Capricornia. Xavier Herbert

weakness for it seriously because they had always waxed ribald when making them. And he heard of it from Government Officers, who also jested about it, but at the same time gave it to be understood that they considered the men who sought the love of lubras—such men were called Comboes—unspeakably low. Although he had often eyed the black housemaid with desire, he had been of the same opinion as his brother Officers till he came in contact with Ned Krater. Krater evidently lived for Black Velvet. He waxed eloquent when he talked about it. He said that it was actually the black lubras who had pioneered the land, since pursuit of them had drawn explorers into the wilderness and love of them had encouraged settlers to stay. He said that a national monument should be set up in their honour. Mark believed him, but could not bring himself to woo the housemaid.

      After living on whiskey for three or four weeks he collapsed. He was sent to the hospital by the doctor, who, being himself a drunkard, listed him as suffering from gastritis and neurasthenia. But Oscar’s friends the nurses were not drunkards. Mark suffered much from their contemptuous eyes, especially from those of Sister Jasmine Poundamore, who was Oscar’s sweetheart. Oscar often came to the hospital while he was there, but never to see him.

      Once again he was turned back to the path of virtue. But now he trod it only because he knew he needed a change of scene, having no illusions about whither it would lead him, nor any desire to be led elsewhere than to adventure on the Silver Sea. He did not return to the social whirl; instead he spent most of his leisure in prowling round the back parts of the town, observing how the bulk of his fellow-citizens lived. What he saw surprised and delighted him. He had not realised how multifarious the population was and for the most part how strange.

      When he met Krater again he learnt that he was on the eve of returning to his camp on the island of Gift of the Sea, or, as he had renamed it, Flying Fox. Krater invited Mark to accompany him, offering to bring him back to town within a couple of weeks if necessary. There was a reason for the kindness. Krater liked Mark, but did not want his company so much as his help to finance his trepang-fishing business. Mark did not guess the reason, though Krater had fished for his help before; but if he had would not have accepted the invitation less eagerly than he did, nor have suffered keener disappointment than he did to learn that, accept or not, he could not go. He applied to the Resident Commissioner for a fortnight’s special leave. He was not only refused it, but in a quiet way rebuked. His Honour apparently knew more about his private life than he supposed. Along with a polite letter of refusal he sent a copy of Rules and Regulations for the Conduct of Officers, in which red-ink marks drew attention to the facts that Indulgence in Drunkenness and Low Company were offences and that an officer was entitled at the end of every three years of Faithful Service to three months’ leave on full pay with a first-class passage home. Evidently His Honour regarded Port Zodiac purely as a business-centre. So Krater’s lugger, which was called the Maniya—after a lubra, some said—sailed without Mark. Mark watched her go. And his heart went with her, out over the sparkling harbour, out on to the Silver Sea, leaving him with nothing in his breast but bitter disappointment.

      Some quiet weeks passed. Then Wet Season came with its extremes of heat and humidity and depraving influences on the minds of corruptible men. Even Oscar began to drink to excess. But he never bawled and pranced and wallowed in mud and came home in the arms of shouting larrikins. He always came home as steadily as he went out, though perhaps a little more jauntily, and ended excesses by simply dipping his head in cold water and swallowing an aspirin and a liver pill or two, not by groping for the bottle and subsisting on it for a week. The converse of his conduct was his brother’s.

      During Wet Season 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