The Playmaker (32 page)

“Your support does not go unnoticed,” H.E. commented.

Yes, Ralph would have liked to have said, but it's Robbie Ross who in the near run has the say on my promotion.

For the second time in a few days, Ralph found himself appealing to Dick Johnson in the parson's admirable garden on the east side of the town. Dick's devotion to his two acres reminded Ralph yet again that he had not been out in some time to his garden on the small island to see to Amstead, the convict gardener, or the state of his own turnips. The playmaking, and concern with Harry Brewer and Mary Brenham, had taken up all his recent attention.

Dick listened with sad tolerance as Ralph told his story. The girl had been beaten, she needed gentleness, and, since Black Caesar had threatened him, so perhaps did her placid small boy. One of the lags had a fancy for her and would now use Caesar's attack as a pretext to offer her the protection of his hut. “I do not think it is under these circumstances that Mary Brenham should be forced to choose a companion for life,” said Ralph piously.

Poor Dick took one step back, leaned on his shovel, and looked out over the early winter harbour which still dazzled as it did in high summer. When he looked back there was a tear in each eye. “I was not wrong in my original judgement of you, Ralph,” he said. “You are indeed a limb of righteousness. I shall insist the girl stay here until the black man is retaken and punished.”

As he left the garden Ralph understood how thoroughly he had deceived an old, if small-minded friend. “That is the nature of love,” he murmured to himself Harry-like, and went off to pack for the expedition.

CHAPTER 22

Ca-bahn

They landed on the very beach from which Arabanoo had been captured on the last day of the previous year. The late afternoon sun was still warm on that strand of fine yellow sand, but the heights of vegetation and sandstone platforms behind the beach, the platforms on which Ralph had once seen a magnificent native stand holding aloft a monstrous iguana, were growing dark already. Davy of course had his own map; given time he would reduce everything to a system. As Private Ellis, the Marines, and the few convicts who had been trusted to travel with them landed rations and arms, pots and blankets, from the two longboats, Davy sat in the long grass on the edge of the trees with Ralph and showed him how they would travel.

Over the hill, said Davy, you came to a spine of land between the harbour and the ocean, and you continued along this—fine lagoons on one side where wild duck might be sighted, and the ocean headlands on the other. Davy hoped they would not have to go too far. Beyond the lagoons lay further hills and ledges and the inland water to the north which H.E. had called Pittwater. Perhaps Arabanoo's relatives, driven along by
gal-gal-la
, had fled that far!

The convicts and Marines assembled now three large bonfires along the beach; there was something about the gathering of wood, the companionable piling of it, which made their voices sound birdlike. A convict cook set up a metal traingle over a smaller fire already burning with a salty crackle. He would suspend the evening pot from that, and everyone's beef for the day would go into it. The sight brought Ralph a saving pulse of elation. It must have had a similar effect on Davy, for now he winked, put the map away, and pulled out a silver flask of brandy and two tiny goblets, the sort of tricky personal accoutrement you would expect a man of his style to possess.

“News of your wife by the
Sirius
, Ralph?” asked Davy, pouring the brandy.

“She spent the Christmas with Kempster. You know Captain Kempster?”

“I do, I do. We were fifteen years of age together in Nova Scotia.”

“That is where you met your wife?” asked Ralph, grimacing a little as he took in some of Davy's brandy. He was curious to see how a young man such as Davy would talk about an absent wife while maintaining a lag companion. There might be some instructive mental trick Davy had to pass on.

“My wife grew up in Nova Scotia,” said Davy. You would have to assess his smile, Ralph thought, as fond. “She still has the outlandish mode of speech of that region, though when she writes she is far more literary than most of your English-born women. I like her American directness.”

High on the beach, where the paperbarks began, Private Ellis was uncoiling Ralph's bedroll. Further along the sand the evening's first three pickets had been placed.

Davy Collins said dreamily, sipping the brandy, “Nova Scotia has such a climate as to encourage embraces.”

“Some people seem adequately encouraged to embraces here,” Ralph said.

“Oh yes, except our stern master. H.E. seems not to need much love.”

Davy poured more brandy still. “My wife attends literary circles,” he said, “and publishes novels under false names. She is very accomplished. She is quite beautiful as well, and I must be composed when I think of that—of a young woman of talent living singly in that lizard's nest called London. It's quite possible she would have been enchanted by this country. North Americans have a skill for dealing with the harsh. And certainly if she had been permitted to come with me there would have been no need for me to spend so much time in making a journal and annotating the language of the natives, and all the rest of the particular housework I engage myself with.”

“If my wife had come,” said Ralph, staring off towards the escarpments where the last light sat, “she may not have been enchanted, but other problems would have been avoided.” He was not drunk enough to confess to Davy that the problem which would have been avoided was his wife's prodigality with money.

It seemed Davy thought Ralph was speaking of the temptations of the flesh, and that supposition caused him to smile briefly and privately. “It has sometimes bothered my mind,” he told Ralph in a lowered voice, “to consider what the government of Great Britain had in mind when they barred us from bringing our wives. Oh, I know it's a tradition of the service that the wives of officers are considered to be too sensitive in upbringing to stand the stress of campaigning in the field as in foreign places. This is rather a different case I would have thought. Reports from earlier visitors praised the place, however remote it would be, and said it was fruitful and temperate. I wonder, couldn't it have been seen as desirable that the lags should have models of marriage placed before their eyes—your marriage, mine? Oh, I don't mean our marriages are perfect, Ralph, though maybe yours is. But I would guess that most of the time your marriage—like mine—is marked by delicacy, consideration, and a certain ceremony. From observing us close at hand, the convicts might have learned those things which it is harder to learn from observing the marriages of most of the Marines. The Marine marriages teach them no more than what they already know of the institution from their observations in the sinks and stews of Soho and Seven Dials and Stepney and Poplar—screaming, punching, violent rutting, and reckless infidelity. Not that I am a paragon in the matter, Ralph. But our marriages might have shown them there were different ways of proceeding.”

The fragrance of the cooking meal, mixed with that of the salt air and the strange bitter eucalyptus smell of the forest, came to Ralph and caused him to smile.

“Why did they not permit our spouses then?” he asked dreamily, without any particular passion at the moment against the Home Secretary or the Admiralty.

“There are only two explanations,” said Davy. “First, there is the possibility they were so stupefied by custom they did not even consider our special case.”

Ralph laughed. He liked Davy's companionable disrespect. “And what's the other explanation?”

“The other one is more beguiling, Ralph. That they—being men fully aware of the normal male leanings—intended that at this distance of space we
should
take convict wives, and by treating them well and having influence over them, turn them into the future matriarchs of this lag society. Through the exercise of our desire for the comradeship of women and for the usual human solace, we were to make an exemplar of marriage out of a convict concubine—to use Dick Johnson's rather exciting and fleshy term.”

Ralph stared at Davy. He was the last man Ralph had suspected would turn into the voice of a rational Satan.

Early in the day it was dismal journeying—they climbed over rock ledges, sometimes encountering the skeletal remains of an Indian stricken months earlier by the smallpox. It was the only sight of a native they had until well into the morning, and this surprised Ralph and Davy, given that the lagoons were so rich in animal life, that ducks made continual small migrations overhead and that those mounds of genial fur and flesh known as wombats occasionally crossed their track.

They were beginning to climb a spur of hills running north from the last of the marshes when they saw a group of native women fleeing through the trees to their left. More exactly they heard them, for the women ran with shrill pee-wit cries, clutching children to their hips and breasts. This chirping flight distracted the party for a moment from what was ahead of them, but then they saw standing in their path, perhaps twenty paces ahead of them, a tall native, three spears and a throwing stick in his right hand, a war club in his left, and a long, double-pointed bone thrust through the septum of his nose. He did not intend to let them come any further, and he signified it by the bellicose hooting he made in his throat.

“This is what comes of capturing them against their wills,” Ralph murmured to Davy. The sight of barbed spears made Ralph angry that H.E. and Davy had with such levity ordered Arabanoo's capture. Davy held his hand up to prevent the Marines from loading their muskets. “Do nothing,” he called.

And with that bland, boyish frankness he and Johnny White had displayed on their excursions in Rio, he began to speak the language of the natives.

“Arabanoo
ba-diel!”
said Davy carefully. He was speaking out of the very dictionary of the language he himself had made. His sentences grew in length. The native seemed to ignore him, keeping up the hooting, stamping his front foot, the one which would take the weight, Ralph understood, when the spear was hurled. Davy bravely raised his voice.

“Arabanoo
gal-gal-la!”
claimed Davy.

The native ceased his hooting and frowned. Davy went to step forward, but the native thrust out the knob of his war club to prevent him.
“Diam o car-rah-dy?”
asked Davy calmly.
“Noy-ga Car-rah-dy!”

He turned to Ralph and translated. “I am telling him Arabanoo is howling for a priest.”

“Car-rah-dy,”
boomed the native.

“Ca-bahn
,” said Davy.
“Car-rah-dy
Ca-bahn!
Diam o
Ca-bahn?”

The native began to weep in front of their eyes and made a keening noise like an elongated
e
. “They weep easily for each other,” murmured Davy to no one in particular. In an effort to be heard over the keening, he had to shout at the native. He began to ask for the weeping man's name. It was believed that if an Indian gave you
that
, you stood less chance of being impaled.

Davy asked again, and the native ceased his wailing and pointed to Davy less aggressively with the club. “I am Collins,” said Davy, with a smile which Ralph thought of as taking some of the sting out of the two-barbed spear, the horrifying acuteness of the shark bone. “I am Collins. And I think you may know me, sir.”

The native began to rehearse Davy's name, the way Arabanoo had rehearsed names on the beach on the day of his capture. “Bennilung!” the native offered suddenly as his own name. He pounded his heart to indicate the sincerity of the offering. “Bennilung!”

“
Diam o
Ca-bahn?” asked Davy, his hands spread wide.

At last the native half turned and, with an open hand, pointed north. Tears still sat glinting on the layers of fish oil that caked his face. Davy moved toward him as if they were about to become fellow travellers. But the native turned again full face and, holding the shafts of the spears horizontally across his own chest, pushed Davy back. So they were to follow, but at a distance.

Ralph was astonished the Indian was willing to pay them any service at all. This race was too compliant, Ralph thought. They did not have that crucial talent for malice which had arrived so abundantly here on the convict transports.

The native ran ahead. He led them through further lagoons and across hilltops where the sound and sight of the ocean were immensely and noisily present. He would wait for them at difficult places—rock outcrops or fenny ground. He never let them get much closer than, say, fifty paces before he was gone again, loping among the tall verticals of trees blackened from the fires of the past summer.

He did not permit a stop, and therefore neither did Davy. Ralph could hear the suppressed grumblings of the Marines and convicts behind him.

At last the native led them up to a plateau covered in small, strange olive-green shrubs, all cuffed back and trimmed by the prevailing wind. Here, by words to Davy and by signs, he told them to wait. It was now midafternoon. The Marines and convicts pitched themselves down on boulders round about. The heat of the sun was sweetly cached in the rocks. The men flung themselves gratefully across them and regained their breath. After further words with Davy, the native Bennilung vanished.

“He has gone to fetch Ca-bahn?” Ralph asked.

“More likely to ask for an audience.” Davy smiled.

Back in the clearing in Sydney Cove, Ralph knew, they would be mining the comic lode of Acts Four and Five under Henry Kable's direction. Last night, Mary Brenham—with her diminishing bruises—would have slept at Reverend Johnson's place.

The soldiers had lit their clay pipes, and Ralph saw one of them moving companionably from group to group. It was Private Joseph Hunt, a young man of weather-beaten but regular face, who had broken the key in the storehouse lock and by this maladroitness been forced to turn King's Evidence. His six accomplices were buried in a communal grave behind the Marine camp. Private Handy Baker rose from that closeness only to inflict a stroke on Harry. Whereas Hunt meandered on a hill above the sea, the sun on his face. Ralph pointed him out to Davy.