Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

gasped Krater. “Gawdsake keep still.”

      When the club was raised again, the madman squealed and dived at Krater’s legs. Krater hit him—hit him—till flakes of brains spattered out of his broken head.

      Krater dropped the club, spat out a mouthful of blood, then signalled to the other boy to come and help him throw the body into deeper water. The other would not come, though Krater scowled at him horribly, doubtless because he thought he was to be put out of his misery too. Krater left the body to the crabs and gulls.

      The rest of the afternoon was spent in silence. Krater sat in the dinghy watching for the first breath of the breeze he expected to spring up from the east. His companion lay in the water, now with a sharp-edged rock in his hand. He wished to die, but not by another man’s hand.

      At nightfall they set out for the Group, steering by the stars. Krater sat in the stern, the boy amidships bailing. They rarely spoke. They were tired and racked to the point of death. They reached Chineri Island late in the following morning. Here they abandoned the dinghy for want of wind and continued their way down the burning beach, heading for a native camp. A thousand flies went with them to suck their suppurating sores. Time and again they fell by the way exhausted, and would have died there but for Krater’s Anglo-Saxon will, which could not realise that it was inextricably in the grip of death and hence flogged the wretched body on to unnecessary misery. On they went and on and on, Stone-Age Man and Anglo-Saxon, clinging to each other for support, blending the matter of their sores.

      It was dark when they reached their destination. Krater asked the natives to take them to Flying Fox at once. They demurred, saying that the sea between was a haunt of terrible devils after dark. But they might as well face the devils as defy the Man of Fire. He could only command in whispers; but he made up for weakness of voice with terrible gestures and violence with a stick. They obeyed him. By now he was almost delirious. His old heart was galloping to death. He did not know it. He thought only of the need to reach home as quickly as possible, and hoped that at home he would find the pests.

      He reached his home, and lived long enough to hear the natives wailing in a Death Corroboree over his late comrade. He knew what the wailing was about. At first he chuckled, considering the cause of it proof of his superiority. But after a while the corroboreeing drove him mad. He shouted to the mourners to stop their row and come and open his doors and windows that he might not suffocate. They did not hear him. What he thought was shouting was mere gasping. And his doors and windows were open as it was. At length, unable to tolerate the wailing longer, he leapt up and rushed out to the mourners with a mighty club and laid about him, cracking heads like eggs and limbs like carrots. But he did not stop the corroboree even then. His violence and the fragility of his victims were only fancies of his dying mind.

      When the natives found that he was dying, they forgot their dead brother and came and peeped at him, while he grovelled on the floor fighting for his breath. Long after he fell back dead they peeped, amazed to find that the mighty Munichillu was merely mortal. For many hours they were afraid to touch him, lest they should discover to their cost that they were taking a liberty. So the ants got at him first. The natives buried him in a shallow grave in the hillocks of the isthmus where he had shot Kurrinua, then looted his house, then staged another Death Corroboree in which they sang of Kurrinua and Retribution. Then, in accordance with their custom, they left the island for the time required for the laying of his ghost or devil. The crocodiles, being respecters neither of persons nor of devils, came and rooted him out and devoured him as soon as they discovered where he lay.

      Ned Krater had been dead about nine months when Mark and Chook returned to Flying Fox. They had heard that Krater was dead from a friend of his who had gone out to visit him some time before. They found the island deserted. The natives had gone to the mainland. Mark was in a way relieved. It was disinclination to set eyes on his half-caste son that had kept him away from the island so long. He came only because he wished to get some things he had left there. Yet he felt curious to know how the child was progressing, so much so that instead of staying only as long as it took him to get what he wanted, as he had intended, he stayed for several days in the hope that natives might come who could tell him where the child was. No-one came. At length he and Chook departed. Soon afterwards they secured a contract for transporting cypress pine in the lugger from a mill that had been set up on an island near Port Zodiac.

      Another year passed. Then Mark and Chook returned to Flying Fox with intent to take up trepang-fishing in earnest. By now Mark had got over the shame of being the father of a half-caste. In fact for some time he had been thinking that most likely the child was dead. This time the natives were in occupation; and with them was young Mark Anthony Shillingsworth, or, as the natives called him, Naw-nim, which was their way of saying No-name. The child’s baptismal name had not got beyond the witnesses to his baptism. The name No-name was one usually given by the natives to dogs for which they had no love but had not the heart to kill or lose. It was often given to half-castes as well. Little Naw-nim’s mother was dead.

      When Mark first saw the child he was playing in sand with a skinny dog. He scampered into the scrub when Mark approached. It was with difficulty that he was caught. Mark picked him up gingerly, not because he was afraid of hurting, but was afraid of being soiled by him. He was unutterably filthy. Matter clogged his little eyes and nose; his knees and back and downy head were festered; dirt was so thick on his scaly skin that it was impossible to judge his true colour; and he stank.

      For all his former callousness and the timidity with which he had come to see the child when he learnt that he was there, Mark was revolted and enraged by the sight of him. With the lump of squealing squirming filth in his arms he passionately reviled the natives for their foul neglect. Then he gave it to a lubra to scrub. He went back to his house spitting and grimacing and brushing contamination from his hands. It occurred to him soon afterwards that most of the responsibility for the foul neglect rested on himself. He was smitten with remorse. That night little Nawnim slept on a blanket beside his father’s bed, now as clean as a little prince and smelling sweetly of Life Buoy Soap, and, though chafed almost raw, quite happy. His father had given him a large bowl of milk porridge to which was added a dash of rum.

      Being bathed became a daily experience in Nawnim’s life. At first he objected to it strongly, but soon became used to it, as he did to wearing the quaint costumes his father made him and to eating whiteman’s food. The food he ate was often strong far beyond the alimentary powers of a child as young as he, but evidently not for one whose system had been hardened with food snatched from dogs and salted with sand and ants. His distended belly soon subsided when more than air was given it to digest; and otherwise he took on more comely shape, as his father observed with great interest. His brassy yellow skin became sleek and firm. His eyes lost their hunted-animal look and shone like polished black stones over which golden water flows. Soon he became fat and bold and beautiful. Mark loved him, and in nursing him wasted scores of hours that should lave been occupied elsewhere. Often when there was no-one near to see, stirred by the beauty of the delicate little features, he would kiss him passionately and address him from the depths of his heart in terms that made him burn with shame when recalled in moments less emotional. But for Chook, who refused to take his affection for the child seriously, he might have adopted him frankly.

      Several months passed. Then Mark and Chook decided to make a voyage to the Dutch East Indies. Mark left Nawnim in the care of his lubra, who looked after him diligently till it seemed as though his father did not intend to return, when she abandoned him to his old friends the dogs. Mark was away for about a year. When he returned he renewed his attention to Nawnim, but did not keep it up with anything like his former interest, because he took as mistress a half-caste girl named Jewty, who would not have the child in the house if his father were not there to protect him. Jewty was one of Ned Krater’s children, a wilful, spiteful, jealous creature. Under her influence and that of Chook and by reason of the fact that he spent most of his time away from the island, Mark eventually lost interest in Nawnim almost completely. And the occasions when he was forced to take notice of the child did anything but rouse paternal love in him, because they were usually in consequence of some foul childish ailment or of the boy’s escapades in theft. Nawnim, associate of niggers’ dogs, had learned to steal as he learned to use his limbs. His father was his chief victim.

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