In the Wet by Nevil Shute

eye, because white labour on the cattle stations is getting scarcer every year. Like Liang with his lettuces and poppies, they see no point in persecuting a man doing a good job unless there is some compelling reason forcing them to do so.
    “David Anderson,” I said hazily. “Are you married, David?”
    “Too right,” he muttered.
    “Any children?”
    “Two.”
    In my heat and my fatigue I was immensely relieved that I had time to get this matter straightened out. “I’ll write a letter to your wife when you’re in hospital, and tell her how you’re going on,” I said. “Where does she live?”
    “Letchworth,” he muttered.
    “Where’s that?”
    “Outside Canberra.”
    “What’s the name of the house, or the road?”
    “Three Ways, in the Yarrow Road.”
    I was so ill and feverish that there seemed to be nothing incongruous in that to me. “I’ll write to her as soon as we get you into hospital.”
    “Pommie bastard,” he mumbled, or it might have been parson. And then he said, “She come from England, too.”
    “She’s English, is she? What part of England does she come from?”
    “Oxford,” he told me. “Her Dad and Mum, they live at Oxford, at a place called Boars Hill. But we met at Buck House.”
    Even in my fatigue, I knew that this was nonsense. There was nothing serious in this that the old man was telling me; he was not married, least of all to an English wife from Oxford, and he had no home in Canberra. These were hallucinations, fantasies from the dream world that he slid into when opium or drink had gripped him. In the disappointment of this discovery I had to force myself to concentrate again upon the problem I was trying to solve. “Try and tell me what’s real,” I said wearily.
    He did not answer that, but his hand stirred in mine, and he said, “Where am I, cobber?”
    “You’re in Liang Shih’s house on Dorset Downs,” I told him. “We’ve got to keep you here tonight, but we’ll get you into hospital tomorrow. There’s too much water on the track to move you tonight.”
    “The Butterfly Spirit,” he muttered inconsequently, “what goes out of you, flipping about all sorts of places while you sleep. Liang tol’ me. This ain’t real.”
    It was no good; he was too far gone in drugs and in disease. One cannot: argue with hallucinations, or makesense of them. I said, “Don’t worry about it now.”
    There was a silence. I glanced around me as I sat by the bed. My eyes had become accustomed to the faint light now, and I looked to see what Sister Finlay was doing. She was sitting by the table, one arm resting on it; her head had fallen forward on this arm, and she seemed to be asleep. I was glad of that, because she had had a very tiring day, and there was no sense in both of us staying awake at the same time. Better to let her rest, and save her energies till they were needed.
    Liang was nowhere to be seen; probably he was in the next room. A faint odour of burning incense drifted round me as I sat there in the darkness, and I thought that he had probably lit another of his joss sticks before the Buddha. The rain still drummed upon the roof, but the clouds cannot have been very thick because to my night-accustomed eyes it was light enough to see a little way across the open clearing, looking through the open door from where I sat. The animals were still there; they had come closer, and I could see them sitting or standing on the edge of visibility. Perhaps they had come closer in the darkness so that they could still watch the house, though now the lights had been extinguished.
    From the bed Stevie spoke suddenly. He said, “This place on Dorset Downs?”
    “That’s right,” I told him. “We’re near the Dorset River, about fifteen miles from the homestead. Where you live with Liang Shih.”
    He muttered inconsequently, “I was born near here. My Dad was a drover.”
    It was queer how fact and hallucination were mixed up in his mind. It was entirely