Kitabı oku: «Capricornia», sayfa 4

SIGNIFICANCE OF A BURNT CORK

IF Mark and his companions had had the energy to execute the plans with which they went to Flying Fox they might have turned the fair place into a township and themselves into bumbles. They planned to build houses, stores, curing-sheds for the trepang they intended to bring in by the shipload, and a jetty, and a tramway, and a reservoir, and—this was inventive Mark’s idea—a dam across the mouth of the saltwater creek and a plant connected with it for drawing electric power from the tide. They did nothing much more in the way of building than to erect a number of crazy humpies of such materials as bark and kerosene-cans, into which they retired with lubras to keep house for them. Mark built for himself by far the best house, and furnished it very neatly. The lubra he selected was a young girl named Marowallua, who, after he had wasted much time in trying to teach her to keep house to suit his finicking taste, he found was with child. He sent her away, refusing to believe that the child was his, and took another girl. It was Krater who caused him to disbelieve Marowallua. Krater said that several times he himself had been tricked into coddling lubras in the belief that they were carrying children of his, to find at last that he had been made cuckold by blackfellows. Marowallua went off to the mainland with her people.

The humpies were set up on the isthmus between the creek and the sea, among a grove of fine old mango trees and skinny coconuts that Krater had planted. In these trees lived a multitude of the great black bats called flying foxes, the coming of which when the mangoes began to bear was responsible for the renaming of the island. Back some little distance from the settlement lay a large billabong, screened by a jungle of pandanuses and other palms and giant paper-barks and native fig trees. The billabong provided much of the food of the inhabitants. Yams and lily-roots grew there in abundance; and it was the haunt of duck and geese, and a drinking-place of the marsupials with which, thanks to Krater’s good sense in helping the natives to preserve the game, the island abounded. More food was to be got from the mainland, where now there were to be found wild hog and water-buffalo, beasts descended from imported stock that had escaped from domesticity. And still more food was to be got from the sea, which abounded in turtle and dugong and fish. The whitemen left the hunting to the natives. It was not long before the settlement became self-supporting in the matter of its supplies of alcoholic liquor as well, thanks to Chook Henn, who discovered that a pleasant and potent spirit could be distilled from a compound of yams and mangoes.

The months passed, while still the trepanging-industry remained in much the same state as it had throughout all the years of Krater’s careless handling of it. It was not long before Krater showed that he resented the intrusion of the others. Thereafter, Mark and Chook and the other young men fished for themselves.

Wet Season came. The Yurracumbungas returned in force to their Gift of the Sea. Wet Season was drawing to a close, when one violent night the lubra Marowallua gave birth to her child. A storm of the type called Cockeye Bob in Capricornia, which had been threatening from sundown, burst over Flying Fox in the middle of the night, beginning with a lusty gust of wind that ravaged the sea and sent sand hissing through the trees. Then lightning, like a mighty skinny quivering hand, shot out of the black heavens and struck the earth—CRASH! The wind became a hurricane. Grass was crushed flat. Leaves were stripped from trees in sheets. Palms bent like wire. Flash fell upon flash and crash upon crash, blinding, deafening. Out of nothing the settlement leapt and lived for a second at a time like a vision of madness. Misshapen houses reeled among vegetation that lay on the ground with great leaves waving like frantically supplicating hands. Rain stretched down like silver wires from heaven of pitch to earth of seething mud. Rain poured through the roof of Mark’s house and spilled on him. He rose from his damp bed, donned a loin-cloth, and went to the open door.

As suddenly as it had come the storm was over. The full moon, rain-washed and brilliant, struggled out of a net of cloud, and stared at the dripping world as though in curiosity. The air was sweet. For a while the ravaged earth was silent. Then gradually the things that lived, goannas, flying foxes, snakes, men, frogs, and trees, revived, began to stir, to murmur, to resume the interrupted business of the night. From a gunyah in the native camp came the plaint of one whose business had only just begun.

Mark returned to bed. He was not feeling well. Of late he had been drinking too much of Chook’s potent grog. He lay behind the musty-smelling mosquito-net, smoking, and listening idly to a medley of sounds. Water was dripping from the roof; a gecko lizard was crying in the kitchen; mosquitoes were droning round the net; frogs were singing a happy chorus on the back veranda.

The silhouette of a human form appeared in the doorway. It was a lubra. Another joined her. Two for sure, since two is dear company at night in a land of devil-devils. They stood whispering. Mark thought that they were come to sell their favours for tobacco or grog. When one stole in to him he growled, “Get to hell!”

The lubra bent over, plucked at the net, said softly, “Marowallua bin droppim piccanin, Boss.”

After a pause Mark breathed as he slowly raised himself, “Eh?”

“Piccanin, Boss—lil boy.”

He asked quickly, “What name—blackfeller?”

“No-more—lil yeller-feller—belonga you, Boss.”

Mark sat staring. The lubra murmured something, then turned away. He sat staring for minutes. Then hastily he searched the bed for his loincloth, found it, donned it, and slipped out. At the door he stopped. What was he doing? Was the child his? Should he ignore it? Better see. But first put on trousers. A whiteman must keep up his dignity.

He went back for his trousers. Now his hands were trembling. Holy Smoke! A father? Surely not! He felt half ashamed, half elated. What should he do? What should he do? What if people found out? What if Oscar—? A half-caste—a yeller-feller! But—gosh! Must tell Chook and the others. Old Ned—old Ned would be jealous. He had been trying to beget yeller-fellers for years. Not that he had not been successful in the past—according to his boasts. Boasts? Yes—they all boasted if they could beget a yeller-feller——

He fumbled for the lantern, lit it, then got out a bottle that was roughly labelled Henn’s Ambrosia, and drank a peg—and then another—consuming excitement! Gosh! A father!

He took up the lantern and hurried out.

He found Marowallua in a gunyah, lying on bark and shivering as with cold. But for her he had no eyes. On a downy sheet of paper-bark beside her lay a tiny bit of squealing squirming honey-coloured flesh. Flesh of his own flesh. He set down the lantern, bent over his son. Flesh of his own flesh—exquisite thing! He knelt. He touched the tiny heaving belly with a fore-finger. Oh keenest sensibility of touch!

After a while he whispered, “Lil man—lil man!”

He prodded the tiny belly very gently. The flesh of it was the colour of the cigarette-stain on his finger. But flesh of his own flesh—squirming in life apart from him—Oh most exquisite thing!

Smiling foolishly, he said with gentle passion, “Oh my lil man!”

The two lubras who had called him stood at the open end of the gunyah. Beside Marowallua, fanning her with a goose-wing, watching Mark with glittering beady eyes, sat the midwife, whose hair was as white as the sand beneath her and skin as wrinkled as the bark above. Mark remembered them, looked up, eyed each one coldly. He believed that lubras sometimes killed their half-caste babies. He might have guessed that they did not do it very often in Capricornia, where the half-caste population was easily three times greater than the white. The thought that harm might come to his son caused him a twinge of apprehension. He looked at Marowallua and said sharply, “Now look here, you, Mary Alice—you no-more humbug longa this one piccanin. You look out him all right. I’ll give you plenty tucker, plenty bacca, plenty everything.” She dropped her tired eyes. He went on, “S’pose you gottim longa head for killim—by cripes you look out!” Then he addressed the women generally, saying, “S’pose some feller hurtim belong me piccanin, I’ll kill every blunny nigger in the camp. Savvy?”

They stared without expression.

He turned to his flesh again, and smiled and chuckled over it till he found the courage to take it in his arms. Then in a rush of excitement he carried it away to show his friends.

In spite of the lateness of the hour, the whitemen rose from their beds and gathered in Mark’s house to view the baby. At first Mark was shy; but when the grog began to flow he became bold and boasted of the child’s physique and pointed out the features he considered had been inherited from him; and while it squealed and squirmed in the awkward arms of Chook, its Godfather, he dipped a finger in a glass of grog and signed its wrinkled brow with the Cross and solemnly christened it after himself, Mark Anthony. When the party became uproarious, a lubra slipped in and stole the child away.

The christening-party went on till noon of next day, when it ended in horseplay during which Mark fell over a box and broke an arm. His comrades were incapable of attending him. Chook wept over him. He drank frantically to ease his pain—drank—drank—till he was babbling in delirium tremens. Natives found him next morning in the mangroves of the creek, splashing about knee-deep in mud, fleeing from monsters of hallucination, while scaring devil-crabs and crocodiles he could not see. His comrades trussed him up and took him in to town.

Mark returned to sanity to find himself lying a physical wreck in hospital, exhausted from the strain of raving for days in delirium tremens, tortured by his broken arm, and otherwise distressed by cirrhosis of the liver and the utter contempt of the nurses, to the point of wishing he had never regained his sanity at all.

His first sane act was to ask his one kind nurse, Chook Henn, if he had talked in his madness about the half-caste piccaninny. His next was to question the drunken doctor warily to prove the worth of Chook’s assurances. His next was to bury his head in the pillows as the result of learning that he had thrice chased lubras working in the hospital garden, and to swear that henceforth he would live decently or die. He drove Howell and Skinn away when they came to visit him, but not before securing their solemn word that they would never tell a soul about the piccaninny. He quarrelled with the drunken doctor because the amiable fellow persistently spoke of his condition as though it were a brave achievement, not a loathsome visitation as it was to himself. He told Chook to keep at a distance so as not to fan him with his alcoholic breath, and asked him to visit him less often and never unless shaved and neatly dressed and sober. And he sent a message to the matron, apologising for any trouble he might have caused. The doctor and the others humoured him; the matron ignored him.

He learnt with great grief that Sister Jasmine Poundamore was no longer on the staff. Then he was hurt to learn that the lady no longer went under that name. She had become Mrs Oscar Shillingsworth some three months before and as such had been till lately honeymooning in Malaya and the Philippines. He was not hurt because Jasmine had become his sister-in-law, but because he had not been invited to witness the event of her becoming so, nor even told when the event was likely to take place, although he had been in town and talked to Oscar not a month before it did. He was also hurt because Oscar ignored his presence in the hospital. But was he worthy of the notice of decent people? Oh God! As soon as he could leave the hospital he would leave the country for ever!

Thus stricken in body and soul he lay in hospital for about a fortnight. Then swiftly he began to recover. He withdrew his head from ostrich-hiding in the pillows and took an interest in the world. The purpose of the stream of sugar-ants that flowed along the veranda past his bed on ceaseless errands to and from the kitchen seemed less irritatingly futile than before. Without realising as much, he decided that the Trade Wind was not roaring across the harbour and bellowing in the trees and frolicking in his bedclothes simply to annoy him, and that this was not the purpose of the half-caste girls who sang all day in the Leper Lazaret, nor of the possums that romped all night on the roof, nor of the windmill whose wheels were always squealing. He began, without realising as much, to think of these things as pleasant things, parts of the pleasant world of which it was good to be a functioning part. He began to walk about and read and talk and even take some pleasure in bawdy jesting with his fellow patients. The doctor said that he was recovering from the cirrhosis.

One day, about a month after his admission to hospital, while in town for an hour or two on furlough, he met Oscar. The meeting took place on the front veranda of the Princess Alice Hotel, where Mark was sitting, resting and drinking ginger-ale. Oscar was about to enter the hotel. “Hello!” he said, smiling. “Quite a stranger.”

“Hello!” returned Mark weakly, and rose, and extended his grubby right hand. He was disconcerted. He had planned to avoid Oscar if he should meet him, or, if unable to avoid him, to assume a pose of haughtiness to punish him for having so long ignored him. First of all he was ashamed of his appearance. He was clad in a shabby khaki-drill suit and grubby panama and sandshoes, and wore neither socks nor shirt, and was unshaven. The slovenliness of his appearance was mainly due to the fact that he had the use of only one hand.

Oscar was brilliant in whites and topee. He looked at the grubby sling in which Mark’s left arm hung, and at the sandshoes, and at the hint of hairy chest to be seen through the buttons of the high-necked khaki tunic. Mark looked at the ebony walking-stick and the patent-leather shoes.

“They tell me you’ve been knocking yourself about,” said Oscar, twisting his moustache.

Mark searched the calm brown face for feeling. He saw no more than he could have expected to see in the face of a casual acquaintance. He was filled with bitterness; but he answered with a weak grin, “Yes—a bit.”

“Getting right again?”

“Close up.”

Mark dropped his eyes. While Oscar was so calm and cool and handsome, he felt flustered and sweaty and uncouth.

“Heard you were in the hospital,” said Oscar. “I’d’ve come out and had a look at you, only I’ve been pretty busy fixing up the new joint.”

Mark felt relieved. So Oscar had not been shunning him deliberately! He cast about for something to say. At length he said lamely, “Heard from home lately?”

“Yes, of course. Haven’t you?”

“Not for months. Reckon they must be shot of me.”

“Rot! If you don’t write to ’em regular, you must expect ’em to do the same to you.”

Mark was of the opinion that his people were ignoring him because Oscar, who had shown strong disapproval of the trepang-fishing, had black-balled him when writing home.

A pause, during which Oscar destroyed a hornet’s nest in the low roof of the verandah with his stick. Then Mark said suddenly, and with so much feeling that he almost gasped it, causing Oscar to look at him with raised brows, “They—they tell me you’re married.”

Oscar’s brows fell. He smiled and answered, “What—you only just found out?”

Mark choked. He was on the point of retorting passionately; but he merely said, “Y—es—since I came in.”

“Been married four months,” said Oscar airily, whirling his stick.

Mark mouthed another passionate retort. He swallowed it, said weakly, “How d’you like it?”

Oscar grinned and shrugged. “We had a great trip round the East,” he said. “Going to have another soon—a run down home this time.”

After a pause, during which Mark searched Oscar’s face for signs of what he felt, he asked huskily, “How’s your wife?”

He meant it for a thrust. Oscar answered it with a chuckle, saying, “What about coming down and learning to call her by her name?”

Mark flushed deeply and replied, “Sure I’m wanted?”

Oscar’s face was expressionless. “Don’t be silly,” he said. After a pause he added, “We’ve got young Heather Poundamore staying with us just now—Jasmine’s sister. Nice kid. She’d like to meet you, she said. We live down by the Residency now——”

“So I heard.”

Oscar looked genuinely surprised. He asked, “Well why the blazes haven’t you been down?”

Mark was bewildered. What could one make of the man? He was on the point of unburdening himself when Oscar said, “Well, I’ll have to be getting along, Mark. I’ve got a date with a feller inside. See you later.” He touched Mark lightly on the shoulder and added, “Don’t forget to come down.”

Mark flushed and stammered, stepped awkwardly down to the gravelled footpath, and went off shuffling, with eyes cast down. Oscar looked after him as he entered the hotel. Mark did not see. He walked for many yards without seeing anything. He was insensible to everything but a keen sense of dismay in his heart. So the best of all men had come to treat him as a casual acquaintance!

He wandered down to a street called The Esplanade which traversed the edge of the promontory on which the town stood. Directly below the point where he stopped lay the Spirit of the Land, careened on the beach of Larrapuna Bay. Chook Henn and a blackfellow were painting her hull. Mark merely glanced at that, then looked over the wind-swept harbour and over the miles of mangrove-swamps of the further shore and over the leagues of violet bush beyond to a blue range of hills that stood on the dust-reddened horizon. He stared at the hills as he often had when he lived in what he had called Slavery, but stared now with no such yearning for the wilderness as then, because at the moment the world was a wilderness in which he stood alone. For minutes he stared. Then suddenly he shrugged and swore.

He looked down the road. An old Chinaman clad in the costume of his race was shuffling along under a yoke from which hung two tin cans of water. He disappeared into an iron shop, one of a group, above the verandas of which stood vertical, bright-coloured Chinese trading-signs. A waggon drawn by a pair of lazy buffaloes and driven by a dozing half-caste was slowly lumbering along. High in the blazing blue sky two kites were wheeling slowly, searching the town with microscopic eyes for scraps. Somewhere in the distance a mean volley of Chinese devil-crackers broke the stillness. Mark sighed. He was thinking that the charm of the town was its difference from the state it would have been in had it been peopled entirely by people like Oscar. Then the scent of whiskey came to his nostrils. He sniffed. He had merely remembered it. He swallowed. He was Low, he decided. He found himself glorying in the fact. He turned to the sea, looked at the ship, saw Chook pounce on the blackboy and cuff him. He grinned. After a moment he went to the steps that led to the beach and descended.

“Hello Chook!” he shouted as he neared the lugger.

Chook looked round, stared for a moment, then answered, “Gawdstrewth! Ow are ya?”

“Fine. What—painting, eh? Where’d you get the paint? Aint got money, have you?”

“Pinched it. There’s a ton of it in a shed down in the Yards near Fat Anna’s. But I’ve got a bit of cash too, if you want it.”

“Yes? Where’d you get it?”

“Won it in a two-up school yesterd’y. I’ve been hangin’ on to it to pay the debts. Want it?”

“I could do with a drink.”

“No!”

“Dinkum.”

“But what about your guts and things?”

“Oh they’re all right now.”

“Well——” said Chook, beaming, “that’s fine! I could do with a drink meself. Aint had one for two days.” Then he turned to the blackboy with a scowl and said, “Here boy—me-feller go walkabout. You go on paintim allsame—or by cripes I’ll break y’ neck.” He turned to Mark beaming, and said, “Good-o, son. Just wait’ll I get the paint off.”

Although Mark’s digression did not last long it was thorough. He returned to the hospital just twenty-four hours after leaving it, not on foot and alone as when he left, but in Joe Crowe’s cab with Chook and a policeman. The nurses already knew that he was drunk. The police had sent word to the hospital by telephone. The sister in charge met him at the front steps and handed him his belongings in a parcel and told him to go to the devil. He was too drunk to understand and too ill to obey if he had understood. The policeman left him, saying that he would not take responsibility for the care of a man with a broken arm. He was left on the steps where he slept soundly with his head on the parcel till the drunken doctor came. The doctor pacified the sister and put him to bed himself.

Mark woke to find the glory faded from his lowness and the ants returned to their maddeningly purposeless pursuits and the Trade Wind more annoying than before.

Thus he lay for several days, renewing his avowals to the pillows.

This time he recovered health and wilfulness in a week. But while the debauch had affected him thus slightly in person, it took more serious effect on him in another way. This he discovered when he sent for tobacco to a store from which he had dealt for many months, and received nothing but a note that stated in uncertain characters inscribed with a Chinese writing-brush: Carn do. More better first you pay up big money you owe.

He sent for Chook, who, he learnt, was suffering a similar boycott. The next evidence of the displeasure with which the business people of the town regarded the debauch came in the form of a lawyer’s letter from the one European store, demanding the settlement of a bill for £28 7s. 8d., under threat of legal action.

Mark would not have been worried about debts had he been entirely without means. A creditor could do nothing worse to an incapable debtor than have him sent to live very comfortably for a month or two at the State’s expense in the Calaboose at Iced Turtle Bay. Because whitemen were treated so well in the Calaboose that few objected to imprisonment for a reasonable length of time and many took pains to be sent there when desirous of taking a spell from the struggle for existence, creditors usually took to court only such debtors as they feared might leave the country. Once a man was judged a defaulting debtor by the law, he could not leave Capricornia till he regained his solvency or died. Mark was not in the happy state of bankruptcy enjoyed by the majority of his fellow citizens. He had a half-share in a ship worth £500. If one creditor should sue him the rest would follow suit, and would sue Chook too, with the result that they would have to sell the Spirit of the Land. Whatever the change in his moral condition since learning what freedom cost, Mark still dreamt of adventures on the Silver Sea. He loved the Spirit of the Land. Therefore he decided to ask Oscar for assistance, to ask him first for money and then for help to get a lowly kind of job in the Government for the purpose of repaying the loan. Oscar was now employed in the Department of Public Works, and hence would be able to get him a job as a labourer.

One day, about a fortnight after the meeting, Mark called on Oscar. On this occasion he was dressed in whites he had borrowed from a friend. He was first of all abashed by being met at the door by the Philippino girl on whose account he had been struck with the bottle. She was Oscar’s maid. He was on the point of flight when Oscar came out and greeted him. He was next abashed by the gentility of his relatives, whom he found taking afternoon-tea in a style quite foreign to him. At first he thought that they were drinking beer, because their beverage was brown and was served with ice in glasses. It was tea. And he found to his discomfort that a strange combination knife-fork was given him with which to eat cakes so small that he could have put six in his mouth at once. Such an instrument should have been welcomed by one crippled as he was; but it did anything but please him, because in using it he had to expose his grubby-nailed hand more often and for far longer periods than he wished. He sweated and fumbled and blushed.

He was further abashed by the treatment he received. Since Oscar and Jasmine had become engaged and it had become evident that he was a waster, their attitude towards him while together in his company had always been one of strained politeness. Now Oscar received him heartily; and Jasmine was gushing. He was pleased till it dawned on him that they were treating him just as they would an ordinary visitor. Then he turned bitter and tried to strike back by calling Jasmine sometimes Miss Poundamore and sometimes Mrs Shillingsworth. His intent was lost on Oscar and Jasmine, who seemed to regard his stiffness as a joke. But evidently it was not lost on Heather. When Mark persisted in calling her Miss Poundamore in spite of her calling him by his first name, she came to blushing and avoiding his eyes.

Heather was about nineteen, and rather too good-looking and self-possessed for the liking of vain, sensitive Mark. He went out of his way to slight her. When she attempted to question him about his ship and the life he led, he told her that such things could not be of interest to such a person as she. After that the talking was mostly done by Oscar and Jasmine, and mostly concerned the City of Singapore, paradise of affected people. Their sojourn there had had a marked effect on them. Their house was furnished, their food was cooked, their speech was spoken, according to the fashionable style of Singapore.

It occurred to Mark at length that Oscar had changed greatly since his marriage, and that the indifference in his attitude towards him was the result of that change, and that the cause of the change was that Oscar was no longer the fellow he had been but the husband of Jasmine. He observed how thoroughly Oscar had become Jasmine’s husband when he learnt that he intended to resign from the Government after another year of service and take up a cattle-station called Red Ochre in the Caroline River Country. Jasmine’s family, the Poundamores of Poundamore Downs, in the Barkalinda Country, State of Cooksland, were graziers born and bred. Oscar’s interest in bovine beasts had never before gone beyond the beef he ate. Joe Poundamore, one of Jasmine’s many brothers, and Archie Poundamore, one of her multitudinous cousins, would be coming up to Capricornia with Jasmine and Oscar when they returned from the trip to the South that they intended to take when Oscar left the Service. Joe was coming to act as manager of Red Ochre and to teach Oscar the grazing business. Archie would go on to Manila to make arrangements for shipping Oscar’s cattle to the Philippines. Oscar and Jasmine had already had dealings with influential people in Manila while they were there on their honeymoon. Knowing that Oscar had never met these young men, Mark was amazed to hear him speak of them with affection. This evidence of his having become absorbed into the Poundamore family made him feel that Oscar must now regard him as a stranger and put him off the object of his visit. He went away without asking for the loan.

But the loan must be raised if the Spirit of the Land were not to fall into the hands of Chinamen. Mark plucked up courage a few days later and went to Oscar’s house again.

The consequences of the second visit were such as to put him off the subject again, indeed to put him in a position in which he came to regard the saving of the lugger as of secondary importance, since they even threatened to make him a Poundamore of Poundamore Downs as well. For he called at the house to find young Heather in sole occupation, to be befriended by her, and to be charmed as he had never been by a woman before. Heather impressed him first with her frankness. Without much delay she asked him why he had sneered at her and the others. He told her. Then she impressed him with her astuteness by telling him something of what she understood of his character. Before long he produced his hand from hiding and explained why it was not clean. She called him a silly boy for behaving so shyly before one who was virtually his sister, and got hot water and soap and a manicure-set and put the matter right. The intimacy of the operation caused both of them feelings that were certainly not fraternal. Then she impressed him with her desire to learn about ships and the sea and the wilderness. Over a manly sort of afternoon-tea he told her a good deal about his life, some of which was true and none discreditable. She told him that she had come to love Capricornia already and would give much to be able to see the wild parts of it as he had. He had it in his heart to say that he would like to show it to her. Instead of waiting for Oscar, he took her down to the beach and showed her the lugger and stayed with her till sundown. That night he was haunted by thoughts of his half-caste son.

Later on, after she had made several short trips in the lugger and heard many tales about the Silver Sea, Heather told Mark that she would love to live all her life in Capricornia and that she hated the thought of having soon to return to dull Poundamore Downs. She said it with a sigh. Mark looked at her as though he understood her thoughts, but suggested nothing to help her, although he had the suggestion in his heart together with the horrible knowledge that he was the father of a half-caste.