The dust was from the chaff bags they were lumping, or that others had lumped before them. They were choking with it. Their eyes were raw, their hair thick with it, they were powdered to the navel with a layer of fine dust that streaked where the sweat ran and where it got into their shorts, and went sodden round their balls, painfully itched and rubbed. It was a kind of madness they moved in. Half-naked, and barefoot mostly, they stumbled through a storm in which they were shadows bent low and tottering under the hundredweight sacks.
The guards too suffered. They had swathed their mouths and nostrils in knotted scarves, but the dust got in under the collars of their uniforms, clogged their lashes, and hung on their brows with an eerie whiteness. They wore heavy boots and leggings, the sign that they were masters here, but sweated for it.
Generations of coolies, Chinese for the most part, but Tamils too, had worked to unload ships and stock these godowns with bales of rubber, wool and cotton; sacks of flour, salt, sugar, rice; and cartons of corned meat, condensed milk, apricot halves and pineapple chunks in cans. A new sort of coolie, they were clearing it now to be shipped as spoils of war to the new masters of this corner of the earth.
Vic humped his sack with the rest. It was an animal’s work though a man could do it, and the dust was a torment, but none of that worried him. Neither did the weight, the two hundred pounds laid on his neck, which he had to trot a hundred yards with. He could do it. He was strong enough. And there was something in him that these things could not touch. He was lit up with the assurance of his own invulnerability. Had been all morning. There was no reason for it.
He knew the danger of such moods. They had dogged him all his life. In the drunkenness of his own power and youth he would lose track of things, grow reckless, and out of sheer physical exuberance say something sooner or later that he did not mean to say, or blindly strike out. That was the danger. He knew this. He was watching himself.
What hurt him, and in the most sensitive part of himself, was that somewhere not so very far away, fiery battles must be taking place, fought by fellows no older than himself, and no more daring either — part of a war that would be talked of for all the rest of his life, and which he would have no share in; no campaign ribbons, no medals, no stories to tell except this shameful one. He would live through this stretch of history and be denied even the smallest role in it.
He was sufficiently certain of his own courage to believe that in the ordinary circumstances of the soldier’s life he would, given the chance, have acquitted himself in a quite superlative way. He had spent his youth studying to be noble. But the world he was in now was a mystery to him. You do not prepare yourself for shame.
The guards were edgy. All this dust and the heat of the place maddened them. They too were young. They resented having to stand guard over coolies. To restore their own sense of honour they would suddenly strike out, and there was no way of knowing when the blow was coming or where from. Out of the storm of dust, that’s all, whack! and you took it.
But for all that, he could not convince himself that the conditions he was under held force. All morning his spirit was light and he swaggered. In brute fact his back was bent and he was tottering like the others in a dense haze, choking, streaming with sweat, feeling every ounce of the two-hundred-pound sack on his neck, but his spirit was coltish. Nothing could touch him.
After a time a rage of frustrated power began to build in him. If there was a girl here his energy might have been taken up in some other way; but there wasn’t. Each time he straightened he felt a surge of exultation and the bitterness of having to rein it in. This was one of his moments — every nerve in his body told him that — and he would miss it for no other reason than that the timing was wrong. That’s what hurt him. The moment, and with it the event — whatever it was — that belonged to it, would be lost and would not recur. The unfairness of it maddened him.
He could never be sure what happened next. As he passed, the most bad-tempered of the guards, a smart young corporal, out of boredom it might have been, or the idle spite of those who have been given power for a moment but no scope to use it, or more likely because, in his own youthfulness, he had caught from the mere look of him the state of rebellious excitement Vic was in — this guard, idly, almost indifferently, leaned out and jabbed at him very lightly with a cane. There was no contact. But Vic, with the load still on his back, stopped, turned, and his spirit acted in spite of him.
Even when he saw it happen he was not dismayed. Some part of him was, and he went cold at the enormity of it; but in the other part, in a kind of triumph, he was exultant. Time stopped dead while he hovered with the two-hundred-pound sack on his back and he and the guard faced one another across a distance of perhaps two feet. He was aware of the hair on his scalp as a dense forest, of his body soaring up from where his feet touched the earth. The moment released itself from the flow of things, expanded and was absolute. He spat in the guard’s face.
He ought to have been a dead man then. That was the logic of the thing. But as the guard hurled himself forward, Mac, who was next in line, stumbled against him, was knocked off balance, and his sack went. There was a soft explosion and they were immediately, all three, swallowed up in a storm of white.
In a moment Japs had rushed in from all directions, and when the others in the party swung round to see what it was, they were using their rifle-butts, their bayonets too, all screaming and out of control.
Vic, his own sack still heavy on his neck, stood at the centre of an absolute fury in which boots and heads and rifle-butts and steel went everywhere. The bayonet blows were synchronised grunts and screams. He too had his mouth open screaming, but it was Mac they were going for.
For Digger it was a moment that for as long as he lived would remain apart and absolute, its real seconds swelling till he felt as if his body had been suspended over a gap where the sun was stopped and chronology had ceased to operate. Duration was measured now only by the mind’s capacity to grasp all that was taking place in it.
He had turned at the first hint of trouble (Vic, that would be, it had to be), slewing on one foot. Heard shouts. Saw the rush of guards, and then, in a storm of dust, saw that someone had gone down. He was thirty feet away and still had the sack on his shoulders. He could see nothing clearly.
Madness was loose, that’s all he knew. From a time, just seconds back, when they were in a world, however harsh their lot in it, that was familiar and human, they were hurled into a place where anything could be done and was done, in animal fury and darkness, in blood, din and a thick-throated roaring before words. They were all in it, all shouting.
It would pass. It had to. But until it did, for what seemed an age, they were outside all order and rule, in a place of primal savagery.
Digger had risen on one foot. He did not come to earth. That’s how he saw it. He hung there as from hooks in his shoulder blades, weighed down by the blood that was being pumped into his hands and the big-veined muscles in his neck; by the weight of the sack he was carrying too. But his limbs, no longer attached or subject to gravity, were flinging about in a passion like nothing he had ever known, that took him right out of himself, over horizons he had never conceived of.
It was a kind of dance, in which he shouted ecstatic syllables that passed right through him, lungs, mouth, consciousness, as if he were no more than the dumb agency of the rhythm he was pounding out in the dust of the godown, beyond smashed bones and the gushing of blood. The cries that came heaving out of him belonged to a tongue he did not recognise, and for all his gift (he who knew whole plays by heart), when his foot came back to earth at last, and the seconds linked, he could not recall a single one of them. They were in a language that his mind, once the moment was gone, no longer had the shape to receive.