Читать книгу Capricornia - Xavier Herbert - Страница 9

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.

Mark stepped up to Nawnim. As he put out a hand to seize him, Nawnim shot from the wall, collided with the bed, stumbled, dashed to the door. Jock grabbed him. He shrieked, fought furiously, wriggled free, and darted to the back door. Jewty was on the veranda. As Nawnim bounded past her she dealt him a cuff that sent him sprawling on his face in the sand. In an instant he was up and flying, shrieking, to the bush.

Jock laughed heartily, slapped scowling Mark on the back. As they were sitting down to drink, he said to Mark, “Fine stahmp of laddie, that. What ye goin’ to do wi’ him?”

Mark answered with a grunt that was intended to give the impression that he did not wish to discuss the matter.

“Ye leavin’ him behind here when ye gaw awee?” asked Jock.

Mark looked at him, and after a moment, said, “Well—as a matter of fact I was thinkin’ of sendin’ him to the Compound. He—he’s not really mine, you know. I—I found him in the bush.”

“In the bulrushes, eh?” asked Jock, and winked at Chook.

Mark blinked, fingered his glass.

It was true that he had thought of sending Nawnim to the Native Compound in Port Zodiac. He had thought of doing so for years whenever his conscience was pricked by the thought of the boy’s growing up as a savage. He had been prevented by fear that the Protector of Aborigines might discover that he was the father of the child and charge him with the cost of his maintenance. He did not know that the cost of maintaining a child in the Compound Half-caste’s Home—indeed of maintaining any inmate of the Compound—was, even there where the necessities of life were expensive, only fourpence per day. Had he known it, he surely would not have been troubled by the thought of his son’s growing up as a half-starved savage.

“I could do wi’ him if ye dawn’t wawnt him,” said Jock. “There in’t many yeller-fellers doon my way.” He chuckled, and added, “I in’t been there long enough yet. I’ve got one yeller-feller meself. Boot it’s a bluidy gurrl. I wawnt boys.” He laughed.

He went on, “I wawnt yeller kids to train as foremen. The Government cawn’t mairk a bloke pay wages to his own soons—see?”

“What—you raisin’ a herd of yeller-fellers?” asked Chook.

Jock swallowed a mouthful of Ambrosia, gasped, blinked. “Gawd!” he breathed. “Wha’s thaht—kerosene?”

Chook frowned.

Mark grinned, and said, “Yeah—you can have the kid if you want him, Jock. But don’t go tellin’ anyone where you got him. Dinkum, he’s not mine——”

“Aw I wawn’t say nawthin’,” said Jock.

“Give’s your word on it,” said Mark. “And give’s your word you’ll treat him decent.”

“Right!” said Jock, and grasped his hand. “There’s me worrd. You can rely on me to bring him up like he wuz me awn soon, cos then I wawn’t have to pay him wages—see?”

Mark thought that a mean motive, but was satisfied that by reason of it Nawnim would be well treated for the rest of his life.

Jock’s station was about two hundred miles inland from Port Zodiac. It covered some two or three thousand square miles. Such a holding was not thought vast in Capricornia, where there were some of even more than ten thousand square miles. Such land was put out to lease at a purely nominal rent, the Government considering itself under obligation to the lessees for their courage in developing the country; indeed so deep was the Government’s sense of obligation that it exempted the lessees from taxation on the profits—often vast profits—of their business. The joke of it was that by no means all the lessees were settlers like Jock. A good number, among whom were included practically all those who controlled the large stations, were English or other foreign companies, who had never seen the land they controlled, but put men on it to work it for them who had to pay taxes out of meagre wages. Indeed many of these big companies controlled similar properties in other countries that were Australia’s rivals in the meat-trade of the world. Thus they were never troubled by competition.

Jock intended to place Nawnim in a stock-camp, in which he would grow up to learn the ways of horses and cattle as the business of his life. He would take to the saddle as soon as possible and work with native stockriders as one of them till he became a man, when, should he prove to be more intelligent, or rather, perhaps, more selfish and purposeful, than a native, he would be made a foreman. By growing up thus he would save Jock the expense of employing a whiteman. The natives made the best of stockriders, but could not be relied upon to remain at work. Jock often had to track his black staff down and bring them back to work at the point of a gun. Nawnim’s status and pay would never be much better than a native’s. The pay of Jock’s natives was tobacco and food and clothes of a sort, their status not that of his horses. He and the many graziers like him excused their meanness by saying that it was useless giving the natives money when they did not understand the value of it. They took pains to see that the natives were never taught it.

Jock had no difficulty in securing native-labour, for all his meanness. On the contrary, he secured it easily. For, when his cattle came, the native game was scared away, or if not scared then starved away, because, during the lean times of Dry Season, the cattle, themselves hard put for succour, would take possession of all permanent grazing. This state of things would greatly affect the natives whose country the Government had leased to Jock, so that they, who, unlike their game, were prevented by tribal laws from wandering out of their domain, would be put to the alternatives of starving or eating Jock’s cattle or going to work for him. The second would be their choice till the police came and shot them. All over the land were bone-piled spots where lazy Aborigines were taught not to steal a whiteman’s bullocks. For natives who were unable to work there was the fourpenny Compound. But for some reason or other that institution was not popular. Most Aborigines who had been born in freedom preferred to do their starving in the bush. And all the while the Nation was boasting to the world of its Freedom and Manliness and Honesty. Australia Felix!

Flying Fox was washed by a vigorous tide, which was capable of rising during spring period to a height of some twenty-five feet. Hence the mouth of the salt-water creek was usually surging like a mill-race, but wasting its power—or so it had been—on transporting such things as jellyfish, leaves, and crocodiles. This waste had been the cause of great irritation to Mark, who, though careless of most forms of ineconomy, could not bear to see the wasting of natural force. Therefore, after years of irritation, at the cost of much study and money on his own part and great labour on the part of the men of Yurracumbunga, he had dammed the mouth of the creek and cut a culvert through the isthmus, causing the water to flow through a quaint-looking machine that sucked out kinetic energy and churned it into electric power. The machine was ingeniously constructed, consisting of an old centrifugal pump of brass, a flywheel of concrete, a dynamo of antiquated type, and an elaborate system of gears comprised mainly of bicycle parts, which was capable of reversing action at the turn of the tide without interfering with the running of the dynamo. Although of rather Heath-Robinsonian design, the machine was quite effective, and when the tide was running, kept the settlement ablaze with electric light. Unfortunately, owing to the perversity of Nature, the tide was usually not running when the light was most required.

There were many electrically-operated gadgets about the place. Jock studied them with interest, wishing to learn how they were made so that he might not have to buy them. And he listened with interest to Mark’s confiding that the building of the machine had given him more pleasure than any job he had ever undertaken in his life, and that therefore it pained him to have to do that which he would not do but for his urgent neediness, namely, part with it for money. Jock thought this an extraordinarily cunning method of bargaining, and therefore responded warily, praising the damming and sluicing and other parts of the contrivance that he would not have to buy, and saying with reference to them that Mark would have made a clever engineer, but cruelly criticising the machine itself, although secretly delighted with its efficacy, in order that Mark might not be led into forming an exaggerated idea of its value.

Simple Mark was hurt by the criticisms, thinking them genuine, and was influenced by them and other subtle methods of Jock’s to make a mighty reduction in his price. He began by asking for £150, which was, he said, £50 less than the machine had cost, and was about the same amount as Jock would have paid had his bargaining not succeeded. He ended, exhausted by hours of merciless wrangling on Jock’s part, by agreeing to take £48 10s. For some hours after the settling of the deal Mark wandered at a distance up the beach, struggling, as he confided to Chook, to keep his hands from choking the life out of a Lousy, Bloody, Popeyed Pommy.

Jock’s stay at Flying Fox was brief. As soon as the machine was packed and stowed, he responded to Mark’s hints about the likelihood of their meeting with bad weather if the return were delayed for long, and said that he was ready to go. Nawnim was captured and taken yelling aboard the lugger.

Mark’s forecast of the weather proved truer than he had realised. The lugger sailed right into bad weather and was buffeted for days. Five days were spent at sea, nearly every hour of which Jock spent in the cabin, sick. Mark was pleased, and wasted many an hour in letting the ship drift broadside to the sea. Through Jock’s confinement, little Nawnim had no need to cower in the chains as he had during the first hour or two; and because of Jock’s lack of appetite Nawnim got most of his helping of food.

At last the end of the voyage came in sight. The Spirit of the Land passed into Zodiac Harbour and went slowly towards the town, revealing to Nawnim one by one the wonders of Civilisation. First wonder was an automobile, a high-wheeled waggon of the type called Motor Buggy, the forerunner of the modern motor-truck. As the ship was making her way under sail alone, Nawnim heard the strange thing roaring in the bush long before he saw it, and saw the cloud of red dust it was raising. Mark noticed his interest and forthwith ordered the helmsman to hug the shore. The buggy—it was just a Thing to Nawnim—rushed from the bush, swung into the beach-road, ran parallel with the lugger’s course. Nawnim had never seen a wheeled vehicle before. He was amazed, and still more amazed when his father waved to the Thing and received an answer.

They crept past the Calaboose. Nawnim stared in wonder at the buildings on the hill and at a gang of black felons working on the road and at a gang of white ones fishing from the cliff. They passed the great Meat-works, which was still more amazing because painted black, whereas the Calaboose was white. They coasted beside Mailunga Beach, which was an almost exact miniature of the ocean-beach at Flying Fox; but it was rendered incomparably more interesting by the fact that two men were pedalling bicycles through the grove of coconuts. Nawnim hopped with excitement and clapped his yellow hands.

Then Jock, who had been asleep, became aware of the fact that the ship was running in smooth water, and leapt up and poked his crimson face from the hatchway, saw what there was to see, and said fervently, “Thahnk gawd!”

Nawnim started, edged away.

Then came into view the Compound, the Nation’s Pride, a miniature city of whitewashed hovels crowded on a barren hill above the sea. Then they passed the hospital, then the Cable Station, then the Residency, then a cluster of neat white houses standing amid poinciana trees that blazed like torches under masses of scarlet blooms. Nawnim’s attention was then snatched away from the shore to the jetty, which suddenly appeared from behind a point, standing with red piles high above the fallen water, looking like a crowded flock of long-legged jabiroos. But even that amazing sight did not hold his attention for long. At the end of the jetty lay an utterly astounding Thing. He gaped, too young and too amazed to think. A blackboy near him said in the Yurracumbunga tongue, “That’s a steamer.”

When at length the steamer was hidden behind a headland, Nawnim, who had been staring at it, rapt, became aware of bustling aboard. He dodged among scrambling legs, concentrated on not being pushed too close to those devil-devilish creatures the whitemen, till a pair of black hands whisked him out of the way and dropped him in the middle of a high coil of rope. He heard the anchor fall, then struggled out of the coil to see that the lugger was lying among several other vessels of similar type, which were peopled with squat quaint-visaged human creatures of a breed he had never seen before. While he was staring at these objects he was seized again, lifted high in the air, lowered with sickening rapidity into the dinghy. He found himself so close to his foster-father that he could smell the sickening whiteman smell of him. For once he was glad when the hands of his true father at length took hold of him, because they lifted him out of that terrible red presence and bore him to the wide wide shore. He was about to fly when Mark seized him again and carried him, protesting uproariously, towards what he was convinced was something frightful. He was left in a humpy on Devilfish Bay in the care of a half-caste woman named Fat Anna.

To Nawnim a deserted house was a delightful playground, but an occupied house a place to be avoided like a reputed lair of debil-debils. Therefore his first few hours’ residence in Fat Anna’s house were not at all comfortable; indeed they were hours of incarceration rather than residence, because it was necessary to restrain him owing to his determination to escape. Anna chased him through mud and mangroves and brought him home thrice before it occurred to her that he was what she called a Myall, a wild creature. The chasing upset her, because she was very fat; but she was also very good-natured and did not thrash him as another person might, nor even reproach him, nor do anything more unfriendly than to hug him to her ample breast and pant a few laughing protests while bathing him with the scent of sweets. It was with her sweets that she eventually dispelled his mistrust of her. She made these herself of butter and sugar and essences in her kitchen. It was with these that she had made most of her mass of flesh.

Having tamed him with sweets, she washed him, performing the operation with such delicacy of touch that he, engaged with a sugar-filled pawpaw, scarcely realised what was going on below his chin. Then she dressed his sores and cropped his hair and put him into his first pair of breeches, which she had made from an old blouse of spotted blue print during his period of intractability. Not even one so misanthropical as Nawnim could long resist the motherliness of Anna. Before many days were out he was snuggling up to her in sheer love.

Anna was of a lower caste than Nawnim. Her father was a Japanese. Therefore, according to the Law of the Land, which recognised no diluent for Aboriginal blood but that of a white race, she was a full-blooded blackgin and not entitled to franchise as Nawnim theoretically would be when he came of age. But Anna did not care. She had small dealings with franchised people, and lived in her own style, untroubled by the formalities that bound the rest of the band to which she legally belonged, because the police seemed to realise that, at least as far as she was concerned, the law they served was an ass. She earned her living by washing clothes for the richer members of the Asiatic crews of the pearling-fleet and by giving her favours to those of them she liked. These were the creatures Nawnim had been amazed to see about him on the day of his arrival. When he inquired about them, Anna told him they were Japs an’ Chows.

She took him for walks through the railway-yards, and down round the pearling-stations, and up the jetty, but never through the town. The Yards were quiet just then, that being the ’tween-trains period; and the jetty was not nearly so interesting when viewed from above and without its steamer; and the town was forbidden ground for one who was a Ward of the State as well as a whiteman’s shame. But Nawnim saw countless interesting things that Anna did her best to explain to him. There was, however, nothing that interested him so much as Anna’s large naked feet. He never tired of watching these, whether they were in action or at rest. She often let him play with them while resting, and made them cut capers to amuse him, or rather suffered them to do so, since it was a fact that more often than not they got out of her control at his touch; for when he touched he tickled, which was always more than she could bear; usually his attention was diverted from her feet by her shrieks of laughter and the astounding involutions of her huge brown-yellow frame.

One day he wandered into the railway-yards, and, becoming tired, sought rest and shelter from the sun beneath a cattle-car that stood in a silent rake. He lay on a cool steel sleeper, unconcerned about the grime he gathered and the reek he breathed, amusing himself with slaughtering with a rusty bolt the meat-ants that ran about him. Then he heard a distant sound and sat up listening. The cause of the sound was approaching rapidly, so rapidly that he leapt up to flee and struck his head against the dung-encrusted undercarriage with such force as to knock him flat. The sound was now a thundering. The very earth quaked. He dug fingers into earth and steel, about to dart into sunshine and safety, when, with a frightful grinding roar and a belching of scalding vapour in his face, a Thing of horribleness unutterable dashed across his path. His shriek was as feeble as the plaint of a grass-stalk in a storm.

He recovered his wits to find himself lying with throat on a rail and hands outstretched clutching gravel and teeth clenched on oily grass. He looked up, dazed. There was nothing terrible before him—nothing, indeed, but the roof of Anna’s humpy smiling at him through the tops of palms. He crawled out warily. Nothing in sight to right or left. When he looked at Anna’s again his heart ached with love for her. He slowly rose, and rising glanced to the right to see—Horror!—the Thing rushing down on him—black hair trailing and white whiskers billowing about its pounding flanks.

He tripped over a rail. The Thing yelled at him. He echoed it with all his might, shot to his feet, raced to the embankment, pitched headlong down, fell in a heap, shot up again, crashed through the scrub, tearing his flesh and scuttling crabs and birds, rushed into the humpy, and shrieking, flung himself into the outstretched arms of Anna.

“Whazzer madder liddel man?” she crooned. “Aw wazzer madder wid de liddle myall now?”

She hugged him close and kissed his distorted face and nursed him and petted him till he could find the voice to speak.

“Oh trice!” he moaned. “Dibil-dibil—dibil-dibil——Oh jeezon trice!”