Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Nawnim started, edged away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      One day he wandered into the railway-yards, and, becoming tired, sought rest and shelter from the sun beneath a cattle-car СКАЧАТЬ