Читать книгу Capricornia - Xavier Herbert - Страница 8

WHEN Mark and the other men left Flying Fox, Ned Krater stayed behind, congratulating himself on having got rid of a set of pests. The pests had been gone about a month when, taking advantage of the mild weather following the Equinox and the end of the Wet, he set out in his lugger, accompanied by six natives, to fish for trepang among coral reefs that lay some twenty miles to the east of the Tikkalalla Islands. One still starry night, while the Maniya, with captain and crew sound asleep aboard, lay at anchor among the reefs, a cockeye bob, as violent as unseasonable, roared down from the north. Before her crew could bear a hand she snapped her cable. In a moment she was engulfed in mighty seas and whirled away like an empty box and smashed to pieces on a projecting reef.

Four of the natives were lost. The others and Krater had the doubtful fortune to be hurled high on to the reef and saved from drowning at the expense of being terribly maimed. One blackboy sustained such severe injuries to the head that, though he remained unconscious, it was not long before he was raving mad. The other boy had his right arm broken, his left ear torn off, and a great slab of flesh stripped from his left thigh. Krater was lacerated all over and had half his starboard ribs stove in.

Thus these favourites of doubtful fortune found each other in the peaceful dawn, objects of interest to a horde of crabs and a flock of seagulls. The boys had lain down to die, as it was the custom of their race to do when life seemed not worth living. But Krater, in spite of his more than sixty years and the fact that, when he breathed, blood gurgled in his chest, rose and took stock of things. He found the dinghy cast up, battered and waterlogged, but evidently seaworthy; and he found as well the lugger’s jib and a sweep and a tangled mass of rigging. He thereupon decided to have the dinghy floated and rigged with sail. Being unable to shout at his dying comrades, he attacked them with a piece of wreckage and convinced them that they were still alive and living with a whiteman.

They were unable to move the dinghy until the tide fell at noon. But Krater permitted no idling, because he guessed that the others were dying and desired to use whatever life they still possessed. He never thought that he might die himself. He felt immortal. First he had them bind his chest with rope in order to restrict his breathing and so ease the pain in his lacerated lung; then he had them help him fashion a mast from the sweep and attach wire stays to it and tear the jib to the shape he desired and make a bailer from canvas and wire and bent wood. The boy who was becoming mad was valuable because he had two sound hands that could be forced to hold things. When Krater was done with him he tied him to the coral to prevent him from making himself sick by drinking of the sea. He wanted his assistance in the task of moving the dinghy, and hoped to be able to make further use of him during the voyage to the Tikkalalla Group. Thus while the day advanced, cloudless, windless, burning hot.

The dinghy was moved and emptied. It was badly sprung, but not so badly as to daunt Ned Krater in his purpose. He stopped the springs with rags torn from the jib and with plugs of wood, thus occupying himself for half the afternoon, while the boy with the broken arm lay in the hot water watching, and the other, now quite mad, lay lashed to the coral howling.

In the middle of the afternoon the madman’s raving and struggling to get at the water became intolerable. Krater went to him, and after studying him for a while, released him. He uttered a joyful yell and scuttled into the water like a crab. While he was drinking, Krater took up a heavy piece of wood and crept on him and struck him on the head with all his might. The boy rolled over in the water, struggling violently. Then he gained his knees and turned on Krater. Krater struck at him again. He jerked his head aside and took the blow on a shoulder. He did not make a sound. He gaped, as though surprised.

“I’m only puttin’ y’outer mis’ry, me lad,” gasped Krater. “Gawdsake keep still.”

When the club was raised again, the madman squealed and dived at Krater’s legs. Krater hit him—hit him—till flakes of brains spattered out of his broken head.

Krater dropped the club, spat out a mouthful of blood, then signalled to the other boy to come and help him throw the body into deeper water. The other would not come, though Krater scowled at him horribly, doubtless because he thought he was to be put out of his misery too. Krater left the body to the crabs and gulls.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in silence. Krater sat in the dinghy watching for the first breath of the breeze he expected to spring up from the east. His companion lay in the water, now with a sharp-edged rock in his hand. He wished to die, but not by another man’s hand.

At nightfall they set out for the Group, steering by the stars. Krater sat in the stern, the boy amidships bailing. They rarely spoke. They were tired and racked to the point of death. They reached Chineri Island late in the following morning. Here they abandoned the dinghy for want of wind and continued their way down the burning beach, heading for a native camp. A thousand flies went with them to suck their suppurating sores. Time and again they fell by the way exhausted, and would have died there but for Krater’s Anglo-Saxon will, which could not realise that it was inextricably in the grip of death and hence flogged the wretched body on to unnecessary misery. On they went and on and on, Stone-Age Man and Anglo-Saxon, clinging to each other for support, blending the matter of their sores.

It was dark when they reached their destination. Krater asked the natives to take them to Flying Fox at once. They demurred, saying that the sea between was a haunt of terrible devils after dark. But they might as well face the devils as defy the Man of Fire. He could only command in whispers; but he made up for weakness of voice with terrible gestures and violence with a stick. They obeyed him. By now he was almost delirious. His old heart was galloping to death. He did not know it. He thought only of the need to reach home as quickly as possible, and hoped that at home he would find the pests.

He reached his home, and lived long enough to hear the natives wailing in a Death Corroboree over his late comrade. He knew what the wailing was about. At first he chuckled, considering the cause of it proof of his superiority. But after a while the corroboreeing drove him mad. He shouted to the mourners to stop their row and come and open his doors and windows that he might not suffocate. They did not hear him. What he thought was shouting was mere gasping. And his doors and windows were open as it was. At length, unable to tolerate the wailing longer, he leapt up and rushed out to the mourners with a mighty club and laid about him, cracking heads like eggs and limbs like carrots. But he did not stop the corroboree even then. His violence and the fragility of his victims were only fancies of his dying mind.

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.