Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

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      Jock laughed heartily, slapped scowling Mark on the back. As they were sitting down to drink, he said to Mark, “Fine stahmp of laddie, that. What ye goin’ to do wi’ him?”

      Mark answered with a grunt that was intended to give the impression that he did not wish to discuss the matter.

      “Ye leavin’ him behind here when ye gaw awee?” asked Jock.

      Mark looked at him, and after a moment, said, “Well—as a matter of fact I was thinkin’ of sendin’ him to the Compound. He—he’s not really mine, you know. I—I found him in the bush.”

      “In the bulrushes, eh?” asked Jock, and winked at Chook.

      Mark blinked, fingered his glass.

      It was true that he had thought of sending Nawnim to the Native Compound in Port Zodiac. He had thought of doing so for years whenever his conscience was pricked by the thought of the boy’s growing up as a savage. He had been prevented by fear that the Protector of Aborigines might discover that he was the father of the child and charge him with the cost of his maintenance. He did not know that the cost of maintaining a child in the Compound Half-caste’s Home—indeed of maintaining any inmate of the Compound—was, even there where the necessities of life were expensive, only fourpence per day. Had he known it, he surely would not have been troubled by the thought of his son’s growing up as a half-starved savage.

      “I could do wi’ him if ye dawn’t wawnt him,” said Jock. “There in’t many yeller-fellers doon my way.” He chuckled, and added, “I in’t been there long enough yet. I’ve got one yeller-feller meself. Boot it’s a bluidy gurrl. I wawnt boys.” He laughed.

      He went on, “I wawnt yeller kids to train as foremen. The Government cawn’t mairk a bloke pay wages to his own soons—see?”

      “What—you raisin’ a herd of yeller-fellers?” asked Chook.

      Jock swallowed a mouthful of Ambrosia, gasped, blinked. “Gawd!” he breathed. “Wha’s thaht—kerosene?”

      Chook frowned.

      Mark grinned, and said, “Yeah—you can have the kid if you want him, Jock. But don’t go tellin’ anyone where you got him. Dinkum, he’s not mine——”

      “Aw I wawn’t say nawthin’,” said Jock.

      “Give’s your word on it,” said Mark. “And give’s your word you’ll treat him decent.”

      “Right!” said Jock, and grasped his hand. “There’s me worrd. You can rely on me to bring him up like he wuz me awn soon, cos then I wawn’t have to pay him wages—see?”

      Mark thought that a mean motive, but was satisfied that by reason of it Nawnim would be well treated for the rest of his life.

      Jock’s station was about two hundred miles inland from Port Zodiac. It covered some two or three thousand square miles. Such a holding was not thought vast in Capricornia, where there were some of even more than ten thousand square miles. Such land was put out to lease at a purely nominal rent, the Government considering itself under obligation to the lessees for their courage in developing the country; indeed so deep was the Government’s sense of obligation that it exempted the lessees from taxation on the profits—often vast profits—of their business. The joke of it was that by no means all the lessees were settlers like Jock. A good number, among whom were included practically all those who controlled the large stations, were English or other foreign companies, who had never seen the land they controlled, but put men on it to work it for them who had to pay taxes out of meagre wages. Indeed many of these big companies controlled similar properties in other countries that were Australia’s rivals in the meat-trade of the world. Thus they were never troubled by competition.

      Jock intended to place Nawnim in a stock-camp, in which he would grow up to learn the ways of horses and cattle as the business of his life. He would take to the saddle as soon as possible and work with native stockriders as one of them till he became a man, when, should he prove to be more intelligent, or rather, perhaps, more selfish and purposeful, than a native, he would be made a foreman. By growing up thus he would save Jock the expense of employing a whiteman. The natives made the best of stockriders, but could not be relied upon to remain at work. Jock often had to track his black staff down and bring them back to work at the point of a gun. Nawnim’s status and pay would never be much better than a native’s. The pay of Jock’s natives was tobacco and food and clothes of a sort, their status not that of his horses. He and the many graziers like him excused their meanness by saying that it was useless giving the natives money when they did not understand the value of it. They took pains to see that the natives were never taught it.

      Jock had no difficulty in securing native-labour, for all his meanness. On the contrary, he secured it easily. For, when his cattle came, the native game was scared away, or if not scared then starved away, because, during the lean times of Dry Season, the cattle, themselves hard put for succour, would take possession of all permanent grazing. This state of things would greatly affect the natives whose country the Government had leased to Jock, so that they, who, unlike their game, were prevented by tribal laws from wandering out of their domain, would be put to the alternatives of starving or eating Jock’s cattle or going to work for him. The second would be their choice till the police came and shot them. All over the land were bone-piled spots where lazy Aborigines were taught not to steal a whiteman’s bullocks. For natives who were unable to work there was the fourpenny Compound. But for some reason or other that institution was not popular. Most Aborigines who had been born in freedom preferred to do their starving in the bush. And all the while the Nation was boasting to the world of its Freedom and Manliness and Honesty. Australia Felix!

      Flying Fox was washed by a vigorous tide, which was capable of rising during spring period to a height of some twenty-five feet. Hence the mouth of the salt-water creek was usually surging like a mill-race, but wasting its power—or so it had been—on transporting such things as jellyfish, leaves, and crocodiles. This waste had been the cause of great irritation to Mark, who, though careless of most forms of ineconomy, could not bear to see the wasting of natural force. Therefore, after years of irritation, at the cost of much study and money on his own part and great labour on the part of the men of Yurracumbunga, he had dammed the mouth of the creek and cut a culvert through the isthmus, causing the water to flow through a quaint-looking machine that sucked out kinetic energy and churned it into electric power. The machine was ingeniously constructed, consisting of an old centrifugal pump of brass, a flywheel of concrete, a dynamo of antiquated type, and an elaborate system of gears comprised mainly of bicycle parts, which was capable of reversing action at the turn of the tide without interfering with the running of the dynamo. Although of rather Heath-Robinsonian design, the machine was quite effective, and when the tide was running, kept the settlement ablaze with electric light. Unfortunately, owing to the perversity of Nature, the tide was usually not running when the light was most required.

      There were many electrically-operated gadgets about the place. Jock studied them with interest, wishing to learn how they were made so that he might not have to buy them. And he listened with interest to Mark’s confiding that the building of the machine had given him more pleasure than any job he had ever undertaken in his life, and that therefore it pained him to have to do that which he would not do but for his urgent neediness, namely, part with it for money. Jock thought this an extraordinarily cunning method of bargaining, and therefore responded warily, praising the damming and sluicing and other parts of the contrivance that he would not have to buy, and saying with reference to them that Mark would have made a clever engineer, but cruelly criticising the machine itself, although secretly delighted with СКАЧАТЬ