Capricornia

Somewhere out of the lamplight a voice cried shrilly, “Munichillu!” The cry went back to the shore, “Munichillu, Munichillu, Munichilluee-ee-ee—yah!” Krater raised the lantern, so that his hair looked like a silver halo round his head, and glared across the water.

The canoes came up to the lugger, their crews looking like grey bright-eyed ghosts. A crowd scrambled aboard to help with the snugging and to get the dunnage. Krater told Mark and Chook to go ashore and wait for him. Chook was shaving hastily in the cabin. Mark looked in at him, laughed at his occupation and said a word or two, then dropped into a canoe alone and went ashore with a smelly, peeping, whispering, jostling crowd.

Mark stepped into the lukewarm water where it broke as into fragments of fire on the lip of the beach, and went up to the native camp, chuckling and distributing sticks of niki-niki, or trade tobacco, to a score of black snatching hands. He stopped to stare at two old men who sat beside the fire, naked and daubed with red and white ochre and adorned about arms and legs and breasts with elaborate systems of cicatrix. They grinned at him and spoke a few words he did not understand. On the other side of the fire, attending to a huge green turtle roasting upturned in its shell, squatted a withered white-haired old woman who wore nothing but a tiny skirt of paper-bark and a stick or bone through the septum of her nose. She also grinned at him, and cackled something in the native tongue that roused a laugh. Feeling self-conscious, Mark clumsily gave her tobacco and lounged away to examine a pile of arms and accoutrements, fine pieces of work, elaborately shaped and carved and painted, wrought presumably with primitive tools and the coarse pigments of the earth. And there were other handsome articles lying about, some in wraps of paper-bark, finely woven dilly-bags and slings and belts and corroboree-regalia of strikingly intricate and beautiful design. He was surprised, having been taught to regard his black compatriots as extremely low creatures, the very rag-tag of humanity, scarcely more intelligent and handy than the apes.

He beckoned a young man standing near, tall and well built as himself, and asked him would he exchange some article for tobacco. Having but a poor grip of the lingua franca called Beche-de-mer or Pidgin, he could not make himself understood. “I want a spear,” he said. “A spe-ar or something. Savvy?”

“Lubra?” asked the man, pointing with fleshy lips to some women squatting by a gunyah.

Mark experienced a shock. Apparently at a sign from the man, a young lubra wearing nothing but a naga of paper-bark rose and came forward shyly. She was not more shy than Mark, who dropped his eyes from her and said to the man simply out of politeness, “Belong you?”

“Coo—wah,” said the man. “You wantim?”

The girl was comely, Mark thought, a different creature from the half-starved housemaid. But his thoughts were at the moment as turbulent as his heart. A true combo would have thought her even beautiful. One who was observant and aesthetic would have gloated over the perfect symmetry expressed in the curves of the wide mobile nostrils and arched septum of her fleshy nose, would have delighted in her peculiar pouting mouth with thick puckered lips of colour reddish black like withered rose, in the lustrous irises and fleckless white-ofegg-white whites of her large black slightly-tilted eyes, in her long luxuriant bronzy lashes, in the curves of her neck and back, in the coppery black colour of her velvet skin and its fascinating musky odour, and might have kept her talking in order to delight in her slow, deep, husky voice, or laughing in order to delight in the flash of her perfect teeth and gums and the lazy movements of her eyes.

Mark was trying to excuse himself for seeing beauty in a creature of a type he had been taught to look upon as a travesty of normal humanity. He was thinking—would the Lord God who put some kind of beauty into the faces of every other kind of woman utterly ignore this one?

“You wantim?” asked the man again.

“Garn!” gasped Mark, digging bare toes in the sand.

“Nungata kita kunitoa,” said the man.

“N-no s-savvy,” gasped Mark.

“Givvim one bag flour, Mister?”

Mark did not heed. He was staring at the lubra’s feet which were digging as his were. Then he looked at the man, hating him for a procurer, knowing nothing of the customs of the people nor realising that the man was only doing what he thought had been asked of him, what he had learnt to expect to be asked of him by every whiteman with whom he had ever come in contact, and what he was shrewd enough to expect to be asked by the momentarily scrupulous Mark. Nor did Mark realise that the man and his kind might love their womenfolk just as much as whitemen do, even though they were not so jealous of their conjugal rights. At the moment he considered the man unutterably base. He said to him huskily, “You’re a dirty dog, old man. Let the lady do her courting for herself.”

In spite of the contempt in which he had held authority when he left town, Mark was still careful enough to return before the vacation ended. He arrived back in the morning of New Year’s Eve. But he did not go home at once. In wandering drinking round the town with Chook, he came to a disreputable bar where he made the acquaintance of a half-caste Philippino named Ponto, who was employed by Joe Crowe the undertaker, with whom he said he was that afternoon going to bury a destitute Chinaman. The idea of taking part in the simple funeral appealed to Mark. He went off with the corpse and Chook and the undertakers and a bag of bottled beer.

That night the Government Service Club held a New Year dance. Mark attended, dressed appropriately, but drunk and filled with his experience of the afternoon. Several times he buttonholed acquaintances, saying such things as, “Now warrer y’think—buried a Chow ’safternoon—me’n Joe Crowe—.” The interest of the person buttonholed would draw a group, to whom he would repeat the introduction, then continue, “N’yorter heard the hot clods clompin’ on the coffing—hot clods—n’im stone cold. Course he couldn’t feel ’em—but I did—for him. Planted him. Then we sat’n his grave and waked him with beer. Gawd’ll I ever forget them clompin’ clods! Clamped down with a ton of hot clods! Gawd! D’y’know—shperiences is the milestonesh of life——”

Oscar joined a group and heard, then led him outside, smiling, telling him that he had a bottle hidden out on the back veranda. In the darkness he fell on him, dragged him to the back gate, and flung him out neck-and-crop. Mark fell in mud. He got up blinking and gasping, to stand waist-deep in dripping grass till Oscar went back into the noisy brilliant hall. Then he turned away, striking at fireflies and mosquitoes that flashed and droned about him, making for the road, sniffing and snivelling, hurt not by the manhandling but by the fact that the manhandler was that best of all men his elder brother.

He wandered into the middle of the town for the double purpose of getting more drink and showing himself in rumpled and muddy dress-clothes. He met Ponto in the disreputable bar again, and through him again found unusual entertainment. Ponto took him to a party at a Philippino house in the district called The Paddock. He was the only whiteman in the company, the only person wearing a coat, one of the few in shoes. Because the company in general were afraid of whitemen, his appearance checked the revelry till Ponto, speaking Malayan, the language of the district, made it known that he was an associate of wild blacks and a burier of destitute Chinamen and generally a hefty fellow, who was come to them as one of them, bringing six bottles of whiskey and a bag of beer. He was acclaimed. Soon he was out of his mess-jacket and boiled shirt. Before long he shed his shoes. He spent half the night trying to woo a starry-eyed Philippino girl who played a guitar.

The party went on till peep of day, when by some mischance that no-one stopped to investigate, it suddenly ended in a battle-royal that raged till the coming of the first sun of the year and half the police-force. Most of the rioters were taken to the lock-up. Mark, though found in the thick of the fight, was taken to the hospital, primarily because he was white and of respectable standing, secondarily because the lover of the starry-eyed girl had vented long-restrained jealousy by cracking a bottle on his head.

Mark spent three terrible days in hospital, tortured by a monster headache, a frightful thirst, a vast craving for hair-of-the-dog, and an overpowering sense of shame. From hour to hour he was visited by noisy bands of half-breed Philippinoes and Malays, who, because they showed no regard for the prescribed hours of visiting, were frequently descended upon and ejected by the tight-lipped nursing staff. He saw Sister Jasmine Poundamore but once. She was now engaged to Oscar. At sight of her he hid his head.

The first respectable person to discuss the escapade with him was that most respectable of Capricornians, His Honour Colonel Flute. What he said to him when he summoned him upon return to duty Mark did not plainly repeat, though he talked bravely enough of what he had said in reply. Oscar cut his boasting short by telling him in the presence of other officers that but for his own friendship with the Colonel he should have been dismissed.

His Honour and Oscar had intended to put Mark in his place. They succeeded, and more, showed him exactly what was his place. He learnt that he was a slave, in spite of all the petty airs he might assume, a slave shackled to a yoke, to be scolded when he lagged, flogged when he rebelled with the sjambok of the modern driver, Threat of the Sack. The dogs! thought he. They had learnt their business in the stony-hearted cities of the South, into which it was imported from those slave-camps the cities of Europe. But they could not wield their whips to terrify in this true Australia Felix, Capricornia. No—because the sack meant here not misery and hunger, but freedom to go adventuring in the wilderness or on the Silver Sea.

He decided to become a waster. But to become a waster in the face of the hard ambitious world, he found, is a strong man’s job, like going down a stair up which a great discourteous crowd is climbing; and he was far from strong; moreover, he was struggling with inhibitions. Sometimes he lived virtuously, more often not, though more through weakness than through wilfulness. Twice again during that Wet Season he was reprimanded by His Honour. Throughout that period Oscar mostly ignored him. Still he was at the head of the stair.

Wet Season passed. The Shillingsworths completed their first year of service in Capricornia. Then, one day in May, Oscar passed a remark over lunch—or Tiffin, as he called it—that led to Mark’s divining that a plot had been hatched by the Medical and Railway Departments to effect the dismissal of Chook Henn. Oscar did not intend to disclose the plot. He said what he did merely with intent to sting the disreputable Chook Henn’s bosom friend. And Mark would not have divined it had he not known that such a plot was to be expected. Chook was off duty on the spree. Previous attempts by his superiors to catch him had failed because the doctor they had sent to prove his condition had been loath to report the facts. But another doctor had been added to the staff, an officious fellow who did not drink. Mark made a few cunning inquiries at his office that afternoon. As soon as possible he slipped away to warn Chook, who should have been marshalling his train for the trip to Copper Creek.

Next morning the new doctor had to go to the Yards to find Chook, who was on his engine, shaky of hand and ill of temper. The doctor came with the Loco-Foreman, who ordered Chook to come down from the cab so that the doctor might see if he were fit to do his duty. Chook was prepared. At sight of them he had sent his fireman away to see about coal. He produced a copy of Rules and Regulations and showed the Foreman and the doctor that he was forbidden either to leave his engine unattended or to allow anyone not taking part in his work to enter the cab. He then became abusive. Doctor and Foreman went away amid derisive laughter of a crowd of low fellows.

Unfortunately for Mark, or perhaps fortunately, Chook in his fuddled state had made known the fact that he had been warned. An Enquiry was held. It was a simple matter to trace the betrayal to Oscar. His Honour sat in judgment. Oscar was accused of that worst of all offences in Civil Service—Blabbing. He looked so bemused and miserable that Mark was smitten to the heart. Mark took the blame, and more, told the Cabinet that he had discovered their paltry plot unaided, that Oscar was the best man in the Service, and the only honest, decent, and intelligent one, and that the faithful service he gave was pearl cast before mean, gutless, brainless, up-jumped swine, chief of which was His Blunny Honour. Mark worked himself into a towering rage. He was still expressing his opinion of his superiors when there was no-one left in His Honour’s sanctum to hear but Oscar and himself. Oscar gripped his hand and said huskily, “Thanks Son, you’re a man.” For less than that, romantic Mark would have gladly gone to jail.

Mark and Chook were dismissed on the same day. They celebrated by getting drunk with Krater and a man named Harold Howell on some of the £25 that Mark was given to pay his passage home. A few days later Mark and Chook between them bought a twenty-ton auxiliary lugger for £500, and with great festivity named it the Spirit of the Land. About a week afterward they sailed in company with Krater’s lugger to Flying Fox, taking with them Harold Howell and another young man named Skinn, to help Ned Krater make of trepang-fishing the most important industry of the land.

Trepang, the great sea-slug, prized by wealthy Chinamen as a delicacy and aphrodisiac!

SIGNIFICANCE OF A BURNT CORK (#ucc395e85-cad9-52ce-ae79-e64b7cf21d6b)

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!”