Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Finlay was a man of severe features, and his wife in her dark beauty reminded me of handsome Mrs Batchelor. That evening at dinner, I became something of a favourite of his perhaps fourteen-year-old, lustrous daughter, Phoebe. She was of a different order of beauty to that of her mother – it was as if they had decided between them to cover the allotted glories available to womankind, and Phoebe, fair and with green eyes, was in other respects her splendid mater’s child. When after dinner, however, she attempted to follow her father and myself onto the verandah, Mr Finlay had only to murmur, ‘Please!’ to make her disappear, flitting with her golden hair indoors. ‘They don’t understand,’ he told me, and by they, he seemed to mean colonial children. There was a rigidity in his neat frame, his exact shoulders. I read it as representing success. But I was nonetheless pleased to hear him say at the end of our pipe-smoking, ‘You must speak to me about investing in livestock with you if you find suitable ground, John.’ Thirds, again. The glorious, ancient and now antipodean arrangement which made the world possible for the son of a Spencean Philanthropist.

  Phoebe, on leaving the verandah in semi-obedience, had worn a curious little unabashed smile, whose glow remained after the lamps indoors were turned down. O matre pulchra filia pulchrior, I reflected of the Finlay women, borrowing the line from Horace. ‘O beautiful mother to a yet more beautiful daughter.’

  I was delighted visiting Hobbes over the next day to see how quickly my pony took on condition grazing in Mr Finlay’s paddock. When on the second morning I saddled him, I was watched from the yard fence by lovely Mrs Finlay, who carried a parasol and was shaded as well by a huge hat, and by Phoebe, echoes of each other, one of the olive cast, one of the light peach. Mrs Finlay said, ‘I can see that you are excited at the prospects of the wilderness.’

  I admitted that I was.

  She said that I must consider myself free to stay with them again whenever I tired of isolation and was passing Goulburn. She said it with some wistfulness, not like a woman who could afford to return to Europe whenever she chose.

  The beautiful child, Phoebe, proclaimed, ‘I wish I were going to the country out there. Goulburn is marked by nothing but torpor.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ said her mother. ‘It’s just your new word.’ She murmured to me, ‘The young may sometimes fall in love with a word.’

  ‘I would not want to marry,’ Phoebe insisted, ‘a man who was content with Goulburn’s torpor.’

  Her mother extended a finger, and spoke with a melancholy fondness. ‘Your father will send you to Europe to be tidied up if you fling around abstract nouns as if they were stones.’ But then the three of us began laughing like guilty schoolchildren, as if in Mr Finlay’s shadow. ‘I would be delighted one day to have a daughter like you,’ I told Phoebe, but she glowered at me, as if I had cast her in an inferior role in a play.

  South of the Finlay estate I entered the area of pasture and native coachwood named the Limestone Plains, where there were few public houses or boarding houses. At the core of each day, about noon, I unsaddled Hobbes and ate a slab of damper with mutton supplied by my host of the previous night and read newspapers from my saddlebag. In the dusk I would look for a glimmer of light or a thread of smoke. I was close to the invisible line, the southern edge of the Limits of Location. Here rich men lived in slab huts, and the owner would call a convict servant to unsaddle a traveller’s horse, and turn it out into a grassy paddock. Lying on my kangaroo skin rug, surrounded by other travellers or convict servants and stockmen similarly encouched, I slept deeply by the doused fire. This was hospitality, this was comfort, on the edge of the defined, the outer regions of the limits. Better comfort, I was certain, and a surer hand than you could have anywhere else on earth.

  When I left one settler, he would give me instructions on how to reach the next, and I divided the bush of Australia, sure of my time, sure of success, into sweet little daily lumps of twenty or thirty miles in extent, about the range of my pony per diem, and about the extent of sheep and cattle runs in that part. I soon knew, though I was not precisely sure when it happened, that I had passed beyond the limits.

  I stayed about then with a gentleman at a place named Baldalgo, in a long, crude slab hut of a kind I would be happy to occupy. He was an Oxford man, and had a dresser full of classic texts. His father was Arch-deacon of Wells. He lived joyously in conditions hardly better than those in which an English herder lived, with smoky sheep’s-fat lamps throwing shadows over his dirt floor, and his only medical remedies being bottles of spirits and a box of antacid powder. For his casual good humour alone, his contentment, good fortune and cultivation, I would willingly have traded places with him.

  Further south, the Oxford man had told me, on the edge of the earth, there was an occupier named Treloar, who lived in Sydney but kept cattle and sheep in that area under the care of an overseer and convict shepherds. Beyond him lay no occupier at all.

  I remarked that there seemed to be few natives in this area.

  ‘You will see them,’ he promised me, ‘coming and going and being a pest to your livestock. Sensible chaps, however, they stay in this area only for the summer, so we will soon be free of them and all their trouble for some months. The women you know, pox my shepherds.’

  I was uncomfortable with this one sour note, since it intruded upon my Arcadian expectations. ‘I thought the pox was a European disease,’ I said, ‘and that we are guilty of passing it to them.’

  ‘Oh, in the first instance, yes. But they get it worse than any European woman would and give it back to the shepherds in a rich, full-blown form.’

  The high plain I rode out on next morning was broad, sometimes with large glacial stones standing on the earth, and to the west a long range of mountains, higher than anything in the British Isles. If you crossed them, the Oxford man had told me, you came ultimately to Port Phillip. They were streaked even in this late summer with fingers of remaining snow.

  Now gentlemen’s fires grew very rare. I came upon the occasional shepherd’s hut of bark and slab timber, and dossed down with English thieves or Irish rick-burners, or machine-breakers from Nottingham and Yorkshire. But often I preferred my own company, or more accurately the company of the country. One late summer night I lay in a scatter of trees and saw fire moving in an incandescent line along the wooded ridges. I felt that the Oxford man’s dresser of great and benign works were nothing against the scale of the night, which was graced and silvered not only by fire but by a near-full moon.

  At some hour I was gently slapped awake by a rise in the breeze. From where I lay I could see every silver underside of every leaf, shimmering greyly above my head. And all around me, marking every limit of my body, my hands swung wide, was the companionable odour of an ancient earth, a great body of unique musk. This worshipful, strange aroma, undisturbed by any human scent but my own, was the product of protean soil laid down before Adam, of the residue of God’s first experiments with trees.

  I stood up on a potent impulse and removed all my clothes – the clothes of an English or Scottish or Irish farmer, lacking only leggings. I felt the air across my chest like the hand of a father. I was the Englishman overcome with enthusiasm for a barbarous place. I believe that people at Home would have said: this is merely the heathenism which too ripe an alien adventure will raise in the young mind. I was not inhibited by any such reflection. I walked a little way, barefooted, and then lay down in nakedness on loamy earth and began to scoop it up and inhale it. The earth groaned, so I thought, like the beloved, caressed. I rose and walked towards the fluid line of fire – it did not so much advance as roll over the earth sideways like a great viper, leaving what it touched blackened. Past standing stones and up amongst grey-leafed trees I approached it, but not – I hurry to say – with any impulse to self-immolation. Just the same I felt no pain in my feet, and though once falling on my knees, very hard, felt no discomfort. Evoking no surprise in me, the night moaned in its manner, and moaned again. Above me the fire maintaine
d its slow, remote progress – it lacked malice towards me. I tripped on a sandstone ledge, and now felt my skin broken and the great joy drain from me. ‘What is this?’ I was forced to ask myself. I wanted to get back to Hobbes and dress.

  A native child of perhaps four years came tottering along the uneven rise I stood upon. He was as naked as I, and grinning as if it were a contest. His hand was out to claim mine.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  The native boy who had seized my hand led me some thirty or forty yards, and I bent over now, ashamed, as in a Biblical tale, of my nakedness.

  Down the far slope of the hill sat a native woman in a fragment of dress that covered one breast. Foam marked her mouth, and her lips were a little parted. She had rigor and was some hours dead. She bore no visible wound and it seemed that something caustic, the fruits of industry in a land far from industry, had been fed to her. The boy seemed to demonstrate her to me, to reach his hands out to show me her seeming easiness, her contentment with her angle of repose. Yet she already had the sick scent of death.

  ‘Is this your Mama?’ I asked him. Grinning still, he began to weep, keening and trying with his small hands to heap up leaves and stones around her legs. I put my own hand very firmly on his shoulder to aid him in his distress, and he looked up once, and went so far as to widen the smile, so pronounced for its contrast of anthracite skin and ivory teeth.

  I could do nothing but recite aloud, bare as Adam, a Paternoster and Psalms 52 and 54 as the little boy continued to scoop and mourn. I must have made, beneath that moon, a ridiculous and helpless sight, but now I had a resolve to get the child away. ‘Come, come, come,’ I told him. ‘I’ll fix Mama.’ I lifted him and he protested only very softly, and I hobbled with him in my arms back down to my camp and campfire so distinct by starlight now. On this descent the earth hurt my feet savagely, in a way which had not been the case on my ecstatic ascent, and I was very pleased to near my boots and my jacket.

  I sat the child by the fire which rubied his smiling face. He pointed into its heart and made a grinning yet grief-stricken comment of approval. I had some shears with me from Goulburn – they were a pair which Mr Finlay had forced upon me. So I picked up my ample blanket and cut a two-foot strip from one end of it. I wrapped this around him and searched for a section of twine I knew was somewhere in my bags, and found it and used it to help fix the blanket at his neck.

  He said suddenly, ‘Jolly good.’ And as if he wanted me to know his gratitude he turned his face full to me and beamed further. I could see he had very fine canine teeth.

  At some stage of this business of warming and clothing and pinning up the blanket on the child, I began to bandy the name Felix about. It was not quite a kindly name – his smile had nothing to do with hilarity. Yet it occurred to me, I think, without ill feeling in a country where giving a nickname to another human is considered a form of welcome. ‘Hold still there, Felix,’ I said. ‘Warm those cold little hands, Felix.’

  ‘Smiley’ would have done as well, except that it seemed to mock what was too mad a smiling purpose in the child. ‘Felix’, involving as it did the little Latin I had, was a civilised gesture on a barbarous night, and it had an edge of protest to it as well, as I recalled Horace’s words. ‘Quo me, Bacche,’ I wanted to protest, ‘rapis tui plenum?’ (Bacchus, what are you doing with me, as I fill with your godhead? Into what forests and caverns are you forcing me …) For Bacchus had been the night’s appropriate god. I had been drunk, after all, without even drinking, and I had been led as by a god into unfamiliar experiences.

  The boy, whimpering and the grimace relaxing a little, sank into a sleep. Would he wake, this child, who, I now saw clearly, was mulatto, half-white, half-black? Might it not be merciful if he did not?

  Now, clothed but lacking a shovel, I climbed the hill again, and heaped boulders and stones over the young woman, inspecting her not too closely, working with some tenderness for Felix’s sake. This method of semi-interment, I had heard many times, was the preferred burial rite of the natives.

  When we woke at dawn, so remotely located and out of the range of kindly breakfasts, I shared with the child Felix some of the dried beef I carried, which he ate with a frank appetite and with a quantity of water from my sealskin bag. Then he staggered away a distance, parted his blanket coat and urinated very functionally. Throughout this process his facial rictus remained. When he returned I reached out and took his cheeks in my hands and tried to ease the grimace with my thumbs, pressing down on the creases that divided the chaps from the area of flesh beneath the nose. But he would not let go of his awful grin. I let him have his way, and when we set off, put him over the saddle in front of me. He would utter an occasional sentence when he saw some bird or passed an isolated boulder, and his arms would work beneath his makeshift cape.

  As we climbed to a high plain about mid-morning, I found what were beyond dispute wagon tracks and a swathe through the grassland such as is made by even a small herd of cattle. These marks I began contentedly to follow, but took as usual my noon rest. That was my father’s advice: do not let circumstances flood out routine. The child, having been fed, slept almost instantly in a patch of sun amongst the tall but scattered trees we found ourselves in. I myself dropped, pipe in teeth, into a meditative drowse.

  I woke to find perhaps thirty native men of sundry ages scattered about our grove – the men, with spears in their hands, considering me calmly. In the trees above some cloaked old gins, as we call native women, could be seen. The manner of the men was not such as to make me even think of my two loaded pistols in my saddlebag. I felt pleased that they had come for their child! Though someone with more missionary spirit might have wanted to retain him, to introduce him to the benefits of being us, I went at once and shook him awake. I took him by the hand – he was pliable to being led – and brought him to two or three older men who were close. Because they wore kangaroo skin capes around their shoulders, they might have recognised my good intent in Felix’s blanket cape.

  Nudging the boy towards them I caught the whiff of their barbarity, or whatever you would like to call their strangeness – half-rancid, half-woodsmoke. The boy walked past these gentlemen, and with a yelp a young woman broke from behind a tree and scooped him up against her breasts. But two of the older women emerged from thickets of stone and eucalyptus trees with digging sticks in their hands and began lashing at the young woman’s lower legs, so that she put Felix down and danced, jumped and howled to get away. I did not know what any of this meant, yet it looked more like an enactment than discipline.

  I gazed at one of the old men and touched my face. ‘Why does he grin?’ I asked, myself then grinning with clenched teeth. The men stared at me, judges in Israel, an austere panel. The most apparently senior one displayed for a second the same sort of extreme grin. I could not tell whether this was courtesy, explanation, satire or dismissal. But he turned his back and moved away at an easy, long-thighed, if bow-legged, gait. The others followed, older women beating the howling gin, or lubra, as younger women were sometimes called, away from Felix, who covered one eye with a hand but seemed to observe the entire departure through his other orb. He muttered, but was not moved yet to tears. It seemed mere seconds before he and I were on our own, in vacated country with each other.

  The tracks I had earlier seen led me and my young companion into a narrowly contained valley, a rocky escarpment showing to the west. About four o’clock, as the light was getting flinty and the air cold, I saw two little slab cabins and a stockyard with three horses. Smoke came up promisingly from one cabin, but from somewhere amongst the blackbutt trees two miles off on the ridge above came a parallel tuft of smoke – the native people who had rejected Felix, or an illegal still from which some lawless passholder or absconder made his living. After tethering Hobbes, I let a drowsy Felix down. He tottered off but I restrained him with a hand.

  A bark door had already creaked open. ‘Heard you on your way,’ an appeasing and somehow untrustwo
rthy voice said. It came from somewhere in the north of England, though it did not owe its archness to any region.

  ‘Turn my horse out in the yard?’ I asked in the normal, rough New South Wales way, not wanting to be thought above myself. Grammatically all I needed was the gruff vernacular appropriate to the slab hut before which I stood.

  Felix had descended from Hobbes in a way which made it plain he wanted to be taken in my arms. When I lifted him, he seemed to fall at once asleep.

  ‘A fine little fellow,’ said the voice whose owner now stood in the shade of his bark verandah.

  As I advanced with Felix I saw a tall, stooping man with a long face and features kippered by sun. He seemed to be ageless, though he might have been forty years. I carried the child past him indoors, and was at once aware of a number of presences in the room – other journeyers and stockmen.

  ‘Set the child there,’ said the man, following me and pointing to an oily sheepskin in the corner.

  While I put Felix down on it, the tall man watched me through squinting, unscannable eyes.

  By the fire two men in boots, dungarees and red shirts sat, smoking pipes, on bits of log. Their wine-dark eyes, set amidst leathery skin and huge amounts of hair, moved languidly over me. They had pannikins of liquor in their hands. I saw one of them reach out with his foot and nudge the boot of the other, to make sure he had properly weighed my entry. They were, I guessed, former prisoners of the queen. The same could be said for the man who had invited me in and who stood by the table, amiable in a worn shirt and moleskins tied below the knees.

  ‘So yeh’re welcome to the yard, mister,’ he told me. ‘Let me fill these boys’ pannikins. Make this home yeh own and when yeh’re ready join us by the fire.’