Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

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       HEIR TO ALL THE AGES

      THE Shillingsworth family in Capricornia had increased in the eight years of Mark’s and Oscar’s residence to the number of six, Mark’s half-caste bastard being included, though perhaps not rightly, as well as Oscar’s two legitimates and himself and his wife, all of whom, though bearing the name, were perhaps more rightly Poundamores. The younger generation were Oscar’s children, Marigold and Roger, and Mark’s Nawnim. In the year of the census, 1910, Mark was thirty. Oscar’s age was now indeterminate, he having reached the doldrums of life, the period between thirty-five and forty-five, in which a man, not knowing whether to forge ahead and pretend to be a hoary elder or to slink back and pretend to be a youth, just drifts and lets his age be known as the—er—thirties.

      The year of census was an eventful one for the whole family. The first to whom adventure came was Roger, aged one year. His adventure was the greatest one can experience. He died, or, as Oscar stated on his tombstone, was Called Home. Measles had a voice in the calling.

      Bitter trouble in Oscar’s home followed the death of Roger. Just prior to it, Jasmine, who was in the unhappy state into which many handsome potent women fall in the early thirties through too closely considering the dullness of the future against the brightness of the past, had been neglecting her home at Red Ochre for what was a frantic endeavour to enjoy the dregs of her almost exhausted youth in the social whirl in town. Oscar had long since dropped out of the social whirl. He would have liked Jasmine to do the same, as he often hinted. But when he accused her of neglecting her child and so having been to a degree responsible for its death he did not really mean what he said. He was not speaking his mind but the craziness that the death of the potential perpetuator of his name had induced in him.

      Jasmine sprang out of mourning perhaps bitterer than his and spat at him all that over which she had been ruminating for years. He learnt that he was a thing of wood, a thing of the gutter sprung from stock of the gutter (distorted reference to disreputable Brother Mark), risen by chance to be—what?—to be a bumptious fool whose god was property, not property in vast estates such as a true man might worship, but in paltry roods. Bah! His very greed was paltry. He dreamt of the pennies he could coin from cattle-dung! (Poor Oscar! He had always resisted her urging him to secure more land and buy more stock, because, not being a grazier born like the Poundamores who controlled vast Poundamore Downs on account of which they were born and buried in debt, he realised that cattle-raising was a business, not a religion, and that as it was he held more country and ran more stock than was warranted by the mean trade he could do. And once he had said quite idly that he wished there were a sale for the cattle-dung that lay about the run in tons.) And she spat at him something that would not have hurt him a few years earlier or later, namely that he was already old and flaccid, while she, who was by eight years his junior, was young—yes—young! Young—and Oh God—aflame with life!

      Stung to malice, Oscar jeered at her for a faded flower blind to its own wilting through pitiful conceit. She fled from him weeping. Poor blundering ass, quickly stricken with remorse, he went after her and begged forgiveness, and thus only made himself more hateful to her by being weak and her more desirable to himself by causing her to be inexorable. They were never reconciled. A few weeks after the scene, she eloped to the Philippines with the captain of the cattle-steamer Cucaracha, accompanied by a cargo of Oscar’s beeves. Oscar was shocked, firstly by having lost her, secondly by having lost her in a manner so unseemly, thirdly by having lost her to a man he had regarded as a friend. He had taken Captain Emilio Gomez into his house as a Spanish gentleman. The fellow had turned out to be nothing but a Dirty Dago.

      There was ample justification for believing that Oscar and his family should not rightly be numbered as Shillingsworths. At the time of the census Red Ochre was bidding fair to become another Poundamore Downs, there being resident in the place eight persons of whom no less than seven were Poundamores of the blood. Oscar himself was the outsider. The seven were Jasmine and her children, and Joe Poundamore and his wife and child, and Heather. Joe had never left the place since coming up to show Oscar how to run it five years before. Heather had been there since having returned with Jasmine when that lady came home from Poundamore Downs where she had gone to bear her baby Roger as a true Poundamore.

      Heather was then twenty-five, still unmarried, and not yet completely recovered from having been overwhelmed by Mark, though disposed to think of him less harshly than she had for a long while after the incident of the burnt cork. She had not seen Mark since her return, not because she had taken pains to avoid doing so, but because he had. Indeed her main reason for returning to Capricornia was to see Mark again. But he was not to be seen in Port Zodiac much in these days. He had visited Red Ochre only once, when his mother and sister Maud came up to stay there for a while about eighteen months before the return of Heather. After that, in spite of the success of the family reunion, he had not set eyes on Oscar for a whole year; and then the circumstances that brought them together was no less than the news of their mother’s death. After Heather returned, Mark did not see Oscar again till after Jasmine deserted.

      The Poundamore stronghold in Capricornia collapsed when Jasmine deserted. Soon after she left, Oscar quarrelled with Joe, not for the first time by any means, but for the first time with any courage. He told Joe to go to hell, and advised Heather to go with him. Joe went back to Poundamore Downs, taking his wife and child, and offering to take the motherless Marigold to give her into the care of her grandparents. Oscar declined the offer, but paid the steamer-fares for which Joe was fishing when he made the offer. Heather, whose love for Capricornia was genuine, did not go home. To the annoyance of Oscar, who would sooner have supported her than see a relative engaged in what he considered a disreputable calling, and to the disconcertment of Mark, whose favourite drinking-place the Princess Alice Hotel was, she got a job as barmaid at the Princess Alice with her old friend Mrs Daisy Shay.

      Oscar ceased to be a Poundamore with the fall of the stronghold. This Mark discovered when next they met. The discovery caused him great astonishment, because the evidence of the fact was Oscar’s quite unexpected brotherly act of coming to the Calaboose and offering to effect his—Mark’s—release. At the time Mark was serving a term of six week’s imprisonment for having failed to pay a debt of £30 that had been owing for forty months. It was his fifth sojourn in the Calaboose. He had long been legally insolvent, having made himself so by deeding his property to Chook, who carefully kept out of debt himself and lived on Mark’s credit. When Mark went to jail, as he now did at least once a year, Chook usually found temporary employment in the town and lived as meanly as possible, saving money against the time of Mark’s release; if unable to find employment, he always got drunk and assaulted the person responsible for Mark’s imprisonment, and thus got sent to jail himself, at once to be with Mark and to save the cost of living.

      Oscar was apprised of the fact that Mark was in jail by Chook, whom he found working in the railway-yards. He also learnt that the pair still owned the lugger and the rest of the trepang-fishing plant, all of which could be turned into money. Oscar was in need of money at the time. His need was largely responsible for his sudden show of magnanimity. He decided that it would be a good idea to get Mark to turn his share of the lugger and other property into cash and then to take him as a partner in his own business. He told Mark that if he would accept the offer of partnership he would settle the debt on account of which Mark was imprisoned.

      Mark accepted the offer eagerly, but not honestly. Strangely enough, though always eager for Oscar’s friendship when it was difficult to secure, he valued it lightly then. He had no intention of becoming Oscar’s partner. He only wished to get out of jail. When he did get out he played with Oscar, accompanied him to Red Ochre, and spent a month with him, pretending that he was СКАЧАТЬ