Читать книгу Follow My Dust - Jessica Hawke - Страница 8

AN INTRODUCTION

I am able clearly to recall my first meeting with Arthur Upfield. It came about when I was myself embattled with forces tending to push me down to the nomadic existence and mental outlook of my mother’s people, for, you should know, my mother was an aborigine and my father was a white Australian. I knew neither parent, and, when a small baby, had been found with my dead mother beneath a sandalwood tree, and was cared for and reared by the Mission Matron. To her I owe a first-class education, and the eradication of an inferiority complex threatened by duality of race.

I had engaged sporadically in police work, and had taken employment as a stockman on a station in the south-west of Queensland, when Arthur Upfield was brought to my hut to work with me. I was not at the hut when Upfield arrived, and I found him baking a brownie and cooking dinner. In the kitchen, we stood either side the table and took stock of each other.

He was of my own age–thirty. He was dressed as any stockman of that time dressed. He was tall, lean, hard. Brown hair grew a little low on his forehead, which was narrow, and the back of his head was broader and higher than the face, indicating a minus concentration and a plus imagination; and, I observed, his ears were fawn-like, denoting quick thinking, and his mouth was mobile and hinted at a sense of humour. About the chin there was a trace of sensuality and arrogance.

His smile of welcome was swift, the smile lighting his hazel eyes, and any reserve I may have had was banished by the outstretched hand and the warmth of its clasp. He spoke rapidly, and when animated was inclined to slur his words. Absence of reserve in him overcame my own, and, when we sat down to his dinner of curry and rice and stewed apricots, I found myself answering a barrage of questions. Should the answer of necessity be prolonged by detail, quite often he would not be listening, so anxious was he to put his next question. Many of his questions were of so personal a nature that I had to evade them until much later when I came to know him better.

As a horseman he passed, but without honours. He had much to learn as a cattleman, but then cattlemen are born, and southern England doesn’t produce cattlemen. By white stockmen standards he could read tracks passably well; he could cook above average, and he liked poker, which I never did. What commended him chiefly to me was his thirst for knowledge. He never attempted to impress me, and never betrayed a hint of superiority over me.

Thus within a week I informed him on matters I would not speak of to any of a hundred other men. It was almost a pleasure to tell him that my registered name is Leon Wood. The subject of the aborigines, the totemic structure of their society, the powers of their magic men, their letter-sticks and smoke signals, he returned to time and time again. Having watched together a migration of rabbits, his questioning concerning these rodents, as well as the migration of rats and mice farther north, became almost embarrassing by its persistence.

I was compelled to acknowledge slight bafflement to myself. Here was a man seeking information and obviously assimilating it, and yet the standard of his education was much lower than my own–but not on all points. A probe now and then proved that he knew very little of algebra, nothing of the higher mathematics, very little of Latin, and was entirely ignorant of Greek. He had me on English history, and on the first great voyages.

We were five months together, and his companionship did much to bring about certain decisions I was able to make relative to my own future. Neither of us was at all put out when the station reorganised its manpower, and we left to travel together for a few miles before parting.

Shortly after this, I received a special appointment within the Queensland Police Department, and years later an assignment took me into western New South Wales, and to my second meeting with Arthur Upfield. He was now working as cook at a place called Wheeler’s Well, but when I visited there he had no one for whom to cook, and I wondered how he endured this loneliness, as he seemed happy enough and showed no effect of solitude.

Upfield was now more matured, much less excitable, more aware of responsibility to himself. He hadn’t lost the habit of firing questions like bullets, but he had gained the patience to listen fully to the answers. Having followed him into the kitchen, and eventually having opportunity to note its extreme tidiness, I saw at the end of the table, against a wall, a shallow wood box partially filled with foolscap, and this provided such interest that, on my friend leaving the kitchen for a minute, I could not forbear investigation.

And in that box was the solution of several mysteries concerning my friend.

The idiosyncrasies were all explained. The shape of his head should have elucidated them for me long before, for I am no stranger to the teachings of the great Italian, Lombroso. The unusual mixture of humility and arrogance, the unusual combination of patience and impatience, and a contempt for the human herd together with a passion to study the herd’s instincts, all indicated the individualist, the rebel, and the sensualist in one. Circumstances could have made this man a great criminal, a great crusader. Inherited attributes are more often than not submerged by unfavourable circumstances, or opportunities wrongly timed.

About a month after I bade farewell to Upfield at Wheeler’s Well, I received from him a letter in which he said he was writing a novel of crime detection and that he had decided to build his investigator on me and name him Napoleon Bonaparte. In modern parlance: just like that. Obviously I could not fail to be interested in the career of this fictional character destined to become popular in the Americas, Great Britain and many countries of Europe. I have, of course, read all the chronicles for which I have supplied most of the basic material, but my main interest has been in the evolution of a man who has surmounted obstacles even greater than those with which I have had to contend, and, moreover, has achieved a commendable degree of success without having battered down competitors to do so. No outstandingly successful man in commerce or politics may claim that. From Log Cabin to White House is a much easier road than that followed by Arthur Upfield, and, also, very truly yours,

Napoleon Bonaparte, D.I., Queensland P.D.