XAVIER HERBERT

CAPRICORNIA

CONTENTS

Introduction

Principal Characters

The Coming of the Dingoes

Psychological Effect of a Solar Topee

Significance of a Burnt Cork

Death of a Dingo

Heir To All the Ages

The Copper Creek Train

Clothes Make a Man

Mars and Venus in Ascendancy

Fe Fi Fo Fum

In the Midst of Life We Are in Death

A Crocodile Cries

Dawn of a New Era

A Shotgun Wedding

Peregrinations of a Busybody

Machinations of a Jinx

Prosperity is Like the Tide

Grandson of a Sultan

Stirring of Skeletons

God in the Silver Sea

Let Our Grace be a Prayer for Forgiveness

Son of a Gin

Song of the Golden Beetle

The Gossips Have Been Busy

Oh, Don’t You Remember Black Alice?

Spinning of Fate the Spider

Death Corroboree

Singing in the Wilderness

Snakes in Arcady

The Uninvited Guest

In Defence of a Prodigal Father

The Devil Rides Horseback

Wrath of the Masters of Mankind

Esau Selleth His Birthright

Murder Will Out

Who Killed Cock Robin?

Back to Earth

Also by Xavier Herbert

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

VAST and sprawling, of almost epic dimensions in that theme and counter-theme battle for dominance, Capricornia reflects Australia in its failure to create an alternative to the society depicted in its pages. It is a rich Australian cultural archive. Herbert labours over the wide brown plains of the colony of Capricornia and finds characters who are readily identifiable as Australian types. There is an unpretentiousness of style which is often appealing; but an Aboriginal reader may find the narrative painful in its seeming historical objectivity. He or she begins to read the novel and finds scenes of devastation and heartbreak as the newcomers, the ‘dingoes’ of the text, destroy Black culture without a qualm. These ‘dingoes’ are depicted as a terrifying almost elemental force, an aspect of ‘natural selection’, which destroys the old in a process of ‘evolution’ towards a new ‘synthesis’.

But this scientific theory, which provides ontological thrust to the novel, is weakened by a counter-theme of ‘Fate’. Few, if any of the characters possess the gift of analytical thought, or question their place in the universe, and I use ‘universe’ deliberately as Herbert (and critics) has stressed that his narrative is concerned with universal themes. Thus events are seen not as random occurrences but as contradictions between theme and counter-theme: natural selection and Fate. The dominance of Fate in the opening pages of the novel is alarming. Events begin to unfold from the very beginning of white settlement and the arrival of what passes for civilisation in a territory on the outskirts of the British Empire. Capricornia is founded in the heyday of that Empire, in the late nineteenth century, and from inauspicious beginnings it stagnates into the first decades of the twentieth century. This period was not at all a good time for the natives of the colonies. The Indian mutiny of 1857 underlined the problem of the ‘native’, and Capricornia too has its ‘native problem’. By the time we reach the end of the long narrative, the problem has still not been resolved. The natives and a newly engendered ‘Coloured’ race persist in a system from which there seems to be no future relief.

Capricornia is a work of great length. The original editor P. R. Stephenson claimed co-authorship on the basis of his editorial work, and perhaps the underlying sternness of the text owes something to him. Stephenson was a complex character searching for a novel in which to be featured. His politics were bizarre though they seemed not to have alarmed any of his associates. Did they listen avidly or painfully as he espoused neo-Nazism, berated the Jews and accepted the importance of Japan in the world in which the red of the British Empire blooded much of the globe? Also a strong nationalist, he sought for things Australian and found the Australian Aborigines. He declared them essential to Australian nationalism. His position in this matter is quite interesting and from it extends a bridge to those racists in the Northern Territory—the ‘Capricornia’ of the novel—who trade in Aboriginal art and artefacts and acknowledge the Aborigines as essential to their economic well-being while treating the artists with disrespect. But then Australian nationalism has always been a fragile thing of, of… Perhaps someone will find a word and put it here for me. I cannot locate a singular word of worth, though I might write ‘defiance’. Stephenson is indicative of the complex and contradictory ways in which Aboriginality is presented and articulated in this wide brown land, a great swath of which is ‘Capricornia’.

First published in 1938, Capricornia was with affectionate irony called ‘that old botch’, but it was popular from the day of its publication and has remained in print to this day. It is a bit ‘blotchy’ and if not for the sternness of its vision, I might read it as a Picaresque Romance detailing life in the distant colony of Capricornia under conditions which are barbaric to say the least. Much of the novel is taken up with the plight of the rapidly increasing mixed race. A representative of ‘the Coloureds’ is the sympathetic main character ‘Norman’. The emphasis placed on this new ‘racial’ type, who is seen as being more noble than either White or Black, reveals a mythology which uses oppositional symbolism to stress the theme and counter-theme of the novel.

In many ways, Capricornia finds a mate in the much later Maurice Chauvel film, Jedda (1955), even to the construction of characters who often seem flat and, writing from the present, slightly absurd. Jedda could also be called a Picaresque Romance, though placing them under the same label glosses over the very contradictions which the novel proposes to explore. Additionally, the underlying seriousness of Capricornia separates it from the somewhat simplistic realist film of Chauvel. Both, however, have endings which reveal the pessimism Europeans seem to get from exposure to an Australia so markedly different from Europe.

Capricornia is massive and might have become an epic in which two races with opposing cultures meet, battle it out, sink into each other’s arms and create the new Australian race, a mixture of good points from the opposing cultures; but this synthesis never occurs. Vincent Buckley writes, ‘The total impression of the book is one of great creative energy battling against a universe of appalling waste’. The vision of a ‘new race’ being created in the colony is at odds with the strong emphasis placed on Fate which plays ‘dingo to all men’—black and white. (Does this ‘Dingo of Fate’ equate with the Giant Devil Dingo of Aboriginal mythology, which devours humankind?) It is an all-compelling deity bringing to nought man and his works, including the promised new race. The novel ends on a note of pessimism. Things will continue as they are fated to do, and as I have argued before, this is a strong trait of the Australian character. Even the very metaphors applied to the land reflect this pessimism: Ancient, arid, the dead heart, flood-ridden, drought-infested, ‘one bloody thing after another’. Man is caught in the twister of Fate and goes around and around. This is stressed in the novel and there is absent a sense of control which the concept of a ‘new race’ might have been able to supply. If I read the novel correctly, the ‘new race’ in the process of being formed would eventually be able to direct its own fate. Unfortunately the vision falters and, instead of exploring any political and cultural possibilities inherent in the ‘new race’, Herbert resolves his novel by the acceptance of an overarching Fate against which mankind strives in vain.

I use ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ because I find Herbert’s novel hard and masculine. The style is close to the bald prose of reportage. Thus, the wide brown land may also be used as a metaphor to a text which is close to the popular best seller. Characters are not so much developed as created in a nutshell, that is, in a name. Thus ‘Norman’ may equal No-man or New-man, a Coloured who is a representative of the new race. Norman is a product of what Thomas Keneally in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith has called ‘the white phallus’ (which may also be equated with white shame). He is the bastard son of the grazier Mark Shillingsworth and an unknown black woman. Norman is also the protagonist in the novel, and it is through him that the ‘new race’ is shown and a transformation attempted.

Sexual need and sexual shame mark the colonisation of Capricornia. And it is this sexual need and the resultant shame that Herbert seeks to exorcise, or transform. The sins of the Colonisers can be no sins, if the result is a New Race of Capricornians. It is not individual sexual need which is at issue; but the very ‘fact’ of natural selection. The novel represents sexual need and shame, not from the position of colonial dominance; but through the workings of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection as applied to races. In trying to do this, Herbert begins his narrative with a wry description of the founding of the main settlements on the coast and moves on to the eventual subjugation of the whole territory of Capricornia. The novel is similar to those by Wilbur Smith which detail the founding and development of the colony of Rhodesia and its revolution into the sovereign state of Zimbabwe; but unlike these postwar novels which are firmly slotted into the genre of romantic adventure, Herbert has a more serious intent in writing the history of his colony. In truth, it is a sad colony and not one man of the stature of Cecil Rhodes appears. It is a ‘universe of appalling waste’; but one in which the promise of the ‘New Man’ is seeded. The promise is there, but remains only a promise. The New Man is confronted by Giant Devil Dingo Fate, and goes under as the crows cry dismally. Herbert’s characters are under the control of this ‘Fate’ and develop towards an acceptance of it as the overarching Law of the universe.

Uncle Oscar gives Norman an education and then property. Norman becomes a man of substance, one able to take his place in what passes for society in Capricornia. But, after journeying South for an education, he returns to find he is still a ‘half-caste’. Initially, he is shocked to discover that he does indeed belong to both races; but then he comes to the realisation that he is their heir. It is at this point that Herbert’s vision falters and Norman suffers a personal tragedy which prevents him from taking his rightful place. The Giant Devil Dingo Fate intervenes on the side of the ‘status quo’.

Herbert peoples the colony of Capricornia with a rich cast of characters, some of whom marry the native women they keep as mistresses. An important minor character is Peter Differ. Peter ‘I beg to differ’ is a failed poet and has been considered Xavier Herbert’s mouthpiece. He is a sympathetic character, and in his obligatory discourse on race relations he takes the side of the emerging ‘Coloureds’. He has helped in the creation of this race; but unlike most other white men, he elects to marry his Black woman. He begs to differ and refuses to accept the syndrome of need and shame under which many men of the colony suffer. He seeks to place himself on the side of the scientific theory of natural selection. But the matrimonial act means little to his fellow colonists; merely a shift in shame. Now he suffers the shame of a white father whose children are treated no differently from illegitimate half-castes.

Herbert reveals, though he does not state, that a colonial society works by exclusion. Effectively, it is made up of many settler factions, each with some degree of power or influence, which find unity only in defending their privileged position against the colonised. This state of affairs is recognised in the novel, though Herbert does not give an analysis of the political situation in the Territory. In 1937, the year before the novel was published, state representatives of Aboriginal Authorities met in Canberra. Each state representative gave an account of Native Affairs in his respective state. Most favoured the assimilation of the Aborigine into the wider society. This position was endorsed by the representative from the Northern Territory who in his address expressed alarm at the rapidly increasing mixed population that, growing up bitter and unfranchised, might in time take over the whole territory.

Thus, at the same time the novel was being written there was a fear in the Northern Territory that the white minority population might lose its place of dominance and be replaced by a ‘Coloured’ majority. Xavier Herbert, active in Aboriginal Affairs, would have been aware of this concern, and he addresses it in his novel. He shows us the formation of this race, but none of its political ambitions. His ‘New Race’, coming into being through natural selection and destined to succeed both black and white, is set up in opposition to ‘Fate’; and eventually ‘Fate’ wins. In his narrative, it is the ‘Coloureds’ that suffer the most and who exist in the most precarious social position. They are more victims than victors, and this may be what Herbert had in mind when raising the idea, or vision, of a superior mixed race. Politically, they have no power and no status, except in the set speeches of ‘well-meaning’ white characters. What happens to them may be seen in the case of the character Constance, who after being seduced and made pregnant by a Protector of Aborigines, Humbolt Lace, is then wedded to the Coloured Peter Pan in order to hide his need and shame. Although this might be seen as an example of natural selection, the end of the novel is symbolic of the Coloureds’ dilemma. The Giant Devil Dingo Fate rules and the crows salute him.

Herbert uses symbols and simple oppositions to structure his novel. In Chapter One, the heading ‘The Coming of the Dingoes’ underlines the then generally accepted civilisation/primitive opposition which is given in the lines:

When dingoes come to a waterhole, the ancient kangaroos, not having teeth or ferocity enough to defend their heritage, must relinquish it, or die.

This sets the theme of the coming into being of a ‘New Race’ through natural selection. Herbert is using the theory correctly though simply, and if we accept it at face value, he is not talking about Social Darwinism at all, but about natural selection in which one species succeeds another, not one society another. He is not describing the replacement of Aboriginal culture and society by the stronger British ‘civilisation’; but by a ‘new’ society emerging from the amalgamation of the two. The opposition of primitivism and civilisation engages in an ironic dialectic, and the synthesis of the dialectic is the ‘new’ race; but the potentialities of this ‘new’ race are not ‘realised’.

Herbert introduces a counter-theme in which natural selection is opposed to Fate. Fate is both antithesis and synthesis. A transcendent force which rules Black, Coloured and White. There is no escape from it and the dialectic collapses into confusion. Fate excludes any attempt at transformation, or social mediation, and stymies any movement towards resolution. What we may finally decide is that we are reading a good yarn, filled with conflict and tension, which are aspects of life and from which there is no escape. It is then that we accept the notion of a ‘universe of appalling waste’ which may only be mitigated through irony and good humour.

Incidents such as Tom O’Cannon’s death on Christmas Day, Joe Ballest’s death and Nick’s ‘seeming death’, are humorously presented so that the bitterness of Man’s Fate is lessened, though not diminished. Apart from this there is the Dickensian caricature which operates throughout the book. Names of the characters O’Crimmell, O’Theef, Paddy Pickhandle, McCrook, Nibbleson, Thumscough, Ponderosass, Shouter Rightit, Major Luffmay and so on, although enjoyable and pointing towards the great Aussie yarn with its emphasis on good humour and irony, may be felt to be too heavy-handed. But it does make for a structural opposition between seriousness and irony which adds to the complexity of the novel. I find the roots of Herbert’s style in the Aussie Yarn. In fact Capricornia might be considered ‘The Great Aussie Yarn’ in that it goes on and on like a river flowing towards the mythical inland sea, which in reality turns out to be a desert of ill-promise.

In summing up my comments on Herbert’s novel, I stress that the theme of Capricornia is the producing of a ‘new’ race from the mixture of Aboriginal and European stock. This is a product of natural selection. Against this is opposed a counter-theme of man at the mercy of Fate. Man proposes, Fate deposes. As natural selection is considered a rigid scientific principle, Fate is considered a rigid metaphysical principle. This opposition results in pessimism. The cawing of the crows at the end of the novel stresses this. By resolving his narrative in this way, Herbert has, I believe, revealed an important aspect of the Australian character. A fatalistic attitude which, instead of stressing change for the betterment, argues for stasis. Thus we have ‘accords’ and ‘consensus’ and calls for unity and conformity as against experiment in difference. It was perhaps Herbert’s knowledge of the Australian character which prevented him from giving us a more optimistic ending in which the two races in Capricornia unite to produce a ‘new’ national type. It is said that an author is only as good as his material allows him to be, and so Herbert has only been able to produce a text which reflects Australia and Australians. It is here that the value of his narrative lies and the reason it has remained a perennial best seller. Capricornia is about what makes Australians Australian.

Mudrooroo Nyoongah

May 1990

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

A

AINTEE, DR. Protector of Aborigines.

ANGEL. See BLACK ANGEL.

ANNA. See FAT ANNA.

B

BALLEST, JOE. Railway Ganger.

BICYCLE. Aboriginal stockman, of Red Ochre cattle station. A member of the Mullanmullak tribe.

BIGHTIT, CAESAR (“THE SHOUTER”). An eminent lawyer.

BLACK ANGEL. An Aboriginal woman, of the Mullanmullak tribe; a midwife.

BLAIZE, MRS VIOLA. Postmistress at Soda Springs.

BLEETER, REV. SIMON. A missionary.

BLOSSOM. See O’CANNON, BLOSSOM.

BOOTPOLISH. Aboriginal stockman, of Red Ochre station. A member of the Mullanmullak tribe.

BORTELLS, EDWIN. A pharmacist, friend of Norman Shillingsworth.

BOYLES, DR BIANCO. Government Medical Officer.

BURYWELL, JACK. Grazier, a purchaser of Red Ochre station.

C

CALLOW, CEDRIC. A grazier, of Agate Bar station.

CHARLIE WING SING. A Chinaman. Cousin of Blossom O’Cannon.

CHIN LING SOO. A Chinese. Father of Mrs Cho See Kee.

CHO SEE KEE. A Chinese. Storekeeper at Port Zodiac.

CHO SEE KEE, MRS. Wife of Cho See Kee.

CHO SEK CHING. A Chinese cook, brother of Cho See Kee.

CHOOK. See HENN, ALBERT.

CHRISTOBEL. An Aboriginal half-caste girl, friend of Tocky.

COCKERELL (“COCKY”). A fettler.

CON THE GREEK. Constandino Kyrozopolis, a Dago cook.

CONNIE. See DIFFER, CONSTANCE.

CROWE, JOE. Undertaker and cabman of Port Zodiac.

D

DIANA. Black quadroon girl, daughter of Yeller Jewty (q.v.).

DIFFER, CONSTANCE. Aboriginal half-caste girl, daughter of Peter Differ. See also PAN, PETER.

DIFFER, PETER. A settler and author, of Coolibah Creek.

DINGO JOE. An Aboriginal half-caste, employed by Oscar.

DRIVER, JOCK. A Pommy. Grazier, of Gunamiah station, Melisande River.

E

ELBERT (“YELLER ELBERT”). An Aboriginal half-caste, an assassin.

F

FAT ANNA. A laundress, and woman of independent means, living on the Port Zodiac waterfront. Classified as an Aboriginal, though daughter of a Japanese. Foster-mother, for a time, of Norman Shillingsworth.

FLIEGELTAUB, KARL. A German, settler, of Caroline River.

FLUTE, COLONEL PLAYFAIR. Resident Commissioner of Capricornia.

G

GIGNEY, SIDNEY. A railway construction engineer.

GINGER. Aboriginal, of the Mullanmullak tribe. A police tracker.

GOMEZ, EMILIO. A Spaniard. Captain of S.S.Cucaracha.

H

HEATHER. See POUNDAMORE, HEATHER.

HENN, ALBERT (“CHOOK”). Locomotive engineer, bosom friend of Mark Shillingsworth.

HOLLOWER, REV. THEODORE. A missionary.

HUGHES, MORRIS. See MORRIS HUGHES.

J

JASMINE. See POUNDAMORE, JASMINE.

JEWTY (“YELLER JEWTY”). Aboriginal half-caste woman, daughter of Edward Krater (q.v.). One of Mark Shillingsworth’s wives.

JOCK. See JOCK DRIVER.

K

KET, CHARLES. Grandson of a Chinaman.

KEYES, PADDY. Head Guard of Red Turtle Bay Jail.

KLINKER, CHARLIE. A locomotive fireman.

KRATER, EDWARD. Scotsman. Empire-builder. Pioneer of civilisation at Flying Fox Island. Also known as Munichillu, “The Man of Fire”.

KURRINUA. An Aboriginal savage, headman of the Yurracumbunga tribe, original owners of Flying Fox Island.

L

LACE, HUMBOLT. Superintendent of the Government Agricultural Experimental Station at Red Coffin Ridge. A protector of Aborigines.

LACE, TOCKY. White quadroon girl, daughter of Humbolt Lace and Connie Differ (q.v.). A waif, also known as Tocky Pan, or Tocky O’Cannon.

LARSNEY, PADDY. Magistrate, of Port Zodiac.

LAVINDICATIF, FROGGY. A Frenchman. Settler.

LEDDER, JACOB. A fettler.

LOW FAT. Chinese family. Settlers.

M

McCROOK. Police trooper, of Melisande River.

McLASH, FRANK (“THE LOCOMOTIVE LOONEY”). Only son of Mrs Pansy McLash.

McLASH, MRS PANSY. Postmistress and storekeeper at Caroline River.

McRANDY, ANDY. Grazier, of Gunamiah station.

MARIGOLD. See SHILLINGSWORTH, MARIGOLD.

MARK. See SHILLINGSWORTH, MARK.

MAROWALLUA. Aboriginal woman, of the Yurracumbunga tribe, of Flying Fox Island. The mother of Norman Shillingsworth.

MOOCH, JOE. A nomad, friend of Mark Shillingsworth.

MORRIS HUGHES. Aboriginal rouseabout, of Red Ochre station. A member of the Mullanmullak tribe.

MUTTONHEAD. An Aboriginal stockman, of Red Ochre station. A member of the Mullanmullak tribe.

N

NAWRATT, ALEXANDER. A lawyer, of Port Zodiac.

NIBBLESOM, HANNIBAL. A lawyer, of Port Zodiac.

NORMAN (“NAWNIM”). See SHILLINGSWORTH, NORMAN.

NORSE, IAN. Railway superintendent.

O

O’CANNON, BLOSSOM (“THE BLOODY PARAKEET”). Daughter of a Chinese father and an Aboriginal mother. Consort of Tim

O’Cannon, and mother of the O’Cannon family.

O’CANNON, TIM. Railway ganger, of Black Adder Creek.

O’CRIMNELL. Police trooper, of Soda Springs.

O’HAY, PAT. Grazier, of Tatlock’s Pool.

O’PICK, MICK. Irishman. Fettler, of Caroline River.

O’THEEF. Police trooper, at Soda Springs.

OPAL. Aboriginal woman, of the Mullanmullak tribe.

OSCAR. See SHILLINGSWORTH, OSCAR.

P

PAN, PETER. Half-caste Aboriginal. Legal husband of Connie Differ.

PICKANDLE, PADDY. Railway roadmaster.

PONDROSASS. A judge, of the Capricornian Court.

PONTO. A half-caste Philippino, assistant to Joe Crowe.

POUNDAMORE SISTERS. Two in number, viz.: (1) Jasmine, who became wife of Oscar Shillingsworth, and mother of Roger and Marigold; (2) Heather, the younger sister, who became closely interested in the welfare of Mark Shillingsworth.

POUNDAMORE, JOE. Grazier, of Poundamore Downs, Cooksland. Brother of Jasmine and Heather.

PRAYTER, REV. GORDON. A clergyman, of Port Zodiac.

PRINCESS. Aboriginal woman, cook at Red Ochre station.

Q

QUONG HO LING. A Chinese settler.

R

RALPH. See SHILLINGSWORTH, RALPH.

RAMBLE, JACK. A nomad, friend of Mark Shillingsworth.

RANDTER, REVEREND. Clergyman, of Port Zodiac.

ROBBREY. Police trooper, of Port Zodiac.

ROTGUTT, JERRY. A publican.

S

SETTAROGE, CAPTAIN. Police superintendent, of Port Zodiac.

SHAY, MRS DAISY. Proprietress of the Princess Alice Hotel, Port Zodiac. A friend of Heather Poundamore.

SHAY, WALLY. Son of Mrs Daisy Shay.

SHILLINGSWORTH BROTHERS. Three in number, viz: (1) Oscar, owner of Red Ochre station, husband of Jasmine, father of Marigold and Roger; (2) Mark, a nomad, the father of Norman (“Nawnim”); (3) Ralph, a city-dweller Down South.

SHILLINGSWORTH, MAUD. Sister of the Shillingsworth brothers; married to Ambrose: a city-dweller.

SHILLINGSWORTH CHILDREN. Three in number, viz: (1) Marigold and (2) Roger, the children of Oscar and Jasmine; (3) Norman (“Nawnim”), a half-caste Aboriginal, the son of Mark and of the lubra Marowallua (q. v.).

SNIGGER, SAM. A foreman at Red Ochre.

STEEN, JOE. Settler, of Caroline River. Sweetheart of Mrs McLash.

STEGGLES, STANLEY. Railway bridge engineer.

T

THUMSCROUGH. State Prosecutor of Capricornia.

TITMUSS, GEORGE. Station master, Port Zodiac.

TOCATCHWON. Sergeant of Police, Port Zodiac.

TOCKY. See LACE, TOCKY.

W

WHITELY, SAXON. Postmaster at Republic Reef.

Y

YELLER ELBERT. See ELBERT. YELLER JEWTY. See JEWTY.

All characters in this story are fictitious.

THE COMING OF THE DINGOES

ALTHOUGH that northern part of the Continent of Australia which is called Capricornia was pioneered long after the southern parts, its unofficial early history was even more bloody than that of the others. One probable reason for this is that the pioneers had already had experience in subduing Aborigines in the South and hence were impatient of wasting time with people who they knew were determined to take no immigrants. Another reason is that the Aborigines were there more numerous than in the South and more hostile because used to resisting casual invaders from the near East Indies. A third reason is that the pioneers had difficulty in establishing permanent settlements, having several times to abandon ground they had won with slaughter and go slaughtering again to secure more. This abandoning of ground was due not to the hostility of the natives, hostile enough though they were, but to the violence of the climate, which was not to be withstood even by men so well equipped with lethal weapons and belief in the decency of their purpose as Anglo-Saxon builders of Empire.

The first white settlement in Capricornia was that of Treachery Bay—afterwards called New Westminster—which was set up on what was perhaps the most fertile and pleasant part of the coast and on the bones of half the Karrapillua Tribe. It was the resentment of the Karrapilluas to what probably seemed to them an inexcusable intrusion that was responsible for the choice of the name of Treachery Bay. After having been driven off several times with firearms, the Tribe came up smiling, to all appearances unarmed and intending to surrender, but dragging their spears along the ground with their toes. The result of this strategy was havoc. The Karrapilluas were practically exterminated by uncomprehending neighbours into whose domains they were driven. The tribes lived in strict isolation that was rarely broken except in the cause of war. Primitive people that they were, they regarded their territorial rights as sacred.

When New Westminster was for the third time swept into the Silver Sea by the floods of the generous Wet Season, the pioneers abandoned the site to the crocodiles and jabiroos and devil-crabs, and went in search of a better. Next they founded the settlement of Princetown, on the mouth of what came to be called the Caroline River. In Wet Season the river drove them into barren hills in which it was impossible to live during the harsh Dry Season through lack of water. Later the settlements of Britannia and Port Leroy were founded. All were eventually swept into the Silver Sea. During Wet Season, which normally lasted for five months, beginning in November and slowly developing till the Summer Solstice, from when it raged till the Equinox, a good eighty inches of rain fell in such fertile places on the coast as had been chosen, and did so at the rate of from two to eight inches at a fall. As all these fertile places were low-lying, it was obviously impossible to settle on them permanently. In fact, as the first settlers saw it, the whole vast territory seemed never to be anything for long but either a swamp during Wet Season or a hard-baked desert during the Dry. During the seven months of a normal Dry Season never did a drop of rain fall and rarely did a cloud appear. Fierce suns and harsh hot winds soon dried up the lavished moisture.

It was beginning to look as though the land itself was hostile to anyone but the carefree nomads to whom the Lord gave it, when a man named Brittins Willnot found the site of what came to be the town of Port Zodiac, the only settlement of any size that ever stood permanently on all the long coastline, indeed the only one worthy of the name of town ever to be set up in the whole vast territory. Capricornia covered an area of about half a million square miles. This site of Willnot’s was elevated, and situated in a pleasantly unfertile region where the annual rainfall was only about forty inches. Moreover, it had the advantage of standing as a promontory on a fair-sized navigable harbour and of being directly connected with what came to be called Willnot Plateau, a wide strip of highland that ran right back to the Interior. When gold was found on the Plateau, Port Zodiac became a town.

The site of Port Zodiac was a Corroboree Ground of the Larrapuna Tribe, who left the bones of most of their number to manure it. They called it Mailunga, or the Birth Place, believing it to be a sort of Garden of Eden and apparently revering it. The war they waged to retain possession of this barren spot was perhaps the most desperate that whitemen ever had to engage in with an Australian tribe. Although utterly routed in the first encounter, they continued to harass the pioneers for months, exercising cunning that increased with their desperation. Then someone, discovering that they were hard-put for food since the warring had scared the game from their domains, conceived the idea of making friends with them and giving them several bags of flour spiced with arsenic. Nature is cruel. When dingoes come to a waterhole, the ancient kangaroos, not having teeth or ferocity sharp enough to defend their heritage, must relinquish it or die.

Thus Civilisation was at last planted permanently. However, it spread slowly, and did not take permanent root elsewhere than on the safe ground of the Plateau. Even the low-lying mangrove-cluttered further shores of Zodiac Harbour remained untrodden by the feet of whitemen for many a year. It was the same with the whole maritime region, most of which, although surveyed from the sea and in parts penetrated and occupied for a while by explorers, remained in much the same state as always. Some of the inhabitants were perhaps amazed and demoralised, but still went on living in the way of old, quite unware of the presumably enormous fact that they had become subjects of the British Crown.

That part of the coast called Yurracumbunga by the Aborigines, which lay about one hundred and fifty miles to the east of Port Zodiac, was first visited by a whiteman in the year 1885. By that time the inhabitants, having only heard tell of the invaders from survivors of the neighbouring tribe of Karrapillua, were come to regard whitemen rather as creatures of legend, or perhaps more rightly as monsters of legend, since they had heard enough about them to fear them greatly. When one of the monsters, in the shape of Captain Edward Krater, a trepang-fisher, suddenly materialised for them, they thought he was a devil come from the sun, because they first saw him in the ruddy light of dawn and he was carroty. Krater was a man of fine physique, and not quietly carroty as a man might be in these days of clean-shaved faces and close-clipped heads, but blazingly, that being a period when manliness was expressed with hair. When the Yurracumbungas discovered that he was mortal, they dubbed him Munichillu, or The Man of Fire.

Ned Krater wished to establish a base for his trepang-fishing on a certain little island belonging to the Yurracumbungas and called by them Arrikitarriyah, or the Gift of the Sea. This island lay within rifle-shot of the mainland and was well watered and wooded and stocked with game and sheltered from the roll of the ocean by the Tikkalalla Islands, which lay in an extensive group along the northern horizon. The tribe used the island at certain times as a Corroboree Ground. Krater had already visited it before he came into contact with the owners. They first saw him when, waking one morning from heavy sleep following a wild night of corroboree, they found his lugger drifting up the salt-water creek on which they were camped. He was standing on the deck in all his golden glory. They snatched up their arms and flew to cover. One of Krater’s crew, who were natives of the Tikkalalla Islands and old enemies of the Yurracumbungas, told the ambuscade at the top of his voice who Krater was and what would happen if it was with hostile intent that they hid, then took up a rifle and with a volley of shots set the echoes ringing and the cockatoos yelling and the hearts of the Yurracumbungas quaking. Krater then went ashore. After spending some hours sneaking about and peeping and listening to and occasionally answering the assurances shouted from time to time by Krater’s men, the Tribe came back shyly to their gunyahs, among which the Man of Fire had pitched a tent.

Thenceforth till a misunderstanding arose, the Yurracumbungas stayed in the camp, staring at Krater and his strange possessions, and learning from his men all they could tell about whitemen, who were, it seemed, not mere raiders like the brownmen who used sometimes to come to them from the North, but supermen who had come to stay and rule. And they learnt a little about shooting with rifles and catching fish with nets and dynamite and making fires by magic, and came to understand why witnessing such things had disorganised and demoralised the vanquished tribes of whom the islanders spoke. As the islanders said—How could one ever boast again of prowess with spear and kylie after having seen what could be done with rifle and dynamite? Far from hating the invader, the Yurracumbungas welcomed him, thinking that he would become one of them and teach them his magic arts.

The tribes of the locality were divided into family sections, or hordes. When a man or men of one horde visited another, it was the custom to allow them temporary use of such of the womenfolk as they were entitled to call Wife by their system of marriage. Because they regarded Krater as a guest and a qualified person, the Yurracumbungas did not mind his asking for the comeliest of their lubras, though they did not offer him one, perhaps because they thought him above wanting one. But they objected strongly when his black crew asked for the same privilege. The islanders were definitely unqualified according to the laws. The granting of such a privilege to them would mean violation of the traditions, the weakening of their system, the demoralisation of their youth. Thus the Yurracumbungas argued. The islanders said that the old order had passed; and to prove it, one of them seized a lubra and ravaged her. The violent quarrel that resulted was settled by Krater, who hurled himself into the mob, bellowing and firing his revolver. Then Krater ordered the Yurracumbungas to give his men what they wanted.

The Yurracumbungas were struck dumb, appalled by their impotence. Night fell. They sat by their fires, staring at Krater and his men. They stared long after Krater had retired to his tent, long after they had relaxed to their own mattresses of bark. Hours passed. All of Krater’s men, except two who dozed over rifles before the tent, fell asleep, gorged on a great meal of fish.

The headman of the horde was Kurrinua. He had argued fiercely against violation of the laws. He was a man as big and hairy as Krater. In the middle of the night he nudged the man next to him and whispered. His neighbour passed the whisper on. Before long the whole camp knew of his intention. No-one stirred till the tip of the old moon appeared above the bush and splashed the inky creek with silver. Then the man next to Kurrinua crawled without a sound across the clearing to the scrub.

A tiny casuarina nut, shot out of the scrub, struck one of the dozing guards and roused him. He looked about. The camp was silent but for snores and the sigh of the wind in the trees. Then a slight sound in the scrub drew the guard’s attention. He listened intently. Again he heard it. Tiny crackling as of a foot treading stealthily on leaves. He rose, and with the movement roused his mate, who whispered. Both listened, heard a peculiar pattering sound, and went rifle in hand, with backs turned to the camp, to investigate. Louder crackling. Kurrinua and young Impalui rose with stones in hands and sped towards the guards like shadows. The guards were knocked senseless without a sound. The horde rose to knees, women and children and ancients ready to fly, warriors in arms. Kurrinua and Impalui snatched up the rifles, crept to the tent. Kurrinua was crouching at the flap of the tent with rifle raised when—BANG!—a bullet tore through his body, through the tent, crashed into the fire. Impalui had fired accidentally. Kurrinua fell into the tent.

Uproar! Spears whizzed. Rifles crashed. Men roared and howled. The horde rushed, fought fiercely for a moment, wavered, turned and fled. A few of the islanders rushed to the tent, which was collapsed and sprawling about like a landed devil-fish. They pounced on it and dragged it clear of the men beneath, dragged Kurrinua free of Krater’s grip.

Kurrinua rolled over and over like a sea-urchin in a gale, got free of clutching hands and kicking feet, rose, and with blood spurting from his back and belly, plunged into the scrub, followed by a hail of bullets. His pursuers lost him. They spread, passed within a yard of where he lay with thigh-bone snapped by a bullet. He crawled towards the isthmus that lay between the creek and sea, bent on reaching the canoes. He heard cries and shots as other fugitives were found. He was in sandy hillocks out of the shelter of the scrub when the hunters, now carrying torches, rushed on to the beach. He rolled into a hollow and buried himself to the neck.

The night passed, slowly for the hunters, all too swiftly for the hunted. No hope now of escaping by canoe. The hunters had dragged the vessels high. But Kurrinua might swim if he could not walk, swim by way of the sea to the passage and the mainland. Surely he had less to fear from crocodiles than from Munichillu and his men. Still he dared not leave the hollow while the hunters prowled the beach, because they would find the wide track of his crawling before he could reach the creek. They splashed along the water’s edge, crashed through the scrub, crept among the hillocks, never went far away.

The dark creek silvered. The hunters’ torches paled. Birds stirred in the bush. A jabiroo flew in from the sea on great creaking wings, swerved with a swish and a croak at sight of the hunters. Jabiroos were gathering at the Ya-impitulli Billabong for the nesting. The Nesting of the Storks. It was the time of the great Corroboree of the Circumcision, for which the men of Yurracumbunga were gathering.

Swiftly the sky lost its stars and the scrub found individuality. Footsteps. A shout when they found the blood and the track of crawling. Footsteps pattering. Kurrinua looked his last at the gilded skyline. Another shout. They danced around him, pointing, kicking sand in his eyes. Soon Munichillu came, and with him the light of day, as though that too belonged to the like of him. At his appearance the east flamed suddenly, so that the sand was gilded and fire flashed in his beard. He looked at the face in the sand, grunted, raised his revolver.

Kurrinua’s heart beat painfully. His eyes grew hot. The pain of his wounds, which he had kept in check for hours by the power he was bred to use, began to throb. But he did not move a hair. He had been trained to look upon death fearlessly. To do so was to prove oneself a warrior worthy of having lived. His mind sang the Death Corroboree—Ee-yah, ee-yah, ee-tullyai—O mungallinni wurrigai—ee-tukkawunni—BANG! Kurrinua gasped, heaved out of the sand, writhed, shuddered, died. Ned Krater spat. In his opinion he had done no wrong. He did not know why the savages had attacked him. He thought only of their treachery, which to such as he was intolerable as it was natural to such as they.

PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECT OF A SOLAR TOPEE

SO slow was the settling of the Port Zodiac district that in the year 1904 the non-native population numbered no more than three thousand, a good half of which was Asiatic, and the settled area measured but three or four square miles. But the civilising was so complete that the survivors of the original inhabitants numbered seven, of whom two were dying of consumption in the Native Compound, three confined in the Native Lazaret with leprosy, the rest, a man and a woman, living in a gunyah at the remote end of Devilfish Bay, subsisting on what food they could get from the bush and the sea and what they could buy with the pennies the man earned by doing odd jobs and the woman by prostitution. The lot of these last was not easy. Fish and game were scarce; and large numbers of natives of other tribes were available as odd-jobbers and prostitutes; and it was made still harder by the fact that they had to dodge the police to keep it, their one lawful place of abode in the land the Lord God gave them being now the Native Compound.

Such was the advanced state of Civilisation in Port Zodiac when the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth arrived there. They were clerks, quite simple men, who came to join the Capricornian Government Service from a city of the South that, had it been the custom to name Australian cities after those who suffered the hardships of pioneering instead of after the merely grand who ruled the land from afar, might have been called Batman, as for convenience it will be called here.

Hopeful as the Shillingsworth brothers were of improving their lot by coming so far from home, they had no idea of what opportunities were offering in this new sphere till they landed. In the ignorance of conditions of life in Capricornia, they came clad in serge suits and bowlers, which made them feel not only uncomfortable in a land but ten degrees from the Equator, but conspicuous and rather ridiculous among the crowd clad in khaki and white linen and wideawake hats and solar topees that met their steamer at the jetty. Nor were they awkward only in their dress. Their bearing was that of simple clerks, not Potentates, as it was their right that it should be as Capricornian Government Officers. When they learnt how high was the standing of Government Officers in the community, especially in that section composed of the gentlemen themselves, as they did within an hour or two of landing, their bearing changed. Within a dozen hours of landing they were wearing topees. Within two dozen hours they were closeted with Chinese tailors. Within a hundred hours they came forth in all the glory of starched white linen clothes. Gone was their simplicity for ever.

Since no normal humble man can help but feel magnificent in a brand-new suit of clothes, it is not surprising that those who don a fresh suit of bright white linen every day should feel magnificent always. Nor is it surprising that a normal humble head should swell beneath a solar topee, since a topee is more a badge of authority than a hat, as is the hat of a soldier.

Carried away by this magnificence, Oscar added a walking-stick to his outfit, though he had till lately been of the opinion that the use of such a thing was pure affectation. Mark still thought it affectation, but did not criticise, first because he feared his brother, and then because his opinions generally had been considerably shaken. Both were changed so utterly in a matter of days by their new condition as to be scarcely recognisable as the simple fellows who came. They dropped the slangy speech that had pleased them formerly, and took to mincing like their new acquaintances, and raised the status of their people when families were talked about, and when the subject was education, made vague reference to some sort of college, while in fact they were products of a State School. Their father, who was dead, had been a humble mechanic in a railway workshop. They described him as a Mechanical Engineer. Their brother Ralph, who was second engineer or third officer on a tiny cargo-steamer, they spoke of as though he were a captain of a liner. They did not lie boldly, nor for lying’s sake. They felt the necessity forced on them by the superiority of their friends. In fact it was Oscar who lied. Mark merely backed him up, not unaware of the likelihood that those to whom they lied might also be liars. But he did not dare even in his mind to question the wisdom of his brother who was by so many years his senior. Oscar was about thirty, and grave in his years when in the company of Mark. Mark was about twenty-two.

Within a week of arrival they knew all the best people in town, including the Flutes of the Residency, head of which house was Colonel Playfair Flute, the Resident Commissioner, first gentleman of the land. As Oscar said gravely, they were Getting On. He appeared to be deeply impressed. Not so Mark, although he took part in the Getting On at first quite as well as Oscar, in fact even better, because he was a youth of more attractive personality. But he was urged mainly by the unusual notice Oscar was taking of him at the time. Previously Oscar had practically ignored him as a very young and rather foolish youth. In fact, but for their mother’s wish that they should be together, Oscar would have prevented Mark from joining him in applying for posts in Capricornia. Their mother was living in the city of Batman with their married sister Maud.

Oscar was soon moved to consider quitting the rather poor bachelor-quarters in which they had been placed and taking a bungalow such as married officers occupied, with a view not nearly so much to making himself more comfortable as to advancing himself socially and in the Service by getting into a position in which he could entertain his superiors as they now condescended to entertain him. Chief cause of this ambitiousness was the fact that through being employed in the Medical Department he had come into contact with the nurses of the Government hospital whose ladylike and professional airs made him feel sensitive as never before of his deficiencies. Mark agreed to share the bungalow willingly, thinking only of comfort.

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.

He decided to become a waster. But to become a waster in the face of the hard ambitious world, he found, is a strong man’s job, like going down a stair up which a great discourteous crowd is climbing; and he was far from strong; moreover, he was struggling with inhibitions. Sometimes he lived virtuously, more often not, though more through weakness than through wilfulness. Twice again during that Wet Season he was reprimanded by His Honour. Throughout that period Oscar mostly ignored him. Still he was at the head of the stair.

Wet Season passed. The Shillingsworths completed their first year of service in Capricornia. Then, one day in May, Oscar passed a remark over lunch—or Tiffin, as he called it—that led to Mark’s divining that a plot had been hatched by the Medical and Railway Departments to effect the dismissal of Chook Henn. Oscar did not intend to disclose the plot. He said what he did merely with intent to sting the disreputable Chook Henn’s bosom friend. And Mark would not have divined it had he not known that such a plot was to be expected. Chook was off duty on the spree. Previous attempts by his superiors to catch him had failed because the doctor they had sent to prove his condition had been loath to report the facts. But another doctor had been added to the staff, an officious fellow who did not drink. Mark made a few cunning inquiries at his office that afternoon. As soon as possible he slipped away to warn Chook, who should have been marshalling his train for the trip to Copper Creek.

Next morning the new doctor had to go to the Yards to find Chook, who was on his engine, shaky of hand and ill of temper. The doctor came with the Loco-Foreman, who ordered Chook to come down from the cab so that the doctor might see if he were fit to do his duty. Chook was prepared. At sight of them he had sent his fireman away to see about coal. He produced a copy of Rules and Regulations and showed the Foreman and the doctor that he was forbidden either to leave his engine unattended or to allow anyone not taking part in his work to enter the cab. He then became abusive. Doctor and Foreman went away amid derisive laughter of a crowd of low fellows.

Unfortunately for Mark, or perhaps fortunately, Chook in his fuddled state had made known the fact that he had been warned. An Enquiry was held. It was a simple matter to trace the betrayal to Oscar. His Honour sat in judgment. Oscar was accused of that worst of all offences in Civil Service—Blabbing. He looked so bemused and miserable that Mark was smitten to the heart. Mark took the blame, and more, told the Cabinet that he had discovered their paltry plot unaided, that Oscar was the best man in the Service, and the only honest, decent, and intelligent one, and that the faithful service he gave was pearl cast before mean, gutless, brainless, up-jumped swine, chief of which was His Blunny Honour. Mark worked himself into a towering rage. He was still expressing his opinion of his superiors when there was no-one left in His Honour’s sanctum to hear but Oscar and himself. Oscar gripped his hand and said huskily, “Thanks Son, you’re a man.” For less than that, romantic Mark would have gladly gone to jail.

Mark and Chook were dismissed on the same day. They celebrated by getting drunk with Krater and a man named Harold Howell on some of the £25 that Mark was given to pay his passage home. A few days later Mark and Chook between them bought a twenty-ton auxiliary lugger for £500, and with great festivity named it the Spirit of the Land. About a week afterward they sailed in company with Krater’s lugger to Flying Fox, taking with them Harold Howell and another young man named Skinn, to help Ned Krater make of trepang-fishing the most important industry of the land.

Trepang, the great sea-slug, prized by wealthy Chinamen as a delicacy and aphrodisiac!

SIGNIFICANCE OF A BURNT CORK

IF Mark and his companions had had the energy to execute the plans with which they went to Flying Fox they might have turned the fair place into a township and themselves into bumbles. They planned to build houses, stores, curing-sheds for the trepang they intended to bring in by the shipload, and a jetty, and a tramway, and a reservoir, and—this was inventive Mark’s idea—a dam across the mouth of the saltwater creek and a plant connected with it for drawing electric power from the tide. They did nothing much more in the way of building than to erect a number of crazy humpies of such materials as bark and kerosene-cans, into which they retired with lubras to keep house for them. Mark built for himself by far the best house, and furnished it very neatly. The lubra he selected was a young girl named Marowallua, who, after he had wasted much time in trying to teach her to keep house to suit his finicking taste, he found was with child. He sent her away, refusing to believe that the child was his, and took another girl. It was Krater who caused him to disbelieve Marowallua. Krater said that several times he himself had been tricked into coddling lubras in the belief that they were carrying children of his, to find at last that he had been made cuckold by blackfellows. Marowallua went off to the mainland with her people.

The humpies were set up on the isthmus between the creek and the sea, among a grove of fine old mango trees and skinny coconuts that Krater had planted. In these trees lived a multitude of the great black bats called flying foxes, the coming of which when the mangoes began to bear was responsible for the renaming of the island. Back some little distance from the settlement lay a large billabong, screened by a jungle of pandanuses and other palms and giant paper-barks and native fig trees. The billabong provided much of the food of the inhabitants. Yams and lily-roots grew there in abundance; and it was the haunt of duck and geese, and a drinking-place of the marsupials with which, thanks to Krater’s good sense in helping the natives to preserve the game, the island abounded. More food was to be got from the mainland, where now there were to be found wild hog and water-buffalo, beasts descended from imported stock that had escaped from domesticity. And still more food was to be got from the sea, which abounded in turtle and dugong and fish. The whitemen left the hunting to the natives. It was not long before the settlement became self-supporting in the matter of its supplies of alcoholic liquor as well, thanks to Chook Henn, who discovered that a pleasant and potent spirit could be distilled from a compound of yams and mangoes.

The months passed, while still the trepanging-industry remained in much the same state as it had throughout all the years of Krater’s careless handling of it. It was not long before Krater showed that he resented the intrusion of the others. Thereafter, Mark and Chook and the other young men fished for themselves.

Wet Season came. The Yurracumbungas returned in force to their Gift of the Sea. Wet Season was drawing to a close, when one violent night the lubra Marowallua gave birth to her child. A storm of the type called Cockeye Bob in Capricornia, which had been threatening from sundown, burst over Flying Fox in the middle of the night, beginning with a lusty gust of wind that ravaged the sea and sent sand hissing through the trees. Then lightning, like a mighty skinny quivering hand, shot out of the black heavens and struck the earth—CRASH! The wind became a hurricane. Grass was crushed flat. Leaves were stripped from trees in sheets. Palms bent like wire. Flash fell upon flash and crash upon crash, blinding, deafening. Out of nothing the settlement leapt and lived for a second at a time like a vision of madness. Misshapen houses reeled among vegetation that lay on the ground with great leaves waving like frantically supplicating hands. Rain stretched down like silver wires from heaven of pitch to earth of seething mud. Rain poured through the roof of Mark’s house and spilled on him. He rose from his damp bed, donned a loin-cloth, and went to the open door.

As suddenly as it had come the storm was over. The full moon, rain-washed and brilliant, struggled out of a net of cloud, and stared at the dripping world as though in curiosity. The air was sweet. For a while the ravaged earth was silent. Then gradually the things that lived, goannas, flying foxes, snakes, men, frogs, and trees, revived, began to stir, to murmur, to resume the interrupted business of the night. From a gunyah in the native camp came the plaint of one whose business had only just begun.

Mark returned to bed. He was not feeling well. Of late he had been drinking too much of Chook’s potent grog. He lay behind the musty-smelling mosquito-net, smoking, and listening idly to a medley of sounds. Water was dripping from the roof; a gecko lizard was crying in the kitchen; mosquitoes were droning round the net; frogs were singing a happy chorus on the back veranda.

The silhouette of a human form appeared in the doorway. It was a lubra. Another joined her. Two for sure, since two is dear company at night in a land of devil-devils. They stood whispering. Mark thought that they were come to sell their favours for tobacco or grog. When one stole in to him he growled, “Get to hell!”

The lubra bent over, plucked at the net, said softly, “Marowallua bin droppim piccanin, Boss.”

After a pause Mark breathed as he slowly raised himself, “Eh?”

“Piccanin, Boss—lil boy.”

He asked quickly, “What name—blackfeller?”

“No-more—lil yeller-feller—belonga you, Boss.”

Mark sat staring. The lubra murmured something, then turned away. He sat staring for minutes. Then hastily he searched the bed for his loincloth, found it, donned it, and slipped out. At the door he stopped. What was he doing? Was the child his? Should he ignore it? Better see. But first put on trousers. A whiteman must keep up his dignity.

He went back for his trousers. Now his hands were trembling. Holy Smoke! A father? Surely not! He felt half ashamed, half elated. What should he do? What should he do? What if people found out? What if Oscar—? A half-caste—a yeller-feller! But—gosh! Must tell Chook and the others. Old Ned—old Ned would be jealous. He had been trying to beget yeller-fellers for years. Not that he had not been successful in the past—according to his boasts. Boasts? Yes—they all boasted if they could beget a yeller-feller——

He fumbled for the lantern, lit it, then got out a bottle that was roughly labelled Henn’s Ambrosia, and drank a peg—and then another—consuming excitement! Gosh! A father!

He took up the lantern and hurried out.

He found Marowallua in a gunyah, lying on bark and shivering as with cold. But for her he had no eyes. On a downy sheet of paper-bark beside her lay a tiny bit of squealing squirming honey-coloured flesh. Flesh of his own flesh. He set down the lantern, bent over his son. Flesh of his own flesh—exquisite thing! He knelt. He touched the tiny heaving belly with a fore-finger. Oh keenest sensibility of touch!

After a while he whispered, “Lil man—lil man!”

He prodded the tiny belly very gently. The flesh of it was the colour of the cigarette-stain on his finger. But flesh of his own flesh—squirming in life apart from him—Oh most exquisite thing!

Smiling foolishly, he said with gentle passion, “Oh my lil man!”

The two lubras who had called him stood at the open end of the gunyah. Beside Marowallua, fanning her with a goose-wing, watching Mark with glittering beady eyes, sat the midwife, whose hair was as white as the sand beneath her and skin as wrinkled as the bark above. Mark remembered them, looked up, eyed each one coldly. He believed that lubras sometimes killed their half-caste babies. He might have guessed that they did not do it very often in Capricornia, where the half-caste population was easily three times greater than the white. The thought that harm might come to his son caused him a twinge of apprehension. He looked at Marowallua and said sharply, “Now look here, you, Mary Alice—you no-more humbug longa this one piccanin. You look out him all right. I’ll give you plenty tucker, plenty bacca, plenty everything.” She dropped her tired eyes. He went on, “S’pose you gottim longa head for killim—by cripes you look out!” Then he addressed the women generally, saying, “S’pose some feller hurtim belong me piccanin, I’ll kill every blunny nigger in the camp. Savvy?”

They stared without expression.

He turned to his flesh again, and smiled and chuckled over it till he found the courage to take it in his arms. Then in a rush of excitement he carried it away to show his friends.

In spite of the lateness of the hour, the whitemen rose from their beds and gathered in Mark’s house to view the baby. At first Mark was shy; but when the grog began to flow he became bold and boasted of the child’s physique and pointed out the features he considered had been inherited from him; and while it squealed and squirmed in the awkward arms of Chook, its Godfather, he dipped a finger in a glass of grog and signed its wrinkled brow with the Cross and solemnly christened it after himself, Mark Anthony. When the party became uproarious, a lubra slipped in and stole the child away.

The christening-party went on till noon of next day, when it ended in horseplay during which Mark fell over a box and broke an arm. His comrades were incapable of attending him. Chook wept over him. He drank frantically to ease his pain—drank—drank—till he was babbling in delirium tremens. Natives found him next morning in the mangroves of the creek, splashing about knee-deep in mud, fleeing from monsters of hallucination, while scaring devil-crabs and crocodiles he could not see. His comrades trussed him up and took him in to town.

Mark returned to sanity to find himself lying a physical wreck in hospital, exhausted from the strain of raving for days in delirium tremens, tortured by his broken arm, and otherwise distressed by cirrhosis of the liver and the utter contempt of the nurses, to the point of wishing he had never regained his sanity at all.

His first sane act was to ask his one kind nurse, Chook Henn, if he had talked in his madness about the half-caste piccaninny. His next was to question the drunken doctor warily to prove the worth of Chook’s assurances. His next was to bury his head in the pillows as the result of learning that he had thrice chased lubras working in the hospital garden, and to swear that henceforth he would live decently or die. He drove Howell and Skinn away when they came to visit him, but not before securing their solemn word that they would never tell a soul about the piccaninny. He quarrelled with the drunken doctor because the amiable fellow persistently spoke of his condition as though it were a brave achievement, not a loathsome visitation as it was to himself. He told Chook to keep at a distance so as not to fan him with his alcoholic breath, and asked him to visit him less often and never unless shaved and neatly dressed and sober. And he sent a message to the matron, apologising for any trouble he might have caused. The doctor and the others humoured him; the matron ignored him.

He learnt with great grief that Sister Jasmine Poundamore was no longer on the staff. Then he was hurt to learn that the lady no longer went under that name. She had become Mrs Oscar Shillingsworth some three months before and as such had been till lately honeymooning in Malaya and the Philippines. He was not hurt because Jasmine had become his sister-in-law, but because he had not been invited to witness the event of her becoming so, nor even told when the event was likely to take place, although he had been in town and talked to Oscar not a month before it did. He was also hurt because Oscar ignored his presence in the hospital. But was he worthy of the notice of decent people? Oh God! As soon as he could leave the hospital he would leave the country for ever!

Thus stricken in body and soul he lay in hospital for about a fortnight. Then swiftly he began to recover. He withdrew his head from ostrich-hiding in the pillows and took an interest in the world. The purpose of the stream of sugar-ants that flowed along the veranda past his bed on ceaseless errands to and from the kitchen seemed less irritatingly futile than before. Without realising as much, he decided that the Trade Wind was not roaring across the harbour and bellowing in the trees and frolicking in his bedclothes simply to annoy him, and that this was not the purpose of the half-caste girls who sang all day in the Leper Lazaret, nor of the possums that romped all night on the roof, nor of the windmill whose wheels were always squealing. He began, without realising as much, to think of these things as pleasant things, parts of the pleasant world of which it was good to be a functioning part. He began to walk about and read and talk and even take some pleasure in bawdy jesting with his fellow patients. The doctor said that he was recovering from the cirrhosis.

One day, about a month after his admission to hospital, while in town for an hour or two on furlough, he met Oscar. The meeting took place on the front veranda of the Princess Alice Hotel, where Mark was sitting, resting and drinking ginger-ale. Oscar was about to enter the hotel. “Hello!” he said, smiling. “Quite a stranger.”

“Hello!” returned Mark weakly, and rose, and extended his grubby right hand. He was disconcerted. He had planned to avoid Oscar if he should meet him, or, if unable to avoid him, to assume a pose of haughtiness to punish him for having so long ignored him. First of all he was ashamed of his appearance. He was clad in a shabby khaki-drill suit and grubby panama and sandshoes, and wore neither socks nor shirt, and was unshaven. The slovenliness of his appearance was mainly due to the fact that he had the use of only one hand.

Oscar was brilliant in whites and topee. He looked at the grubby sling in which Mark’s left arm hung, and at the sandshoes, and at the hint of hairy chest to be seen through the buttons of the high-necked khaki tunic. Mark looked at the ebony walking-stick and the patent-leather shoes.

“They tell me you’ve been knocking yourself about,” said Oscar, twisting his moustache.

Mark searched the calm brown face for feeling. He saw no more than he could have expected to see in the face of a casual acquaintance. He was filled with bitterness; but he answered with a weak grin, “Yes—a bit.”

“Getting right again?”

“Close up.”

Mark dropped his eyes. While Oscar was so calm and cool and handsome, he felt flustered and sweaty and uncouth.

“Heard you were in the hospital,” said Oscar. “I’d’ve come out and had a look at you, only I’ve been pretty busy fixing up the new joint.”

Mark felt relieved. So Oscar had not been shunning him deliberately! He cast about for something to say. At length he said lamely, “Heard from home lately?”

“Yes, of course. Haven’t you?”

“Not for months. Reckon they must be shot of me.”

“Rot! If you don’t write to ’em regular, you must expect ’em to do the same to you.”

Mark was of the opinion that his people were ignoring him because Oscar, who had shown strong disapproval of the trepang-fishing, had black-balled him when writing home.

A pause, during which Oscar destroyed a hornet’s nest in the low roof of the verandah with his stick. Then Mark said suddenly, and with so much feeling that he almost gasped it, causing Oscar to look at him with raised brows, “They—they tell me you’re married.”

Oscar’s brows fell. He smiled and answered, “What—you only just found out?”

Mark choked. He was on the point of retorting passionately; but he merely said, “Y—es—since I came in.”

“Been married four months,” said Oscar airily, whirling his stick.

Mark mouthed another passionate retort. He swallowed it, said weakly, “How d’you like it?”

Oscar grinned and shrugged. “We had a great trip round the East,” he said. “Going to have another soon—a run down home this time.”

After a pause, during which Mark searched Oscar’s face for signs of what he felt, he asked huskily, “How’s your wife?”

He meant it for a thrust. Oscar answered it with a chuckle, saying, “What about coming down and learning to call her by her name?”

Mark flushed deeply and replied, “Sure I’m wanted?”

Oscar’s face was expressionless. “Don’t be silly,” he said. After a pause he added, “We’ve got young Heather Poundamore staying with us just now—Jasmine’s sister. Nice kid. She’d like to meet you, she said. We live down by the Residency now——”

“So I heard.”

Oscar looked genuinely surprised. He asked, “Well why the blazes haven’t you been down?”

Mark was bewildered. What could one make of the man? He was on the point of unburdening himself when Oscar said, “Well, I’ll have to be getting along, Mark. I’ve got a date with a feller inside. See you later.” He touched Mark lightly on the shoulder and added, “Don’t forget to come down.”

Mark flushed and stammered, stepped awkwardly down to the gravelled footpath, and went off shuffling, with eyes cast down. Oscar looked after him as he entered the hotel. Mark did not see. He walked for many yards without seeing anything. He was insensible to everything but a keen sense of dismay in his heart. So the best of all men had come to treat him as a casual acquaintance!

He wandered down to a street called The Esplanade which traversed the edge of the promontory on which the town stood. Directly below the point where he stopped lay the Spirit of the Land, careened on the beach of Larrapuna Bay. Chook Henn and a blackfellow were painting her hull. Mark merely glanced at that, then looked over the wind-swept harbour and over the miles of mangrove-swamps of the further shore and over the leagues of violet bush beyond to a blue range of hills that stood on the dust-reddened horizon. He stared at the hills as he often had when he lived in what he had called Slavery, but stared now with no such yearning for the wilderness as then, because at the moment the world was a wilderness in which he stood alone. For minutes he stared. Then suddenly he shrugged and swore.

He looked down the road. An old Chinaman clad in the costume of his race was shuffling along under a yoke from which hung two tin cans of water. He disappeared into an iron shop, one of a group, above the verandas of which stood vertical, bright-coloured Chinese trading-signs. A waggon drawn by a pair of lazy buffaloes and driven by a dozing half-caste was slowly lumbering along. High in the blazing blue sky two kites were wheeling slowly, searching the town with microscopic eyes for scraps. Somewhere in the distance a mean volley of Chinese devil-crackers broke the stillness. Mark sighed. He was thinking that the charm of the town was its difference from the state it would have been in had it been peopled entirely by people like Oscar. Then the scent of whiskey came to his nostrils. He sniffed. He had merely remembered it. He swallowed. He was Low, he decided. He found himself glorying in the fact. He turned to the sea, looked at the ship, saw Chook pounce on the blackboy and cuff him. He grinned. After a moment he went to the steps that led to the beach and descended.

“Hello Chook!” he shouted as he neared the lugger.

Chook looked round, stared for a moment, then answered, “Gawdstrewth! Ow are ya?”

“Fine. What—painting, eh? Where’d you get the paint? Aint got money, have you?”

“Pinched it. There’s a ton of it in a shed down in the Yards near Fat Anna’s. But I’ve got a bit of cash too, if you want it.”

“Yes? Where’d you get it?”

“Won it in a two-up school yesterd’y. I’ve been hangin’ on to it to pay the debts. Want it?”

“I could do with a drink.”

“No!”

“Dinkum.”

“But what about your guts and things?”

“Oh they’re all right now.”

“Well——” said Chook, beaming, “that’s fine! I could do with a drink meself. Aint had one for two days.” Then he turned to the blackboy with a scowl and said, “Here boy—me-feller go walkabout. You go on paintim allsame—or by cripes I’ll break y’ neck.” He turned to Mark beaming, and said, “Good-o, son. Just wait’ll I get the paint off.”

Although Mark’s digression did not last long it was thorough. He returned to the hospital just twenty-four hours after leaving it, not on foot and alone as when he left, but in Joe Crowe’s cab with Chook and a policeman. The nurses already knew that he was drunk. The police had sent word to the hospital by telephone. The sister in charge met him at the front steps and handed him his belongings in a parcel and told him to go to the devil. He was too drunk to understand and too ill to obey if he had understood. The policeman left him, saying that he would not take responsibility for the care of a man with a broken arm. He was left on the steps where he slept soundly with his head on the parcel till the drunken doctor came. The doctor pacified the sister and put him to bed himself.

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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