Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

Boss—lil boy.”

      He asked quickly, “What name—blackfeller?”

      “No-more—lil yeller-feller—belonga you, Boss.”

      Mark sat staring. The lubra murmured something, then turned away. He sat staring for minutes. Then hastily he searched the bed for his loincloth, found it, donned it, and slipped out. At the door he stopped. What was he doing? Was the child his? Should he ignore it? Better see. But first put on trousers. A whiteman must keep up his dignity.

      He went back for his trousers. Now his hands were trembling. Holy Smoke! A father? Surely not! He felt half ashamed, half elated. What should he do? What should he do? What if people found out? What if Oscar—? A half-caste—a yeller-feller! But—gosh! Must tell Chook and the others. Old Ned—old Ned would be jealous. He had been trying to beget yeller-fellers for years. Not that he had not been successful in the past—according to his boasts. Boasts? Yes—they all boasted if they could beget a yeller-feller——

      He fumbled for the lantern, lit it, then got out a bottle that was roughly labelled Henn’s Ambrosia, and drank a peg—and then another—consuming excitement! Gosh! A father!

      He took up the lantern and hurried out.

      He found Marowallua in a gunyah, lying on bark and shivering as with cold. But for her he had no eyes. On a downy sheet of paper-bark beside her lay a tiny bit of squealing squirming honey-coloured flesh. Flesh of his own flesh. He set down the lantern, bent over his son. Flesh of his own flesh—exquisite thing! He knelt. He touched the tiny heaving belly with a fore-finger. Oh keenest sensibility of touch!

      After a while he whispered, “Lil man—lil man!”

      He prodded the tiny belly very gently. The flesh of it was the colour of the cigarette-stain on his finger. But flesh of his own flesh—squirming in life apart from him—Oh most exquisite thing!

      Smiling foolishly, he said with gentle passion, “Oh my lil man!”

      The two lubras who had called him stood at the open end of the gunyah. Beside Marowallua, fanning her with a goose-wing, watching Mark with glittering beady eyes, sat the midwife, whose hair was as white as the sand beneath her and skin as wrinkled as the bark above. Mark remembered them, looked up, eyed each one coldly. He believed that lubras sometimes killed their half-caste babies. He might have guessed that they did not do it very often in Capricornia, where the half-caste population was easily three times greater than the white. The thought that harm might come to his son caused him a twinge of apprehension. He looked at Marowallua and said sharply, “Now look here, you, Mary Alice—you no-more humbug longa this one piccanin. You look out him all right. I’ll give you plenty tucker, plenty bacca, plenty everything.” She dropped her tired eyes. He went on, “S’pose you gottim longa head for killim—by cripes you look out!” Then he addressed the women generally, saying, “S’pose some feller hurtim belong me piccanin, I’ll kill every blunny nigger in the camp. Savvy?”

      They stared without expression.

      He turned to his flesh again, and smiled and chuckled over it till he found the courage to take it in his arms. Then in a rush of excitement he carried it away to show his friends.

      In spite of the lateness of the hour, the whitemen rose from their beds and gathered in Mark’s house to view the baby. At first Mark was shy; but when the grog began to flow he became bold and boasted of the child’s physique and pointed out the features he considered had been inherited from him; and while it squealed and squirmed in the awkward arms of Chook, its Godfather, he dipped a finger in a glass of grog and signed its wrinkled brow with the Cross and solemnly christened it after himself, Mark Anthony. When the party became uproarious, a lubra slipped in and stole the child away.

      The christening-party went on till noon of next day, when it ended in horseplay during which Mark fell over a box and broke an arm. His comrades were incapable of attending him. Chook wept over him. He drank frantically to ease his pain—drank—drank—till he was babbling in delirium tremens. Natives found him next morning in the mangroves of the creek, splashing about knee-deep in mud, fleeing from monsters of hallucination, while scaring devil-crabs and crocodiles he could not see. His comrades trussed him up and took him in to town.

      Mark returned to sanity to find himself lying a physical wreck in hospital, exhausted from the strain of raving for days in delirium tremens, tortured by his broken arm, and otherwise distressed by cirrhosis of the liver and the utter contempt of the nurses, to the point of wishing he had never regained his sanity at all.

      His first sane act was to ask his one kind nurse, Chook Henn, if he had talked in his madness about the half-caste piccaninny. His next was to question the drunken doctor warily to prove the worth of Chook’s assurances. His next was to bury his head in the pillows as the result of learning that he had thrice chased lubras working in the hospital garden, and to swear that henceforth he would live decently or die. He drove Howell and Skinn away when they came to visit him, but not before securing their solemn word that they would never tell a soul about the piccaninny. He quarrelled with the drunken doctor because the amiable fellow persistently spoke of his condition as though it were a brave achievement, not a loathsome visitation as it was to himself. He told Chook to keep at a distance so as not to fan him with his alcoholic breath, and asked him to visit him less often and never unless shaved and neatly dressed and sober. And he sent a message to the matron, apologising for any trouble he might have caused. The doctor and the others humoured him; the matron ignored him.

      He learnt with great grief that Sister Jasmine Poundamore was no longer on the staff. Then he was hurt to learn that the lady no longer went under that name. She had become Mrs Oscar Shillingsworth some three months before and as such had been till lately honeymooning in Malaya and the Philippines. He was not hurt because Jasmine had become his sister-in-law, but because he had not been invited to witness the event of her becoming so, nor even told when the event was likely to take place, although he had been in town and talked to Oscar not a month before it did. He was also hurt because Oscar ignored his presence in the hospital. But was he worthy of the notice of decent people? Oh God! As soon as he could leave the hospital he would leave the country for ever!

      Thus stricken in body and soul he lay in hospital for about a fortnight. Then swiftly he began to recover. He withdrew his head from ostrich-hiding in the pillows and took an interest in the world. The purpose of the stream of sugar-ants that flowed along the veranda past his bed on ceaseless errands to and from the kitchen seemed less irritatingly futile than before. Without realising as much, he decided that the Trade Wind was not roaring across the harbour and bellowing in the trees and frolicking in his bedclothes simply to annoy him, and that this was not the purpose of the half-caste girls who sang all day in the Leper Lazaret, nor of the possums that romped all night on the roof, nor of the windmill whose wheels were always squealing. He began, without realising as much, to think of these things as pleasant things, parts of the pleasant world of which it was good to be a functioning part. He began to walk about and read and talk and even take some pleasure in bawdy jesting with his fellow patients. The doctor said that he was recovering from the cirrhosis.

      One day, about a month after his admission to hospital, while in town for an hour or two on furlough, he met Oscar. The meeting took place on the front veranda of the Princess Alice Hotel, where Mark was sitting, resting and drinking ginger-ale. Oscar was about to enter the hotel. “Hello!” he said, smiling. “Quite a stranger.”

      “Hello!” returned Mark weakly, and rose, and extended his grubby right hand. He was disconcerted. He had planned to avoid Oscar if he should meet him, or, if unable to avoid him, to assume a pose of haughtiness to punish him for having so long ignored him. First of all he was ashamed of his appearance. He was clad in a shabby khaki-drill suit and grubby panama and sandshoes, and wore neither socks nor shirt, and was unshaven. The slovenliness of his appearance was mainly due to the fact that he had the use of only one hand.

      Oscar was brilliant in whites and topee. He looked at the grubby sling in which Mark’s left arm hung, and at the sandshoes, and at the hint of hairy chest to be seen through the buttons of the high-necked khaki tunic. Mark looked at the ebony walking-stick