Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ