Capricornia

The Shillingsworths were young men of good taste, as they showed in the style in which they furnished and decorated their new home. Though forced by jealous superiors to take an inferior kind of house, they made of it the prettiest in the town. Mark, who was inventive, fitted up on the wide front veranda a punkah of both beautiful and ingenious design, which worked automatically when the wind blew, that is when its working was not required. Oscar took a smelly native from the Compound and converted him into a piece of bright furniture that made up for the defects of Mark’s machine and called him the Punkah Wallah. This Wallah fellow also waited at table and did odd jobs; and his lubra worked as housemaid. The services of this pair cost the Shillingsworths five shillings a week in cash and scraps of food, and added inestimably to the value they now set upon themselves. Most of their own food they had sent in from a Chinese restaurant.

They had not been living in the bungalow long, when one night they held a party that was honoured by the presence of Colonel Playfair Flute. Then Oscar said gravely to Mark, while watching the temporary Chinese butler at work, “By cripes we’re getting on!” Mark only smiled, too deeply touched by his brother’s pleasure for answer. Within a month of that party Oscar was raised to the post of Assistant Secretary of his Department. He considered that he had become Professional.

Just as Oscar was affected by the atmosphere in which he worked, so was Mark, but with results quite different. Mark was troubled by the fact that while employed in the Railway Department, which pleased him greatly, he was as far removed from the rails and cars and locomotives, connection with which was responsible for his pleasure in his job, as Oscar from the lepers in the Lazaret he dealt with in his ledgers. The work of his hands was merely to record with pen and ink what other hands accomplished with the actual oily parts of that interesting machine the railway. He breathed the mustiness of an office, while the owners of those other hands breathed the smells of locomotives, brakevans, and the flying wilderness. He was a musty clerk, while they were hefty men. When he attempted to discuss what troubled him with Oscar he was told not to be Silly. When he put it to his office-mates he was stared at. When he came out with it one day down in the railway-yards before the station-master and the engineer of the mail-train that ran once a fortnight between Port Zodiac and Copper Creek, he was laughed at and told he was a queer fellow for One of the Heads. The frank contempt of these two last for those they spoke of as The Heads filled him with desire to prove that he was really not one of them but rather one of their hefty selves by telling the truth about his railwayman father. It was only loyalty to Oscar that checked him. Soon he came to detest the perpetual gentility in which he lived as One of the Heads and to wish for nothing better than to be disrated to the company of the hefty fellows of the Yards.

No-one in the railway-yards wanted anything to do with The Heads. When Mark went there in pursuance of his duties, as he did much more often than necessary, eyes that regarded him plainly said, “Here’s a pimp!” He would sooner have lost his job than he would have informed on them for whatever they felt guilty about, as for weeks he tried to prove to them. He won regard at last by taking beer along with his official papers and by betraying secrets of the office.

He fawned particularly on George Tittmuss, the station-master, a giant of a man who awed him with his physique, hefty enough youth though he was himself, and Albert Henn, or Chook Henn as his friends called him, the engineer of the mail-train, a jovial little fellow who was rather kind to him. These men were very popular among workingmen, were what are called Booze Artists, fellows who can drink continuously without getting drunk, or at least not as drunk as youthful Mark got on a single bottle of beer, and very amusing yarn-spinners and musicians and singers. The parties they held in the house they shared were the joy of the railwaymen. By dint of sheer truckling, Mark at last won an invitation to the house to hear Chook Henn play his concertina, or Make it Talk, as his friends said. Soon he began to attend their parties regularly, though furtively. Soon he began to drink in a manner that to him was excessive. Soon he replaced his topee with a grubby panama, and took to rolling his cigarettes and going about the town without a coat. But there were times when a reproachful word from Oscar, who for a long while remarked nothing more than the slovenliness of dress, made Mark feel that he was not the remarkably adaptable fellow he mostly thought himself, but a poor thing of common clay who was weakly retrogressing. When he felt like that he kept away from the railwaymen, resumed coat and topee, and took a spell of gentility.

One night in Henn’s house he told the truth about his father. Forthwith he was accepted as a brother. But even as he staggered home that night arm in arm with Chook Henn and Tittmuss, his conscience scolded his tipsy ego for its folly in having betrayed that best of all men his brother. Next morning, while he lay in that state of stagnant calm which precedes the drunkard’s storm of suffering, Oscar came to him and growled. Oscar was not a teetotaller; indeed he had often drunk with Mark of late; but he carried his liquor like a gentleman, or a Booze Artist, and with dominance forced Mark to do the same. At any other time he would have made a joke of Mark’s condition. But that morning he knew, as half the town did, that Mark had staggered up Killarney Street in Low Company. In a quiet, dry, relentless voice that Mark knew well and dreaded, Oscar called him a fool, a waster, a disgrace, and ordered him to mend his ways. Then he went off, erect, cool, clean, sober, sane, a gentleman, everything that Mark was not. Envying him, loving him, loathing himself, Mark choked, swallowed the scum in his mouth, rose hastily, rushed out to vomit. Oscar at breakfast heard him, rose grimacing, slammed a door.

Mark forsook his railway friends for some time. He did not remain virtuous for long, but made the acquaintance of old Ned Krater, whose tales of life on the Silver Sea made the railwaymen seem almost as musty as himself. Then he began to see Port Zodiac as not a mere place of business but a tarrying-place on highroads leading to adventure. He really learnt to drink through being taken up by Krater. Drink! He began to consider himself a finished Booze Artist, not knowing how he carried his grog, since he often carried so much, nor suffering the aftermaths so badly, since he learnt the trick of taking a hair of the dog. In fact he carried it so ill that the friends he made through associating with Krater often had to carry him home. Hair-of-the-dog made him proof against the criticism of his brother.

And through associating with Krater, he began to take an interest in native women, or Black Velvet as they were called collectively, affairs with whom seemed to be the chief diversion of the common herd. He had heard much about Black Velvet from his railway friends, but had not taken their confessions of weakness for it seriously because they had always waxed ribald when making them. And he heard of it from Government Officers, who also jested about it, but at the same time gave it to be understood that they considered the men who sought the love of lubras—such men were called Comboes—unspeakably low. Although he had often eyed the black housemaid with desire, he had been of the same opinion as his brother Officers till he came in contact with Ned Krater. Krater evidently lived for Black Velvet. He waxed eloquent when he talked about it. He said that it was actually the black lubras who had pioneered the land, since pursuit of them had drawn explorers into the wilderness and love of them had encouraged settlers to stay. He said that a national monument should be set up in their honour. Mark believed him, but could not bring himself to woo the housemaid.

After living on whiskey for three or four weeks he collapsed. He was sent to the hospital by the doctor, who, being himself a drunkard, listed him as suffering from gastritis and neurasthenia. But Oscar’s friends the nurses were not drunkards. Mark suffered much from their contemptuous eyes, especially from those of Sister Jasmine Poundamore, who was Oscar’s sweetheart. Oscar often came to the hospital while he was there, but never to see him.

Once again he was turned back to the path of virtue. But now he trod it only because he knew he needed a change of scene, having no illusions about whither it would lead him, nor any desire to be led elsewhere than to adventure on the Silver Sea. He did not return to the social whirl; instead he spent most of his leisure in prowling round the back parts of the town, observing how the bulk of his fellow-citizens lived. What he saw surprised and delighted him. He had not realised how multifarious the population was and for the most part how strange.

When he met Krater again he learnt that he was on the eve of returning to his camp on the island of Gift of the Sea, or, as he had renamed it, Flying Fox. Krater invited Mark to accompany him, offering to bring him back to town within a couple of weeks if necessary. There was a reason for the kindness. Krater liked Mark, but did not want his company so much as his help to finance his trepang-fishing business. Mark did not guess the reason, though Krater had fished for his help before; but if he had would not have accepted the invitation less eagerly than he did, nor have suffered keener disappointment than he did to learn that, accept or not, he could not go. He applied to the Resident Commissioner for a fortnight’s special leave. He was not only refused it, but in a quiet way rebuked. His Honour apparently knew more about his private life than he supposed. Along with a polite letter of refusal he sent a copy of Rules and Regulations for the Conduct of Officers, in which red-ink marks drew attention to the facts that Indulgence in Drunkenness and Low Company were offences and that an officer was entitled at the end of every three years of Faithful Service to three months’ leave on full pay with a first-class passage home. Evidently His Honour regarded Port Zodiac purely as a business-centre. So Krater’s lugger, which was called the Maniya—after a lubra, some said—sailed without Mark. Mark watched her go. And his heart went with her, out over the sparkling harbour, out on to the Silver Sea, leaving him with nothing in his breast but bitter disappointment.

Some quiet weeks passed. Then Wet Season came with its extremes of heat and humidity and depraving influences on the minds of corruptible men. Even Oscar began to drink to excess. But he never bawled and pranced and wallowed in mud and came home in the arms of shouting larrikins. He always came home as steadily as he went out, though perhaps a little more jauntily, and ended excesses by simply dipping his head in cold water and swallowing an aspirin and a liver pill or two, not by groping for the bottle and subsisting on it for a week. The converse of his conduct was his brother’s.

During Wet Season most work was suspended, necessarily or not. So common was the saying Leave it till after the Wet, and so often used while the season was still a long way off by people with difficult tasks to do, that it seemed as though the respect for the violence of the elements was largely a matter of convenience or convention. However, the necessity for suspension could never be gainsaid in view of the experiences of the early settlers, which were never forgotten by good Capricornians.

When the town became crowded with idlers just before Christmas, Mark, who had in him all the makings of a good Capricornian, chafed because his job went on. He was in this mood when the good Capricornian Krater came back to town to idle and began again to try to interest him in trepang-fishing. A few days before Christmas, Krater asked him if he would like to go out to Flying Fox for a few days during the week of vacation. Mark accepted the offer eagerly. This time he said nothing about it to anyone but his bosom friend Chook Henn, whom he asked to join him in the excursion, and the Wallah fellow, whom he told at the last minute, instructing him to pass the news on to Oscar. He sailed into the Silver Sea aboard the Maniya at sundown on Christmas Eve, drunk, and roaring Black Alice with Chook and Krater, accompanied by Chook’s concertina.

Oh don’t you remember Black Alice, Ben Bolt, Black Alice so dusky and dark, That Warrego gin with a stick through her nose, And teeth like a Moreton Bay shark, The villainous sheep-wash tobacco she smoked In the gunyah down by the lake, The bardees she gathered, the snakes that she stewed, And the damper you taught her to bake—

As the Maniya drifted before a dying breeze into the creek up which she had stolen with Civilisation years before, the sun was sinking. The creek lay like a mirror, fleckless but for chasings here and there where fishes stirred. Rich red gold was splashing on the waters of the reaches to the west, flowing to the sea in dazzling streams down gently-rolling troughs. The sun sank swiftly. Purple shade of night came creeping in. The red gold faded to the hard yellow gold of coins, to the soft gold of flowers, to silver-gilt, to silver, to purple pewter chased with filaments of starlight. The changes passed with the minutes.

“Leggo!” bellowed Krater. The anchor splashed. The chain snarled through the hawse. The echoes clattered across the darkening creek to stir the silence of the brooding bush.

A cry from the shore—“Oy-ee-ee-ee—yah-a!”

Fire leapt in the clearing above the beach, illuminating mighty tree-trunks and the forms of naked men, sending great shadows lurching, splashing the creek with gold. High the fire leapt—higher—higher—blazed like great joy, then checked, fell back, and died.

Again the cry. It was answered only by the echoes. The lugger’s crew, harassed by snarling Krater, were all engaged in snugging ship. The fire leapt again. Ragged patches were snatched from it and carried to the beach. Torches blazed for a minute or two over the launching of canoes. Soon the splash of paddles was heard. Then ghostly shapes shot into the wheel of light shed by Krater’s lantern.

“Itunguri!” cried a voice.

“Inta muni—it-ung-ur-ee-ee-ee—yah!” cried the crew.

“Kiatulli!” shouted Krater. “Shut y’ blunny row!”

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.