Capricornia

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.

Thus a match was made by fate. Mark tried to keep it secret, because, while taking it seriously himself, he realised that his cronies would take it as a joke. But such a thing could not be kept secret for long in a community as small and curious as Port Zodiac. The news of it spread rapidly. Oscar and Jasmine smiled over it and said that it was the best thing that ever could have happened to these two restless youngsters. The nurses at the hospital, moved by feminine love of romance, on account of it gave Mark as much furlough as he wished and for once treated him as a fellow creature. Other women chattered about it, some in Heather’s presence and not without dropping a hint or two about the little they knew of Mark’s character. His cronies roared over it, all except Chook, who fretted over it as news of an impending bereavement.

Talk of Mark’s bad character was by no means new to Heather. She had heard much about him from Jasmine. But she was not concerned about his reputation then, not realising how bad it really was. She gave all her attention to studying the effect her presence had on him and to enjoying the profound effect that his had on herself. Although Mark was unaware of it, he had overwhelmed her.

In this innocent stage the affair lasted for a fortnight. It almost reached the kissing-stage, which, indeed, it might have reached before but for Mark’s mixed feelings of reluctance to commit himself and fear of giving offence and terror that later she might discover his monstrous disgrace. Heather had been ready to be kissed all along.

Fate was jesting for the time. One afternoon while the couple were leaving the jetty in the lugger, setting out on a short fishing-cruise that in the minds of both of them seemed likely to end with kissing, Harold Howell, who, with Skinn and another of Mark’s cronies, had followed Mark down to the house from the town and had been running about and chuckling ever since, came rushing down the jetty, shouting and waving a small brown-paper parcel. Mark sent the blackboy, who was the third person on the ship, to attend to the engine, and took the wheel himself and turned the vessel back. “What’s up?” he shouted at Howell.

“Something you forgot,” answered Howell.

“Me? I didn’t forget anything.”

“Oh yes you did!”

“What is it?”

“Dunno. Feller up town gave it to me. Said you’d forgotten it. Something for the lady, I think. Catch.”

Howell tossed the parcel and skipped back out of sight. It fell on the deck near Heather, who picked it up. Mark turned the ship back to sea, shouted to the blackboy, then went to Heather. “Something for you?” he asked.

“For you isn’t it?”

“He said for the lady.”

“Yes—but something you’d forgotten. Shall I open it?”

“Yes—wonder what it is?”

After unwrapping many layers of brown paper, Heather came to a small cylindrical object screwed up in tissue paper. Mark was leaning over her shoulder, pleasantly near her hair. She unscrewed the tissue and revealed a charred beer-bottle cork. She looked up at Mark in surprise, to be still more surprised by the sight of him. His face was crimson, his eyes glazed. After a moment she asked, “Why—what is it?”

Mark grinned feebly, and answered, “Oh—er—a—er just a bit of a joke.”

“Joke?” she murmured, staring.

He chuckled weakly and took the cork and tossed it overboard, foolishly to windward, so that it flew back and fouled his white shirt and lodged in the sling of his arm. He picked it out and flung it to leeward, hard. But there was no escape from the memory of it. There were corks by the score in the sea, and on the beach where they landed, and in the bottles of soft-stuff they had for their picnic. For the rest of the afternoon Mark behaved quite guiltily. There was no kissing.

That night Heather called on a knowing acquaintance of hers, Mrs Daisy Shay, proprietress of the Princess Alice Hotel. In the course of conversation she carefully asked what jocular significance could be found in a burnt cork. It was not specially to ask the question that she called on Mrs Shay; she called by prearrangement; but she went filled with curiosity and not a little foreboding about the incident of the afternoon. She learnt to her horror that the men of Capricornia said that once a man went combo he could never again look with pleasure on a white woman unless he blacked her face. And she learnt much more that horrified her, some of it about Mark, who owed money to Mrs Shay.

Next day she did not go up Murphy Street as usual to meet Mark coming in from the hospital, but went for a walk round Devilfish Bay that kept her out till sundown. Next afternoon she went for another long walk, and again the next, after which there seemed to be no further need to avoid Mark. Instead of calling at the house on the third afternoon, Mark went to the First and Last Hotel and got drunk. Next day he had to leave the hospital.

It was Mark who did the avoiding subsequently. He guessed what had happened, and realised that the dream was ended, knowing that while white women might forgive a man any amount of ordinary philandering they are blindly intolerant of weakness for Black Velvet. For a while he felt bereft. He cursed Heather, not knowing that he had caused her much weeping. Then he shrugged off the yearning for her company and sought that of the delighted Chook instead. When he met Howell he tried to quarrel with him. Howell persisted in arguing that he had done him a good turn, saying that any fool could get married, that it was the strong man who did not.

About a week later he got the promise of a job in the railway-yards. By making this known, he was able to quiet his creditors. As soon as his arm was healed he went to work as an Inspector of Rolling-stock. His duty was to examine and oil the wheels of rolling-stock. It was not at all laborious. The rolling-stock of the Capricornian Government was limited, and little of it ever rolled.

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