Capricornia

When the natives found that he was dying, they forgot their dead brother and came and peeped at him, while he grovelled on the floor fighting for his breath. Long after he fell back dead they peeped, amazed to find that the mighty Munichillu was merely mortal. For many hours they were afraid to touch him, lest they should discover to their cost that they were taking a liberty. So the ants got at him first. The natives buried him in a shallow grave in the hillocks of the isthmus where he had shot Kurrinua, then looted his house, then staged another Death Corroboree in which they sang of Kurrinua and Retribution. Then, in accordance with their custom, they left the island for the time required for the laying of his ghost or devil. The crocodiles, being respecters neither of persons nor of devils, came and rooted him out and devoured him as soon as they discovered where he lay.

Ned Krater had been dead about nine months when Mark and Chook returned to Flying Fox. They had heard that Krater was dead from a friend of his who had gone out to visit him some time before. They found the island deserted. The natives had gone to the mainland. Mark was in a way relieved. It was disinclination to set eyes on his half-caste son that had kept him away from the island so long. He came only because he wished to get some things he had left there. Yet he felt curious to know how the child was progressing, so much so that instead of staying only as long as it took him to get what he wanted, as he had intended, he stayed for several days in the hope that natives might come who could tell him where the child was. No-one came. At length he and Chook departed. Soon afterwards they secured a contract for transporting cypress pine in the lugger from a mill that had been set up on an island near Port Zodiac.

Another year passed. Then Mark and Chook returned to Flying Fox with intent to take up trepang-fishing in earnest. By now Mark had got over the shame of being the father of a half-caste. In fact for some time he had been thinking that most likely the child was dead. This time the natives were in occupation; and with them was young Mark Anthony Shillingsworth, or, as the natives called him, Naw-nim, which was their way of saying No-name. The child’s baptismal name had not got beyond the witnesses to his baptism. The name No-name was one usually given by the natives to dogs for which they had no love but had not the heart to kill or lose. It was often given to half-castes as well. Little Naw-nim’s mother was dead.

When Mark first saw the child he was playing in sand with a skinny dog. He scampered into the scrub when Mark approached. It was with difficulty that he was caught. Mark picked him up gingerly, not because he was afraid of hurting, but was afraid of being soiled by him. He was unutterably filthy. Matter clogged his little eyes and nose; his knees and back and downy head were festered; dirt was so thick on his scaly skin that it was impossible to judge his true colour; and he stank.

For all his former callousness and the timidity with which he had come to see the child when he learnt that he was there, Mark was revolted and enraged by the sight of him. With the lump of squealing squirming filth in his arms he passionately reviled the natives for their foul neglect. Then he gave it to a lubra to scrub. He went back to his house spitting and grimacing and brushing contamination from his hands. It occurred to him soon afterwards that most of the responsibility for the foul neglect rested on himself. He was smitten with remorse. That night little Nawnim slept on a blanket beside his father’s bed, now as clean as a little prince and smelling sweetly of Life Buoy Soap, and, though chafed almost raw, quite happy. His father had given him a large bowl of milk porridge to which was added a dash of rum.

Being bathed became a daily experience in Nawnim’s life. At first he objected to it strongly, but soon became used to it, as he did to wearing the quaint costumes his father made him and to eating whiteman’s food. The food he ate was often strong far beyond the alimentary powers of a child as young as he, but evidently not for one whose system had been hardened with food snatched from dogs and salted with sand and ants. His distended belly soon subsided when more than air was given it to digest; and otherwise he took on more comely shape, as his father observed with great interest. His brassy yellow skin became sleek and firm. His eyes lost their hunted-animal look and shone like polished black stones over which golden water flows. Soon he became fat and bold and beautiful. Mark loved him, and in nursing him wasted scores of hours that should lave been occupied elsewhere. Often when there was no-one near to see, stirred by the beauty of the delicate little features, he would kiss him passionately and address him from the depths of his heart in terms that made him burn with shame when recalled in moments less emotional. But for Chook, who refused to take his affection for the child seriously, he might have adopted him frankly.

Several months passed. Then Mark and Chook decided to make a voyage to the Dutch East Indies. Mark left Nawnim in the care of his lubra, who looked after him diligently till it seemed as though his father did not intend to return, when she abandoned him to his old friends the dogs. Mark was away for about a year. When he returned he renewed his attention to Nawnim, but did not keep it up with anything like his former interest, because he took as mistress a half-caste girl named Jewty, who would not have the child in the house if his father were not there to protect him. Jewty was one of Ned Krater’s children, a wilful, spiteful, jealous creature. Under her influence and that of Chook and by reason of the fact that he spent most of his time away from the island, Mark eventually lost interest in Nawnim almost completely. And the occasions when he was forced to take notice of the child did anything but rouse paternal love in him, because they were usually in consequence of some foul childish ailment or of the boy’s escapades in theft. Nawnim, associate of niggers’ dogs, had learned to steal as he learned to use his limbs. His father was his chief victim.

The years passed, as the years will, even in places like Flying Fox, where their passage may go long unnoticed. Mark passed from youth into manhood, while spending half his time at Flying Fox and the rest in Port Zodiac and other easy-going places, and so without acquiring much more understanding of moral values than he had ever had, which was perhaps no less than that possessed by most folks. His son spent all his time roaming with the Yurracumbungas, growing up half in the style of the Tribe and half in that of their dogs.

HEIR TO ALL THE AGES (#ucc395e85-cad9-52ce-ae79-e64b7cf21d6b)

THE Shillingsworth family in Capricornia had increased in the eight years of Mark’s and Oscar’s residence to the number of six, Mark’s half-caste bastard being included, though perhaps not rightly, as well as Oscar’s two legitimates and himself and his wife, all of whom, though bearing the name, were perhaps more rightly Poundamores. The younger generation were Oscar’s children, Marigold and Roger, and Mark’s Nawnim. In the year of the census, 1910, Mark was thirty. Oscar’s age was now indeterminate, he having reached the doldrums of life, the period between thirty-five and forty-five, in which a man, not knowing whether to forge ahead and pretend to be a hoary elder or to slink back and pretend to be a youth, just drifts and lets his age be known as the—er—thirties.

The year of census was an eventful one for the whole family. The first to whom adventure came was Roger, aged one year. His adventure was the greatest one can experience. He died, or, as Oscar stated on his tombstone, was Called Home. Measles had a voice in the calling.

Bitter trouble in Oscar’s home followed the death of Roger. Just prior to it, Jasmine, who was in the unhappy state into which many handsome potent women fall in the early thirties through too closely considering the dullness of the future against the brightness of the past, had been neglecting her home at Red Ochre for what was a frantic endeavour to enjoy the dregs of her almost exhausted youth in the social whirl in town. Oscar had long since dropped out of the social whirl. He would have liked Jasmine to do the same, as he often hinted. But when he accused her of neglecting her child and so having been to a degree responsible for its death he did not really mean what he said. He was not speaking his mind but the craziness that the death of the potential perpetuator of his name had induced in him.

Jasmine sprang out of mourning perhaps bitterer than his and spat at him all that over which she had been ruminating for years. He learnt that he was a thing of wood, a thing of the gutter sprung from stock of the gutter (distorted reference to disreputable Brother Mark), risen by chance to be—what?—to be a bumptious fool whose god was property, not property in vast estates such as a true man might worship, but in paltry roods. Bah! His very greed was paltry. He dreamt of the pennies he could coin from cattle-dung! (Poor Oscar! He had always resisted her urging him to secure more land and buy more stock, because, not being a grazier born like the Poundamores who controlled vast Poundamore Downs on account of which they were born and buried in debt, he realised that cattle-raising was a business, not a religion, and that as it was he held more country and ran more stock than was warranted by the mean trade he could do. And once he had said quite idly that he wished there were a sale for the cattle-dung that lay about the run in tons.) And she spat at him something that would not have hurt him a few years earlier or later, namely that he was already old and flaccid, while she, who was by eight years his junior, was young—yes—young! Young—and Oh God—aflame with life!

Stung to malice, Oscar jeered at her for a faded flower blind to its own wilting through pitiful conceit. She fled from him weeping. Poor blundering ass, quickly stricken with remorse, he went after her and begged forgiveness, and thus only made himself more hateful to her by being weak and her more desirable to himself by causing her to be inexorable. They were never reconciled. A few weeks after the scene, she eloped to the Philippines with the captain of the cattle-steamer Cucaracha, accompanied by a cargo of Oscar’s beeves. Oscar was shocked, firstly by having lost her, secondly by having lost her in a manner so unseemly, thirdly by having lost her to a man he had regarded as a friend. He had taken Captain Emilio Gomez into his house as a Spanish gentleman. The fellow had turned out to be nothing but a Dirty Dago.

There was ample justification for believing that Oscar and his family should not rightly be numbered as Shillingsworths. At the time of the census Red Ochre was bidding fair to become another Poundamore Downs, there being resident in the place eight persons of whom no less than seven were Poundamores of the blood. Oscar himself was the outsider. The seven were Jasmine and her children, and Joe Poundamore and his wife and child, and Heather. Joe had never left the place since coming up to show Oscar how to run it five years before. Heather had been there since having returned with Jasmine when that lady came home from Poundamore Downs where she had gone to bear her baby Roger as a true Poundamore.

Heather was then twenty-five, still unmarried, and not yet completely recovered from having been overwhelmed by Mark, though disposed to think of him less harshly than she had for a long while after the incident of the burnt cork. She had not seen Mark since her return, not because she had taken pains to avoid doing so, but because he had. Indeed her main reason for returning to Capricornia was to see Mark again. But he was not to be seen in Port Zodiac much in these days. He had visited Red Ochre only once, when his mother and sister Maud came up to stay there for a while about eighteen months before the return of Heather. After that, in spite of the success of the family reunion, he had not set eyes on Oscar for a whole year; and then the circumstances that brought them together was no less than the news of their mother’s death. After Heather returned, Mark did not see Oscar again till after Jasmine deserted.

The Poundamore stronghold in Capricornia collapsed when Jasmine deserted. Soon after she left, Oscar quarrelled with Joe, not for the first time by any means, but for the first time with any courage. He told Joe to go to hell, and advised Heather to go with him. Joe went back to Poundamore Downs, taking his wife and child, and offering to take the motherless Marigold to give her into the care of her grandparents. Oscar declined the offer, but paid the steamer-fares for which Joe was fishing when he made the offer. Heather, whose love for Capricornia was genuine, did not go home. To the annoyance of Oscar, who would sooner have supported her than see a relative engaged in what he considered a disreputable calling, and to the disconcertment of Mark, whose favourite drinking-place the Princess Alice Hotel was, she got a job as barmaid at the Princess Alice with her old friend Mrs Daisy Shay.

Oscar ceased to be a Poundamore with the fall of the stronghold. This Mark discovered when next they met. The discovery caused him great astonishment, because the evidence of the fact was Oscar’s quite unexpected brotherly act of coming to the Calaboose and offering to effect his—Mark’s—release. At the time Mark was serving a term of six week’s imprisonment for having failed to pay a debt of £30 that had been owing for forty months. It was his fifth sojourn in the Calaboose. He had long been legally insolvent, having made himself so by deeding his property to Chook, who carefully kept out of debt himself and lived on Mark’s credit. When Mark went to jail, as he now did at least once a year, Chook usually found temporary employment in the town and lived as meanly as possible, saving money against the time of Mark’s release; if unable to find employment, he always got drunk and assaulted the person responsible for Mark’s imprisonment, and thus got sent to jail himself, at once to be with Mark and to save the cost of living.

Oscar was apprised of the fact that Mark was in jail by Chook, whom he found working in the railway-yards. He also learnt that the pair still owned the lugger and the rest of the trepang-fishing plant, all of which could be turned into money. Oscar was in need of money at the time. His need was largely responsible for his sudden show of magnanimity. He decided that it would be a good idea to get Mark to turn his share of the lugger and other property into cash and then to take him as a partner in his own business. He told Mark that if he would accept the offer of partnership he would settle the debt on account of which Mark was imprisoned.

Mark accepted the offer eagerly, but not honestly. Strangely enough, though always eager for Oscar’s friendship when it was difficult to secure, he valued it lightly then. He had no intention of becoming Oscar’s partner. He only wished to get out of jail. When he did get out he played with Oscar, accompanied him to Red Ochre, and spent a month with him, pretending that he was considering how best he could dispose of his property, while in fact he was making plans to take up pearl-fishing and waiting for Chook to earn more money. At last he told Oscar that he would like to try his hand at pearl-fishing first, and vowed that if he made a profit he would invest it in Red Ochre. On the strength of that Mark tried to sell Oscar the hydro-electric power plant that he had erected at much expense and for little purpose at Flying Fox. Oscar would not buy, in spite of the attractive picture, which imaginative Mark drew for him, of Red Ochre electrified free of cost by the waters of the Caroline River. However, when Mark was leaving, Oscar lent him £20 and refrained from mentioning the £30 Mark owed him on account of the debt.

Mark was tired of Flying Fox and trepang. It was his plan to set up a new camp on Chineri Island in the Tikkalalla Group and to fish for pearl-shell on the shallow banks that lay between there and the Dutch East Indies. This was the result of his having lately made the acquaintance of Japanese pearlers from the Van Diemen Islands, from whom he had learnt something of the art of diving, which had brought him to believe that the Silver Sea was floored with mother-o’-pearl. It was for the purpose of raising money to buy a diving-outfit that he was trying to sell the electric power plant.

He was beginning to despair of ever being able to sell the plant, when he met a man named Jock Driver, who owned a cattle-station called Gunamiah, situated on the Melisande River. Jock Driver was a North-country Englishman and very mean. His reason for being interested in the machine, as he confessed, was only that he hated to see the waters of the Melisande running to waste. He was deeply interested in the machine from the moment he heard of it, but did not show that he was more than casually so, because he wished to make a bargain of the purchase. An ordinary Australian of the locality would have taken Mark’s word for what he said about the machine, and would have said Yes or No to the price asked, and, as a preliminary to doing business, would have stood the needy seller treat. Mark had to stand treat himself, and had to take Jock out to inspect the plant.

Thus it happened that one quiet afternoon in the early part of the Wet Season of that eventful year, little Nawnim, now aged six, while playing in Mark’s house, taking advantage of Mark’s absence in town and Yeller Jewty’s in the native camp, heard the splash of the anchor and the rattle of a chain. For a moment he stood bewildered, then crept to the front door and peeped out, to be confronted with the sight of Mark and Chook and Jock landing from the dinghy. They had set out for the shore before the ship dropped anchor.

Nawnim ran to the back door, intending to flee. But flight was put out of the question by the sight of heavy-handed Jewty running home. For a moment he hesitated, gathering his little wits, then drew back, and, after making a wild survey of his surroundings, rushed into hiding in the bedroom. Jewty was rushing home to get her infant daughter Diana, whom she had left asleep on Mark’s white-sheeted bed. Diana was a black quadroon, her father being a blackfellow. Mark forbade Jewty to have the child in the house.

Mark’s house consisted of one large room, with a kitchen built under the back veranda and connected with the room by a curtained doorway. The room itself was large and high. Two-thirds of it served as a living-room, the rest, screened off by canvas curtains prettily stencilled by the finicking hand of Mark, as the bedroom. Nawnim rushed into the bedroom so precipitately that he nearly crashed into the bed. He woke Diana. She was naked like himself, but chocolate-coloured, not copperish as he was. She did not see him. He darted under the bed.

The whitemen came up the beach, roaring Black Alice. Jewty flew in through the back door, took a peep from the front. The whitemen were within a few yards now. She drew back, hesitated for a moment, then darted into the bedroom.

Nawnim could see into the living-room through a gap in the loose-drawn curtain. He saw the whitemen enter, as did Jewty, who was crouching by the gap. The whitemen stopped in the middle of the room and shouted their song to conclusion, then laughed, hugged each other, and sat down. Jock asked for a drink. Mark said that they must wait till the crew brought the things from the ship. Then Chook said that he would like Jock to try his Ambrosia, and rose and went off to his house to get some. Soon Mark rose, went to the front door and looked to see what the crew were doing, then, seeing that the boys were idling, went out to hurry them.

Jock rose and walked about the neatly-appointed room, examining it. Nawnim could see his face, which was one such as he had never seen before. It frightened him. Jock was, in fact, quite a good-looking fellow. What troubled Nawnim was his colouring. His mouth was as red as fresh raw meat, and thick-lipped and wide and constantly writhing. Nawnim was used to lean-faced, brown-faced, thin-lipped, small-eyed whitemen. Jock’s face was as red as a boiled crayfish, even redder than it usually was in this climate in which it was as foreign as a gumtree would be in his native fogs, because it had lately been put under the blood-rousing influences of salt-wind and grog. The redness of his face set off the blueness of his bulging English eyes and the blackness of his hair and the whiteness of his large prominent teeth. His teeth looked like a shark’s to Nawnim, his eyes like a crab’s. When he approached the bedroom Nawnim turned sick with fright. Jewty must have been given a turn too. She rushed to the bed and snatched up her baby and trod on Nawnim’s little hand. Nawnim yelped, heaved away, struck his head on the underneath of the bed, and rolled into view bawling. Diana screamed and clutched at her mother’s hair.

Jock looked in. The children’s cries died in their mouths. All three stared at him. “Hellaw!” he cried. “What’s this—the fahmily, eh?”

Still the trio stared. Jock looked them over, grinning, then said to Jewty, “You Mark’s missus?”

She blinked.

“Eh?” he asked.

“Yu-i,” she muttered.

“These his piccanins?”

She nodded to Nawnim and muttered, “Dat one belong Mark.”

“Not this one?” he asked, stepping up to look at Diana.

Jewty shrank back, with Diana shrinking in her arms.

“Eh?” asked Jock.

“Him belong him blackfella,” she muttered; then, as Jock put out a hand to touch the child, she cried sharply, “No-more!” and struck his hand back with her own.

Jock’s eyes blazed. “You bitch!” he hissed.

Jewty stood rigid, with hand upraised to strike again.

Then Mark and Chook came in. Jock turned, looked round the curtain, and said to Mark with a grin, “Joost introdoocin’ meself to your fahmily. I didn’t knaw ye had one.”

“Eh?” murmured Mark, approaching. He stopped at the doorway and gaped. Nawnim shrank back to the wall.

Jock chuckled. Mark swallowed, looked from one to another of the group, then said thickly to Jewty, “What the hell you doin’ here with those brats?”

She frowned, hugged Diana to her, and answered sulkily, “Him two-fella come himself.”

After a moment Mark grunted, “Get out!”

She slunk past him, eyeing him sideways. Nawnim still shrank against the wall. Mark growled at him, “Come out of that—come on now!” Nawnim shrank more.

“That your kid, eh?” said Jock with a grin.

Mark glanced at him sourly.

“The lassie tawl me he wuz,” said jock, and chuckled deeply.