Capricornia

Differ had long since drunk himself out of Oscar’s employ. He had taken up land on Coolibah Creek, a tributary of the Lonely River, where, with Government assistance, he had planted peanuts. He was also reluctantly assisted by Oscar to the tune of some £50 while preparing his plantation. In spite of this, one time while in town he bought £20 worth of stores in Oscar’s name from a storekeeper who thought that he was still employed by Oscar. He did so in belief that he would be able to pay the bill, before it was presented, out of the profits from the sales of his first crop of nuts, the harvesting of which was about to begin, considering himself forced to adopt such means, because no storekeeper would give credit to one who must hand over his crop for marketing to his principal creditor, the Government. Unfortunately the price of peanuts was not nearly as high when the Government sold his crop as it was when he made bold to impose on Oscar. There was just enough profit to meet the Government’s demands.

The Differ affair happened at a time when Oscar was deeply worried by his own affairs. The cattle-market was dead as far as Capricornia was concerned. The cruel part of it was that the trade was elsewhere very much alive. According to reports from South, Australian beef was being exported as fast as butchered at prices high and in quantities large as never before. Butchery was the order of the day, just then. A great war has broken out in Europe. Yet not a pound of meat went out of Capricornia.

The Port Zodiac meatworks, which was flourishing at the time of Oscar’s entry into grazing, had been closed for some years. The loss of this trade had not been felt so much, because, as it had slowly declined, the trade in cattle on the hoof with the Philippines, incipient at the time of Oscar’s entry, had increased in a manner more than compensatory. Now the Philippines’ market had also failed, had suddenly collapsed, indeed, owing to the very thing responsible for the great prosperity of grazing in the South—the European War.

It happened thus. The cattle-steamer Cucaracha, already a vehicle of trouble for Oscar, had been arrested for trafficking with a German raiding-cruiser prowling about the Silver Sea. Her people were American citizens of Spanish and Philippino origin and hence in no way bound to favour any party in the hostilities; but the rights of Neutrals were not receiving much reverence anywhere at the time from those maintaining Freedom of the Seas; she was locked up in some sort of nautical prison while a lengthy argument on International Law went on. A complicated business. A diabolic business it was to Oscar, the devil behind it that Damned Dago Gomez, and the design of it another cowardly blow at himself. So he thought, although he knew that Captain Gomez had changed his ship immediately after helping Jasmine to change her affections. He hoped that the fellow might have been taken as a traitor and shot.

The S.S. Cucaracha was not replaced; nor did she return to the Capricornian trade for many a year. Such a comparatively unremunerative occupation as that of carrying a few score head of cattle six times a year from Port Zodiac to Port Marivelles was not worth a ship-owner’s thought at a time when half the world’s shipping was locked up by blockade and a good half of what was free lay in Jones’s Locker and the rest was being paid any price its owner demanded to carry cargoes into the zone of war.

Exciting times were those for the world in general, but dull in far-off Capricornia; good times for the graziers of the Southern States with the multitudinous railways and easy distances from stations to abattoirs and ships, hard times for the graziers of that distant land which was divided from such happy outlets by a wilderness of which the width was not reckoned in mere hundreds of miles but thousands.

Differ was well aware of this state of affairs and how it affected Oscar. Therefore Oscar, who disregarded the fact that the man had done what he had in honest belief that he could rectify it, thought the imposture particularly mean. But at the outset he wished to deal with Differ leniently. He went out to Coolibah Creek and told him what he thought of him, which was even less than he had thought when he set out, because he found the fellow drunk and living in utter squalor, with his Javan Princess more than ever his drudge. Oscar went too far with expressing his opinion. From cringing, Differ flew into a rage, took up a gun, drove him off his property. Oscar went for the police.

Differ was arrested on the charge of having obtained goods by false pretence. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, one of which he spent in jail, the rest, because it was found that he was suffering from an internal growth, in hospital. Far from treating Oscar as one he had wronged or who had wronged him, he honoured him by sending him Constance to take care of. He sent her with a letter describing her as “a tender flower at a dangerous age, who must be shielded from the evil world.” She was then thirteen. Oscar could do nothing but take her.

Differ came out of hospital about a month before Mark’s return. He did not go straight home. He went to Red Ochre, where he stayed a long while convalescing, whiling the time with teaching Marigold and Norman and behaving as one who had been irreparably injured by a faithless friend. By the time he went back to Coolibah Creek his crime had cost Oscar a good hundred pounds.

The people of Capricornia took little interest in the European War at first. Not only were they about as far removed from the seat of it as it was possible for anyone to be and almost utterly ignorant of the cause of it and virtually unconcerned in the issues, but they were out of range of the propaganda of those who would have had them become as frenzied as most of the rest of the world was at that time. There was but one newspaper in the country, The True Commonwealth, which was published in Port Zodiac once a week and, lacking means to deal with telegraphic news, devoted to local topics and the strongly anti-imperialistic views of the man who ran it. Such references as The TrueCommonwealth made to the war did anything but lead the populace to think the affair any business of theirs. And the news and propaganda in imperialistic papers imported once a month by the mail-boat from the South lacked power because it lacked continuity and was stale. Even such slave-minded people as the Government Officers in town were for a long while of opinion that it would make no difference to Australia who won the war so long as Australia kept out of it.

Then a war-monger, or Sooler, as such people were called in the locality, made his voice heard in the land. He was Timothy O’Cannon, ganger of the railway, a soldier born, his birth-place being the garrison at Southern Cross Island in Cooksland, where his father had been a sergeant-major and he himself had served some little time. His own attention to the vastness of the war was drawn by chance when once, while on a visit to town, he found in the hotel where he was staying an English magazine containing photographs taken in the war-zone. As an artilleryman he was particularly interested in the great guns that were being used. He wrote to a newsagent in the city of Flinders asking for a regular supply of this magazine and of a certain strongly imperialistic local daily. Thus he became an agent of the Propagandists. He spoke of the Belgian Atrocities as though he had witnessed them. When he had read and digested and succumbed to these journals he passed them on.

If ever a man made a true unselfish voluntary sacrifice in that European War it was the same Tim O’Cannon. He sacrificed the chance to take a soldier’s part in it, which to him meant the chance to attain to paramount glory. Countless times he all but sooled himself into khaki. But much as he loved that cloth he loved his children more. He was the father of four quadroons who were regarded as half-castes because the lighter part of their mother’s blood was Asiatic; and he was only too well aware of what their future would be should he desert them. So he had to satisfy his lust for homicide with passing on the urges of the Propagandists and sooling the able-bodied off to war and hounding pacifists and enemies into retirement. Thus for a while. Then he conceived the glorious idea of growing cotton to feed the thundering guns. He imported cotton-seed from Cooksland, where cotton-growing for the war had already begun, and planted it on the little cattle-station to which he had previously given his spare time.

People scoffed at O’Cannon’s cotton, saying at first that it would never see the Wet through, then that it would never live through the Dry. It flourished and bore well. The price he got for his crop was grand. Then Capricornia went cotton mad. The Government imported seed by the ton and gave it away, and set up a great experimental culture-station at Red Coffin Ridge, a place on the railway between the Caroline and Black Adder Creek. It was Tim O’Cannon who suggested the building of the station. As the instigator of the madness he should have been given the post of Superintendent. He was not. His character was against him. He was regarded as a combo. The job was given to Humbolt Lace, a Government clerk, who claimed to be an amateur botanist.

Oscar planted cotton at Red Ochre. Differ planted cotton at Coolibah Creek and considered the future of his Javan Princess assured. The people of the Caroline Siding, except Karl Fliegeltaub, whom O’Cannon had hounded into retirement, banded together and established the biggest cotton-plantation in the country. Patriotism for profit! The very pursuit in which the Propagandists themselves were occupied! Thus Capricornia, freest and happiest land on earth, was dragged into a war between kings and queens and plutocrats and slaves and homicidal half-wits, which was being waged in a land in another Hemisphere, thirteen thousand miles away.

Nature was against it. The wholesale planting was begun at the end of the Wet Season in 1916. The following Wet was the heaviest for many a year. Every plantation was washed bare. Karl Fliegeltaub and Mick O’Pick got drunk on the strength of it. The cotton-boom collapsed.

So it came to seem as though there were something in the enemy’s boast of Gott Mit Uns. People began to listen to O’Cannon, who went round hounding mercilessly. Then news came that Australian troops were now being sent to Europe and were having the time of their lives, and that owing to the great depletion of the manhood of the Southern States, harvests of all kinds were going begging for reapers. An exodus began. Oscar decided to join it, to be one of the number going to Keep the Home Fires Burning in a good soft job, because, on account of his responsibility to Norman and Marigold, and on account of his now determinate age, he considered himself ineligible for more dangerous service. He decided to sell his stock and sub-let his lease and go home for the Duration.

In the middle of the Dry Season that followed the collapse of the cotton-boom, one day while Oscar was in the midst of drafting an account of Red Ochre’s stock-in-trade for presenting to a man named Burywell who was contemplating taking on the lease, a naked blackfellow brought him a message from Differ.

Messages from Differ were by no means rare just then. The man was ill again and poorer than ever, and, knowing that Oscar was going away, was desperately snatching at whatever crumbs of charity remained. He had lately become an utter pest to Oscar. First Oscar had been forced to take care of Constance again while he returned to the hospital for an operation. Fortunately his treatment cost nothing. As it was, other expenses he incurred cost Oscar a pretty penny. It was impossible to refuse him. He made Oscar feel that he would have a death on his conscience if he did not help him. After all, the operation did him more harm than good. He returned to say that it had been decided that he must undergo special treatment necessitating his going to a hospital in the South, in order to do which he asked Oscar for the loan of £150. He offered as security the manuscript of a novel and a stack of poems and short stories he had written, which, according to him, were worth a fortune. Oscar did not discredit the man’s literary ability; in fact he considered him a very clever fellow in an unpractical way; but he had little faith in the value of literary ability in Australia, having been thoroughly taught by Differ himself that Australian editors and publishers did not know what literary ability was; so he suggested that Differ should cash the securities himself. Poor Differ had tried that long ago. They were dog-eared by the hands of many a publisher’s-reader and postman. Next Differ asked for £100 without security, and when that was refused asked for £50, and finally £33 10s.—the bare second-class fare for two to Flinders. Oscar refused.

Still Differ was not silenced. When he learnt that Oscar was contemplating going South he begged to be allowed to manage the Station, first asking a small salary for his services, finally offering them for the mere right to live in a comfortable home and eat free beef. That would have suited Oscar admirably at the time, because it had looked as though he could not find anyone fool enough to take the place off his hands; but last of all the careless caretakers he could easily have found would he have chosen drunken Differ; while the wretched man was pleading he was thinking how his cattle would be butchered wholesale for hides that Chinese storekeepers would take in exchange for a few shillings’ worth of grog.

At length Differ gave up begging favours for himself and concentrated on begging for Constance. Already up to the time of his last message he had four times begged Oscar to take Constance with him down to Batman, where he desired to have her placed in a convent. This latter line of begging was done by means of flowery letters that said much about Oscar’s unparalleled kindness to Norman and stated that the writer was at death’s door. Thrice Oscar sent back apologetic refusals. The fourth time he gave the messenger a stick of tobacco and told him to go to hell.

When the naked blackfellow handed him the latest letter, Oscar snorted with anger, pitched the missive into the litter of papers on his table, and went on with the drafting. He was working in the dining-room. He looked up but once during the next half-hour, and then only to bawl at the blackfellow for lounging on the back veranda near the door. At last he picked up the letter. It consisted of five sheets of rough brown paper rolled into a cylinder and tied with string. The writing had been done with a wet ink-pencil by a shaky hand. It was scarcely readable. As Differ usually wrote with care, Oscar at once assumed that he had written shakily to lend colour to the cause he surely would be pleading. He sneered as he smoothed out the paper. Yes—sure enough Differ was dying again. Pity that wolf would not come!

The letter ran:

Dear Friend,

I am dying. My course is run. For God’s sake help me. The haemorrhage I told you about is much worse. I’ve scarcely any blood left in my miserable body.

I’ve been a burden to you for years. Forgive me for a poor weak fool. Soon you’ll be freed of me for ever. I ask but one more favour, friend of years, my only friend. Take my child with you to the convent. You can’t refuse me. On your charity, think of my little girl and what will happen to her when I am gone. The Compound, humiliation, prostitution, at last a place by the camp-fire in the bush, and always the unutterable debasement of being coloured and an outcast.

It will cost you so little to do this—£16, and a few shillings for clothing. At present she’s in rags. Oh my darling, my sweet sweet child, just budding into beautiful womanhood, my Javan Princess—in rags!

My friend, come to me at once so that I might not have to die alone. I can’t come to you. I’m too weak to ride. I’d have to ride, because for one thing the white-ants have eaten the wheels of my buckboard, and my one cart-horse has gone bush with the brumbies. Laughable, isn’t it! I feel I can laugh now, even in the shadow of death. I am happy. For I know you won’t fail me. Oh you can’t—you can’t—Heaven would surely strike you if you did—And I—I would die mocking you for your meanness.

Forgive me, my friend. Understand my anguish. Please come at once with the buckboard and take me to the rail. If I can make the journey I’ll go up to the hospital. Oh I don’t care about dying. I’ve suffered enough. Really I think I’d be disappointed if I recovered.

If I should die before you come, I shall send Constance across to you. I bequeath her innocence to your care. And I bequeath to you my literary work. Useless though these might be commercially, they are the attar-drops distilled from the long and futile ebullience of my life.

Consider my darling’s peril, Oscar. It is real—so terribly real. Her peril, from which no hand but yours can save her. Then, on your charity, come to me. Yours, PETER.

For some minutes Oscar stared before him, seeing Differ dying, and while dying striving to write what he called the Perfect Phrase—poor devil! And seeing Constance, the ragged Javan Princess, the sweet bud of womanhood. And seeing the rubbish-heap on to which the flower would be cast if his hand were not put out to help. And thinking that if he did not help he would be a fiend.

Then suddenly he remembered something Differ had often talked about, what he called the Suggestive Power of the Written Word, the making, by means of arrangement of word and phrase, of mesmeric passes as it were before the reader’s mind in order to convince—that was Differ’s word, Convince!—Convince Against All Reason. Ah!—here was Differ trying to mesmerise him with an ink-pencil—and succeeding! He shuddered, searched among the papers for his pipe. Was Differ mad, or extremely cunning? he wondered. Cunning. Yes—he had been using him for years. He had never been anything but an Old Man of the Sea. And he had got pretty nearly everything he had ever wanted from him. Mesmerism—yes!

He picked up the letter and read it again, then again. With each reading it lost its power. No, he decided, the wolf had not come; and Constance was not a Javan Princess; nor would he be a fiend if he left her to her fate, which would surely not be as bad as Differ said. And Differ? Well, perhaps he would abandon beggary when there was no poor fool about to beg from.

He rose and went outside. The naked blackfellow was leaning against a veranda post, watching Marigold and Norman playing with their toys. He noticed for the first time that the fellow was naked. He had taken little notice of him in the darkened room, and afterwards had seen him only through the fly-wire door. He snapped at him, “You dirty myall—what name you no-more gottim trouser?”

The blackfellow grinned and said, “Me number-one poor-man, Boss.”

Oscar stepped up and pushed him, crying angrily, “Go catchim flourbag—dirty cow standing front of children like that!”

The blackfellow stood and stared. “You dopey cow!” roared Oscar. “Get to the devil out of it!” He rushed. The blackfellow fled. Then Oscar went inside, and wrote to Differ thus:

Dear Peter,

Your strange letter to hand. No I’m sorry I can do nothing in re Constance. I’ve told you often enough how matters stand with me. Money’s tight. And I might not be going right to Batman yet. If I can get a job in Flinders I might stay there. What could I do with Constance then? Really I wouldn’t like the responsibility of having to take care of her. Norman is different. He’s a boy. And then again—what say they won’t take her in this convent in Batman you speak of? I’ve heard that a girl has to be of good parentage before she can become a nun. Perhaps they’d put her in an orphanage. Then I reckon she’d be better off in the Compound, because girls out there have at least the good clean bush to go to if things go wrong, but girls out of an orphanage have only the streets.

Now I suggest you take her over to Red Coffin Ridge. Lace is a deputy protector of Aborigines and therefore bound to take care of her. But this is my main reason for suggesting it. Mrs Lace is going down South next boat to have a baby, and I know she’d like to have someone to look after her, because Lace told me so, and she might take Conny with her as a maid, and you never know might fix her up somewhere down there. A woman can do more in that line than a man. Then you could go to hospital. I’m sure you’d be all right if you’d leave the booze alone.

If you like this suggestion you’d better hurry over to Red Coffin, because Mrs Lace will be going up next train. Even if she doesn’t want Conny on the trip it’s pretty certain she’ll want someone to help her with the baby when she returns, so Lace might keep her there.

Well, Peter, I’m sorry I can’t get over for a while. I’m expecting Jack Burywell up tomorrow to show him over the joint. I’ll come when he’s gone and run you over to the rail. I promise that if you send Constance over to Lace I’ll keep an eye on her while I’m still about. But look here now, Peter, don’t send her over here. Not under any circumstances. If you do I’ll send her straight to the Compound. And another thing, make that nigger of yours wear something when he comes here. It’s not decent for the children. Yours ever, OSCAR.

The wolf had come to Differ. His cries of its nearness had never been exaggerated much. He had been convinced for months past that his days were numbered.

Lying helpless in his bed, which was a blanket-covered buffalo-hide strung to a sapling frame, behind a mouldy mosquito-net that swarmed with flies, he read Oscar’s letter. At first he groaned; and while he stared at the stained calico canopy of the net, tears oozed from the corners of his sunken eyes. Constance was sitting on a box beside him, fanning him with a goose-wing. She saw the tears, but took little notice of them. He often wept.

After many minutes of silent weeping he breathed deeply; then his scraggy grey-streaked beard parted in a smile as he turned to his daughter. His blue eyes met her velvet brown ones. He whispered, “Love—” and put out a skinny hand to meet the small brown one that came creeping under the net.

“Love,” he went on in a whisper, “God knows what’s to become of you in the meantime, but rest assured one day you’ll die and be at peace. Princess or prostitute, you’ll die. Strange there are fools who kid themselves they’ll live again. Who would want to who has really lived already? Oh my little one, I’ve given you a lot of trouble in your little life, worrying you about your future. What’s it matter what happens to you after all? The aim of the world in general is to live happily ever after, to exist like the beasts of the field, wanting nothing but good pasture and quiet mating and the right to moo a bit.”

A pause. It was broken by Constance, who looked up from the letter lying on his breast and asked, “Is Mister Shillingsworth coming, Daddy?”

He searched her face for a while, then answered, “No darling, not now.”

She blinked and looked down.

After a while he asked, “Do you want to go to Batman very much, dear?”