Round the Bend

  He straightened up upon the trestle and looked down on them, spanner in hand. He was wearing a soiled khaki shirt and khaki shorts; he wore old oil-stained shoes with socks rolled round about his ankles. Beads of sweat were making little glistening streaks upon his face in the heat of the hangar, and the shirt clung to his back in dark, wet patches. His hands and forearms were stained and streaked with oil from the engine, mixed with sweat.

  “I inspect some of the work you do upon these engines and these aeroplanes,” he said. “God, the All-Seeing and All-Knowing, He inspects it all. You come to me and say, ‘I have replaced this manifold and the job is finished.’ I come to look at it to see if there is any fault, and I see everything in place. I look at the nuts, and I see the locking wires correctly turned the right way to prevent the nuts unscrewing, and that is all that I can see. I cannot see if the nuts are screwed only finger tight; I cannot see if you have put a lever on the spanner and strained them up so tight that the bolts are just about to fail in tension. These things are hidden from me, but nothing is hidden from the All-Seeing Eye of God.”

  He paused. “God, the All-Knowing, knows if you have done well or ill,” he said quietly. “If you ask Him humbly in prayer to tell you, He will tell you if you have done well or ill; in that way you will have a chance to do the job again, and try to do it better. Or you can come to me and say, Help me to do this work, because I cannot do it right. God is All-Merciful, and He will not hold bad work against you if He sees you striving to do right. So I say this to you.”

  He paused again. “With every piece of work you do, with every nut you tighten down, with every filter that you clean or every tappet that you set, pause at each stage and turn to Mecca, and fold your hands, and humbly ask the All-Seeing God to put into your heart the knowledge whether the work that you have done has been good or ill. Then you are to stand for half a minute with your eyes cast down, thinking of God and of the job, and God will put into your heart the knowledge of good or ill. So if the work is good you may proceed in peace, and if it is ill you may do it over again, or come to me and I will help you to do well before God.”

  He turned back to the engine. “If you do this,” he said, “you will soon find that you are praying to God forty-five times a day or more, as He directed the Prophet in the first instance. Moses and Mahomet were quite right to get the tally reduced, because the people of that day were nomads and camel drivers. But you are educated men doing the most skilled work in all the world, and so much closer to God. God will require more of you than of common men; you are worth more than many camel drivers, because men look to you to see how good work should be done. And now I tell you, good work can be done only with the help and power of the All-Knowing God.”

  It was only then that I noticed what young Tarik was doing. He had got out a penny exercise book, bought in the souk or stolen from a school, and he was writing busily in it with a pencil, using the workbench as a desk. He was obviously having difficulty in keeping up and I would have given a good deal for a look at the book; I didn’t know that Tarik could write. But equally obviously, he was doing his best to write down everything that Connie said. I wondered when I saw him how long he had been doing it.

  It was five o’clock presently, and time for the men to knock off. Those who were Moslems, which meant most of the men working in the hangar, went out to the little patch of ground beside the hangar and turned to Mecca and commenced their afternoon Rakats. I had noticed a couple of days before that they had fallen into the habit of doing this together in a little crowd or congregation, and I was surprised to see some of the Arab servants from the R.A.F. camp join them. One of these I thought I recognized as the barman in the officers’ mess, though I had only seen him once or twice and I couldn’t be sure.

  Connie did not join them in their devotional postures. He went with them and knelt in prayer a little way apart from them, facing Mecca as they did, but kneeling all the time. I guessed that this was because he was not a Moslem, and for the first time I wondered what he was.

  I must say, I was rather impressed. In aircraft work of the somewhat pioneering sort that I was doing you have to be adaptable. When a new situation arises without precedent, you have to go to first principles and make the precedent yourself, and this religious turn that my maintenance crew were taking was just one of those things. I had chosen to staff my enterprise entirely with Asiatics. Having done that with my eyes open, I could not expect to run the non-essential parts of my business wholly in the European way; there must be tolerance on my part, and I must adapt my way of doing things to suit their ways of life. You can run a workshop in the Western style with time clocks and job cards and ratefixers and premium bonus schemes, but to make a success of that you’ve got to have some people from the West to work in it, and I myself was the only one in the party. Or, you can run it in the Eastern way, and that’s not necessarily a bad, or inefficient, or a slovenly way. Connie had introduced into my shop a form of discipline that was quite new to me, but the proof of the pudding after all was in the eating, and I was coming to the conclusion that the results were pretty good. The aeroplanes were being well maintained.

  Dwight Schafter had commented on that when I had met him in the hospital in Batavia; he had said that Asiatic engineers who worked with Connie became confident and responsible people. My own experience was tending in the same direction and I began to watch the work that went on very closely. I must say I was very pleased indeed, so pleased that I mentioned it to Gujar Singh one day to get his views.

  Gujar and I had flown the Carrier to a place called El Hazil in the Arabian desert about halfway between Kuwait and Egypt, with a load of machinery for the pipeline. El Hazil at that time was little more than a sand airstrip, three wooden huts, and half a dozen tents, with a Bedouin encampment in the middle distance. It was nearly dark when the unloading was finished and there was some stuff to go back to Bahrein that was coming in to the strip in the morning, so we stayed there for the night, sleeping on camp beds in the cabin of the aircraft, as we often did.

  We had supper with the engineers in their mess hut, and strolled over to the aircraft presently, smoking in the cool of the night. It was very quiet in the desert; the dark blue sky was sown with millions of bright stars. I said to Gujar, “How do you think things are going in the hangar now?”

  He said, “I think very well.”

  I nodded. “I think so, too.” We walked on for a few paces. “I think Shak Lin is very good with them,” I said at last. I had fallen into the habit of using his Asiatic name when speaking to an Asiatic. “I’m just a little worried about all this religion. I suppose that’s quite all right?”

  He smiled. “I do not think you have anything to worry about. I think it is a very good thing.”

  I hesitated. “One of the R.A.F. officers, Flight Lieutenant Allen, was saying the other day that he’s getting talked about, in the souk. Do you think that’s true?”

  He said, “There is talk in the souk about him.”

  “Not going to make any trouble, is it?” I had in mind vague stories of religious riots and that sort of thing.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You know that he is great friends with the Imam?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes,” he told me. “They have long talks together, very frequently.”

  That was something, anyway; if the Imam knew what was going on in the hangar it was unlikely that there would be trouble with the orthodox Moslems. “What is he, Gujar?” I asked. “Is he a Moslem?”

  He smiled. “He is not a Moslem. When I met him first I thought he was a Buddhist, at Damrey Phong. Now I don’t know what he is.”

  I glanced at him. “I saw you praying with him there before the Buddha. I thought you were a Sikh.”

  He laughed. “I saw you, too, Mr. Cutter. I thought you were a Christian.”

  “Oh, well …” And then I stopped, a bit embarrassed. I was about to say that that was different, and then it
seemed to me to be a bit silly to say that. I didn’t know what to say. It was infinitely quiet and blue and peaceful in the desert night.

  “Perhaps,” said my chief pilot presently, “he is just an ordinary man like you and me, who has the power to make men see the advantage of turning to God. As you have power to make men see the advantage of sending new tracks for a bulldozer by air.”

  It seemed a funny sort of way to look at things. “Maybe,” I said vaguely. “The part that concerns me, of course, is the maintenance, and I’m bound to say I think that’s going a lot better since he came.”

  “I think it will do so,” Gujar said. We strolled on together for a while in silence. Presently he said, “People get into such bad habits when they start to learn the techniques of the West.”

  “Bad habits?” I said.

  He struggled to express himself in English. “I am not trying to be rude. You English and Americans have your own way of life, which is different to ours. I know you have your own codes of behaviour which are based upon the Christian religion, and very good they are. But you are not religious people, as we understand it in the Asiatic countries. Few of you pray to God in public or in private even once a week.” He paused. “But God, and prayer to God, is necessary to us.

  “When one of our boys starts to learn an English or American technique like the maintenance of aircraft,” he said, “he learns from men who are materialistic in their way of life. He learns that science is the ruling force in the world, that every effect has a certain cause. Only when men are old and wise can they begin to see the Power of God even behind these things of science, and our young men are neither old nor wise. They see that railways run and ships steam and aeroplanes fly without the help of God. So they abandon God and turn to Science, and then, because religion is necessary to us, they are bewildered.”

  He smiled. “I know what English pilots say about Asiatic ground engineers,” he said. “I myself prefer to fly an aircraft serviced by a British engineer. With God taken from their way of life, our engineers become slovenly and irresponsible; they need a British or an American foreman who can check their work all the time if the aircraft are to be safe to fly. I think that Shak Lin understands this very well. He is showing your men that God is with them in the hangar, and making them turn to God for help in doing their work well. He is giving back to them the thing that has been taken from their lives. I think that you may find that in a year’s time your ground engineers are as good or better than any English engineer.” He laughed. “If that happens, you will have a maintenance staff that is unique in Asia, in more ways than one.”

  We went to bed soon after that. I let him go first, because in the cabin of the Carrier there was no privacy, and he had a lot to do with combing his long black hair, bandaging up his beard, and saying his prayers that did not seem to be any concern of mine. I stood outside leaning against the tail of the aircraft, thinking about what he had said. I was starting to get an uneasy feeling that there was more in this business than operating the aircraft and cutting the costs and charging enough to show a decent profit. There were things going on that I didn’t really understand, and though they seemed to be beneficent, I found them worrying.

  They did not become less worrying as time went on. The three months’ nominal hire of the Carrier came to an end and left me, of course, with a very substantial profit on its operation, for it was flying several hours every day. I had engaged in a protracted three-cornered negotiation to buy it in instalments, conducted by means of letters and cables to Dwight Schafter in prison in Batavia and to his attorney in Indianapolis. It wasn’t an easy deal because they wanted dollars for it and I could only pay in blocked sterling; however, they weren’t in any position to sell it in America while it was his property, which gave me some advantage. We finally settled on a price of twenty-four thousand pounds for it to be paid in equal instalments of a thousand pounds a month. At that it was a cheap aeroplane, and I was very well pleased.

  In the hangar, after a month or two, there was a tendency for casual Arabs to drift in and sit about around the machines, especially in the afternoon when Connie was in the habit of talking to the men in the last hour of the day. Apparently these people came from Muharraq and even across the causeway from Bahrein for the sole purpose of listening to what was going on in the hangar and saying their prayers with the party afterwards. The aerodrome was an R.A.F. station and there was a guard on the road, but so many Arabs were employed about the camp that there was never any difficulty about getting in. There was the obvious danger that tools would be stolen, and apart from that the people were a nuisance to the work.

  I had a talk with Connie about it in the office one day. “We’ll have to keep them out,” I said. “I don’t want to be unreasonable, but we can’t have all these bodies round the aircraft.”

  He nodded. “I quite agree. I’ll get a notice put up on a board, in Arabic. Then we’ll string a cord across the mouth of the hangar, and have one of the labourers on guard. But I’m afraid they’ll probably come all the same. You won’t mind if they come and sit outside the hangar, behind the rope?”

  “I don’t mind what they do so long as they don’t come into the hangar,” I said. “What do they come for?”

  “The engineers have been talking about the prayers we have after work,” he said. “The people come to join in those.”

  “They walk all the way from Bahrein to say their prayers outside our hangar?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s a bit of a novelty for them, you see.”

  “Well, it’s all right with me,” I told him, “so long as we keep them out of the hangar. I don’t want the tools stolen.”

  He said, “Oh, they wouldn’t do that.”

  “Says you.”

  “They wouldn’t. All they want to do is to come here and pray. They wouldn’t steal things from a mosque. I should be very much surprised if we lost anything.”

  “You mean, they come to our hangar as a mosque?”

  “In a way.”

  “Well, I dunno,” I said, a little at a loss. “Anyway, let’s keep them out.”

  “I’ll see to that.” He got up to go, and then he said, “My mother died last week.”

  He had never mentioned his family to me at all; he was a queer, solitary man. “I say, I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I’m very sorry indeed, Connie. Was that in San Diego?”

  He nodded. “These things have to happen,” he said quietly. “She had been ill for several months. My sister had been looking after her.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I repeated. And then I said, “You’ve got just the one sister, haven’t you?”

  He nodded. “She lived with my mother.”

  “Not married?”

  “No.”

  One has to try and help one’s staff when they are in trouble, and I had known Connie since I was a boy. “What’s she going to do?” I asked. “Does she work there?”

  He nodded. “She’s got quite a good job. She’s a secretary with an American export firm—Collins and Sequoia Inc. She speaks and writes Chinese, you see.”

  “Shorthand typist?”

  He nodded.

  “Too bad you’ve got to live on opposite sides of the world,” I said. “If she’d like to join you here, I’ll give her a tryout in the office for a couple of months. No hard words if she doesn’t suit, though, and the job comes to an end after two months.” I had never had a shorthand typist, and though the babu clerk was good up to a point, the correspondence was always on top of us. A semi-Asiatic girl might be the answer.

  He said, “That’s good of you, Tom. I don’t know that she’d fit in here, but I’ll certainly write and put it to her.”

  I nodded. “Do that, Connie. I’d like to help if I can. And I’m damn sorry about your mother. I really am.”

  The rope across the mouth of the hangar and the notice in Arabic did the trick all right. Most afternoons people used to collect outside the hangar at about four o’clock; they wo
uld squat down on their heels in the shade beside the rope and look at what was going on inside, and listen to what they could. On some afternoons there were as many as twenty of them, mostly elderly men. They were quite orderly and never made any trouble. For Moslems there is extra virtue in prayer as a congregation, and these chaps used to sit around until the engineers knocked off, and then they would all go together to the bit of vacant land beside the hangar and do their Rakats in a group, Connie kneeling a little way apart. The Chinese, Chai Tai Foong, took to coming to the prayer meeting after a bit; he was not a Moslem and he knelt apart behind Connie.

  I used to keep an eye on what went on in the hangar in the afternoons because it all seemed a bit difficult to me; however much work I had on my desk on the days when I wasn’t flying, I usually took a stroll down to the hangar about that time. I did this one afternoon about a month after the rope went up and found a big new Hudson saloon parked just by the rope and four very well-dressed Arabs squatting by the rope a little apart from the crowd, looking at what was going on inside. One of these men was very old. I knew him and one of the others by sight; it was the Sheikh Abd el Kadir and his Wazir, Hussein.

  There is a great big barren island by Bahrein which is the Sheikhdom of Khulal. It’s practically all desert, with a few tiny hamlets scattered round the coasts where fishermen and pearl divers live. The place is about a hundred miles long and fifty or sixty across, but it is quite waterless and uninhabited in the middle. I suppose there may be six or seven thousand Arabs in the whole Sheikhdom, about three thousand of whom live on the east coast in the one place that can be called a town, the capital, Baraka. There is an airstrip there marked out upon the desert with small cairns of stones painted white, and in Baraka Sheikh Abd el Kadir had his palace, about a hundred miles as the crow flies from Bahrein.

  Khulal produces a little dried fish, a few pearls of poor quality, a negligible quantity of dates, and a vast amount of crude oil. The Arabia-Sumatran Company have a field of oil wells near the southwest corner of the island and a refinery at a place on the west side called Habban; there is a pier here to which the tankers come, and a town of modern, standardized houses where about a thousand Europeans live. They pay a royalty to the Sheikh for every barrel of his oil they take away, and I had heard various opinions of his income from this source. Some said he had an income of a million pounds a year, but others said that it was nothing like so much as that, not more than three hundred thousand. Whatever his financial position was, the old man had sufficient for his daily needs, considering that he paid no taxes whatsoever. He lived quite modestly in a small palace just outside Baraka, white and rococo, and surrounded by a grove of date palms. I had flown a new Packard to him in the Carrier a month or two before, and had met the Prime Minister, Hussein. Now there they all were, sitting gravely before the rope that kept them out of the hangar, trying to hear what was going on inside.