaming children, all boys, all naked, ran down to a rickety pier built by Tonkinese laborers. Then older native boys, perhaps nine and ten years old, piled into their own small outrigger canoes and started paddling furiously across the water. Two old men, in statelier outriggers, sedately plied their paddles and swept with leisurely speed past the frenetic boys.
Then came the girls! There were native girls with conical breasts, and red sarongs about their hips. There were inquisitive Chinese girls who were pulled back by equally inquisitive Chinese mothers. Tonkinese girls, as yet unmarried, stood close to their distinctive white and red shacks. And in the distance, properly aloof, a few French girls demonstrated their inherited superiority by looking with disdain upon the entire proceedings. They wore white dresses, and you could not discern whether their breasts were conical or flabby.
At this moment people on shore were satisfied that Benny was in the boat! Someone cried, "It's the doctor!" and the happy call was echoed up and down the beach. The children shouted it to one another, for it meant that they would have sweets from the big, green candy tin. Old men laughed for to them Benny meant cigarettes. Young girls giggled, for they knew that if they bumped against the jovial fellow and let him pat them on the bottom, he would give them some more of the good red cloth. White women were pleased to see him, for he brought endless and delightful gossip from the home island. And the sisters in the hospital were ready to welcome him, for they knew him to be a kindly fellow who could, by one way or another, get them almost any medicine they might need.
So everyone on Bali-ha'i laughed and whistled; and someone at the school started ringing a bell, whereupon Benny rang his louder. But all this time, on Vanicoro across the channel not a sound was made. Not a leaf rustled. Not a voice raised welcome. High in the hills at least three hundred men and women watched the boat come into the channel, make a ringing of bells, and tie up to the wharf of Bali-ha'i. In fact, the watchers of Vanicoro had seen the boat when it was six miles out, and all silently they watched it come... almost to their own island. Silently, they would watch it while it was there, and in the late afternoon they would watch it until it was eight or nine miles out to sea.
Atabrine Benny always visited Bali-ha'i with mixed emotions. On the one hand he enjoyed anything strange and recondite. He loved seeing brown young girls, black girls with firm bosoms, trim French girls with white frocks, sedate sisters in long black. The tragically slim strip of land was part of the South Pacific, and he reveled in its strangeness. But even as he did so, he thought of Waco, Texas, and his wife. Brusquely, he dismissed the thought. In Waco he was a druggist's helper. On Bali-ha'i he was a doctor. A consulting doctor, and he was happy.
As the boat touched the quivering dock, Benny leaped out. It seemed as if his pudgy stomach would pull him forward onto the wet boards, but he was amazingly agile. "Hello, hello!" he called out to everyone who clustered about the dock. He patted all the Tonks on the head, tried to pat the shy black girls on the bottom, and smiled at the sedate sisters who stood on the stone steps.
"Hello, hello!" he cried, waving his atabrine bottle. "Here comes the doctor!" In his exuberance, in the tireless, sweaty, steaming friendliness and at-homeness of the man everyone could see why Americans were the way they were. Atabrine Benny was all the traveling salesmen of Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California rolled into one. Even the suspicious sisters liked to take atabrine when he dispensed it!
When Benny jumped from the small boat onto the dock, Lt. Cable wondered what he should do. In the excitement of seeing old friends,