Capricornia

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.”