Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ