by David Malouf
They chewed on this. Possible. Possible. But were more impressed by something simpler and more disturbing, since it touched on themselves and the sense they had of being in a place that had not yet revealed all its influences upon them.
Wasn’t it true (this was not Mr Frazer but another delver into deep things) that white men who stayed too long in China were inclined to develop, after a time, the slanty eyes and flat faces of your yellow man, your Chinese?
Study him, sitting there in the sun with that vacant, in-turned look; heavy-browed, morose. Look at the furrow in his brow. Was it a white man’s thought that set it there, or the knowledge of something (they would not name it) that could hardly be conceived of in a white man’s thinking, which when the dark recollection of it flickered over his brow, brought it right into the room with you, as a thing you could smell. Because for all the scrubbing with raw soap, and the soft woollen shirts and moleskins Ellen McIvor had found for him, and washed with her own hands, he had kept the smell he came with, which was the smell of the myall, half-meat, half-mud, a reminder, a depressing one, of what there might be in him that could not be reclaimed.
His very way of moving was a reminder. He could be in a room before you knew it, his feet scarcely whispering over the hard dirt floor. Your hand would go to the back of your neck as if a fly had lighted there. But there was no fly. You wheeled round and it was him, grinning in that foolish apologetic way he had, eager to make up for the shock he had given you by snatching the sopping shirt out of the dirt or fetching water to replace the suds, while you held your side and waited for your heart to return to its place under your ribs.
Of course, it wasn’t him you were scared of. He was harmless, or so they said, and so you preferred to believe. It was the thought that next time it might not be him. That when you started and looked up, expecting the silly smile, what would hit you would be the edge of an axe. He made real what till now had been no more than the fearful shape of rumour, though the rumour lately had had a name and number to it: Comet River, nineteen souls.
For at any moment – this was the fact of the matter – they might be overwhelmed. The stoutest of them, stepping out under the stars to take a piss before bed, all unbuttoned and exposed to the night, would feel his balls shrink at the crack of a twig, and tuck himself away without even troubling to shake the last drops off.
Even in broad daylight, to come face to face with one of them, stepping out of nowhere, out of the earth it might be, or a darkness they moved in always like a cloud, was a test of a man’s capacity to stay firm on his own two feet when his heart was racing.
It brought you slap up against a terror you thought you had learned, years back, to treat as childish: the Bogey, the Coal Man, Absolute Night. And now here it is, not two yards away, solid and breathing: a thing beside which all you have ever known of darkness, of visible darkness, seems but the merest shadow, and all you can summon up to the encounter, out of a lifetime lived on the other, the lighter side of things – shillings and pence, the Lord’s Prayer, the half-dozen tunes your fingers can pick out on the strings of a fiddle, the names and ages of your children, including the ones in the earth, your wife’s touch on your naked belly, and the shy, soft affection you have for yourself – weakens and falls away before the apparition, out of nowhere, of a figure taller perhaps than you are and of a sooty blackness beyond black, utterly still, very close, yet so far off, even at a distance of five feet, that you cannot conceive how it can be here in the same space, the same moment with you.
What you fix your gaze on is the little hard-backed flies that are crawling about in the corner of its bloodshot eyes and hopping down at intervals to drink the sweat of its lip. And the horror it carries to you is not just the smell, in your own sweat, of a half-forgotten swamp-world going back deep in both of you, but that for him, as you meet here face to face in the sun, you and all you stand for have not yet appeared over the horizon of the world, so that after a moment all the wealth of it goes dim in you, then is cancelled altogether, and you meet at last in a terrifying equality that strips the last rags from your soul and leaves you so far out on the edge of yourself that your fear now is that you may never get back.
It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them, since at any moment he could show either one face or the other; as if he were always standing there at one of those meetings, but in his case willingly, and the encounter was an embrace.
4
THE SCHOOLMASTER, George Abbot, let it be thought in the settlement that he was a man of twenty-six or seven with the manners of an older man even than that. He was, in fact, just nineteen, but his plainness, and the severity with which he dealt with every sort of youthful enthusiasm, made possible the deception. He affected a pipe, did not roll his sleeves up, even on days when the heat under the shingles of his one-roomed schoolhouse was at furnace pitch, and when he was invited out on Sundays, did not allow the mothers of his pupils to indulge him with second helpings. He did not wish to be seen as a boy; all the more because he was afflicted with the appetites of one, in a body which, to his consternation, was still growing and which at every point let him down.
In the mean little room they had provided him, behind the blackboard in the room where he extended authority over a rabble of seven to twelve-year-olds, he fought with his loneliness, his youth, and a sensual nature that had been subdued at home by the rigours of convention and the softening presence of his sisters, but also by the duty he felt to his own high prospects. Out here, in the listless air and salt damp of a place where everything was at a point of bursting fullness, he was constantly tormented. All that had once been fine in him had gone to rot, and he had too high a regard for the truth, was too arduous in the exercise of a strict self-scrutiny, not to ask what sort of fineness it might be that was at the mercy of mere conditions and had so easily succumbed.
He knew the falseness of his position and hated it. When he was invited out, he was, often enough, the only one at the table wearing shoes.
The older girls of the household, when they fixed their frank gaze upon him, would make him colour so fiercely that to hide it he had to take the handkerchief from his sleeve and go through the motions of blowing his nose – a performance they regarded as so remarkable that the whole table stopped and stared.
Their brothers, fellows of his own age, sat smirking. They did not know how to address him without doing violence to their own rather shaky dignity. He was Mr Abbot to their parents, and to their little brothers and sisters he was Sir. When he ran into them lounging about the settlement, roughly at ease, as he was not, with their youth, they would fall silent till he passed, then whisper and guffaw, though never loud enough for complaint.
His pupils, thin-cheeked the girls, the boys, some of them almost men, shag-haired and puffy lidded, had been up before dawn to milk cows or do whatever other chores their rough farm life demanded. They swayed at their desks. Their eyelids flickered.
The singing of the nine times table did not enliven them, nor did Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ when their young voices sent it out on the torpid air. Defeated by the dullness that glanced back at him from slate-pencil holders gone dark with sweat and the dead blue of their teeth, he felt a slow rage take hold of him.
With an irony of which he was perfectly aware, he chalked up the words from the Reader that they were to learn for homework: mettlesome, benign, decorum, prudence … In the morning, after the monitor had sponged them off, he would hear them over and punish those who got them wrong, the boys and girls equally, one stroke of the ruler for each word misspelled.
A kind of loathing for them, and for himself as well, came with the vinegary odour as they held out their hands, stretched back the fingers and showed the calluses, ragged where they had been picking at them, and the fate-lines grained with dirt.
He hated these petty tyrannies. They mocked with littleness every aspiration he felt towards what was noble and gener
ous in him. But he beat them, and the immediate physical effect was releasing. Then, when he saw the fierce little will with which even the smallest of them clamped their hands in their armpits and fought back tears, he could have burst into tears himself at the shame of it.
He had never meant to come to Australia, least of all to this outlandish part of it.
The only boy in a family of five, he had been educated at the expense of his godfather, a bachelor of luxurious taste and eccentric views who was a distant relation of his mother’s, and had once perhaps, or so she liked to suggest, been an admirer. She had no hesitation, when George’s father died, in applying to him on the boy’s behalf.
Mr Robertson, ‘Cousin Alisdair’, came to take a look at them, and though, to her disappointment, the great man did not repeat the visit, he did agree to pay for George’s schooling, and twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas, the boy went to stay with him at his country place near Perth. He had presents of pencils and books, and at Christmas little packets of sugar plums and walnuts and sweet-tasting tangerines, which he smuggled home to his sisters; and on his birthday each year was taken to be measured for his suits. The tailor’s assistant showed him materials, and advised by Cousin Alisdair he learned to distinguish between the different qualities of tweed, then stood on a box while Mr Davidson, marvelling at how fast he grew, what a sturdy chest he had, applied the tape, and Cousin Alisdair, in a high-backed chair, turned the pages of a magazine.
He was a clever little fellow, with all the pert charm that goes naturally with childish self-assurance, and was soon a favourite with all the servants of the household and its many visitors, who were impressed with the ease with which, in his strapped trousers and tucked shirt, he entered a drawing room, his readiness to answer posers from Cousin Alisdair’s legal friends, or to run messages or fetch, with such little-mannish gallantry, a book or a plaid for the ladies, and his ingenuity in devising, out of a stick and the paper from a sweet packet, a swat against the sleepy wasps that came stumbling from the orchard to disturb their rest. He took all this as no more than the tribute due to a charm that was native and irresistible in him, so it was a shock when, at fifteen or so, life dealt him a first and fatal disappointment. The beginnings of a terrible plainness began to declare itself and he saw – it took him a little time to quite grasp it – that people no longer extended the same interest to him, and when he fell back on his old tricks of charm, looked embarrassed: they were no longer appropriate to the big, overgrown fellow he had become.
Cousin Alisdair too lost interest in him. He had offended, he saw, with a good deal of bitterness, against the great man’s high regard for the aesthetic. He had to fight hard not to be hurt into a permanent anger at the injustice of things, or become as morose as his heavy looks suggested.
Mr Robertson continued to pay for his upkeep and schooling, and at the beginning of each term to write to him warm, colourless letters, but they no longer met. So it was with a sense of injured pride, and the determination not to show it, that he presented himself, one morning, modestly attired and armed at last with his degree, at George Square to thank his benefactor, as was only proper, for past kindness, but also, he hoped, to receive the offer he had been promised of a place.
The footman who let him in was a well-knit, snub-nosed fellow of his own age, very fancily got up. He was inclined, George thought, to swagger, and as they passed through various rooms and the young fellow stood aside to let him pass, George felt himself the subject of lazy scrutiny, which tempted him to fiddle in a foolish way with his collar.
It was as if this big farm boy, who was, it was true, not a bad-looking fellow, had in conceit at the fine cut of his frock coat, the swelling of his calves in their pale silk stockings, together with God knows what other articles of smug self-confidence, set up a comparison between them, and settled the thing, with a good deal of satisfaction, in his own favour. George was put off his stride. He had to remind himself, firmly, that he had come here intending to make no appeal to old sentiments, and especially no attempt at old charms. Let his benefactor take him seriously, just as he was.
Mr Robertson was at his desk with the morning mail. George was astonished by how little he had changed. He rose up, all freshly scented, lay aside his gold-rimmed spectacles, came round the desk, and embraced George in such warm and unaffected terms that all the resentment he had felt went soft in him and his old eagerness for affection came back in a flood. He had been very fond of Cousin Alisdair at one time.
Mr Robertson retired to the far side of the desk but was all rosy interest.
He was delighted, he really was, to see him so well-grown; to see, too, what good use he had made of himself.
Progress? Excellent. His mother was well? Dear woman. Such happy memories of earlier days. And his sisters?
George was glad of the opportunity this offered to remind Mr Robertson of how they, his mother and sisters, depended on him. Mr Robertson praised his sense of responsibility, he was gratified to see it in so young a man. They were going swimmingly, and moved on easily now to his future. Had he given it any thought? Did he have some idea of what he might do with himself?
Well he had, of course, and in the closeness that had been restored between them, and out of a natural frankness, George took Cousin Alisdair into his confidence in a way he had not originally intended. He put aside the little speech he had prepared and spoke of his feelings, his aspirations, he even ventured a stroke or two of wit; he allowed himself to show off a little, which was forgivable, surely, considering all that was at stake. In the end he made a full confession. Inspired by the usual Sunday school stories, but also by more serious reading among the explorers – and the example, of course, of their own Dr Livingstone – it had come to him, not hastily but after a proper search of his own soul and a great deal of quiet consideration, that his life, his real life, lay with the Dark Continent, with Africa. He wanted a life that was arduous; which would call on all his strength – he was physically very strong. He had no idea how Mr Robertson might feel about such things, and he was conscious, always, that he had his mother and sisters to consider and might, for the time being, have to devote himself to something more practical, to trade that is, to business – that was for his benefactor to decide, and of course if it came to that, he would knuckle under, he would be patient – but Africa was where his soul led him, he was certain of this. It was too powerful an idea to be destroyed by the years he might have to devote to moneymaking. He had no illusions about the hardships such a life might present. He was prepared for that. He looked forward to it in fact; work of a kind that would test and stretch and …
He was aware suddenly of another voice in the room. Mr Robertson had spoken; two or three syllables that had reached his ear but not as yet his understanding. Carried away by his own enthusiasm he had taken it for granted Mr Robertson would hear him out, and was astonished now to see his benefactor’s face, all rosy-cheeked and expectant, lit up by an expression of droll interest and mischievous – could it really be that? – amusement.
Australia. That was the word Mr Robertson had dropped into the room. The silence deepened around it, then spread. Had he, by any chance, Mr Robertson sweetly demanded, his eyes dancing behind circles of thin gold, considered Australia?
Well he had not. Never in his life. Not once. He grew breathless; he tried to keep the great smothering mass of it off.
Australia? He barely knew where it was. He had the uneasy feeling that it had just popped into his benefactor’s head. Out of one of those letters perhaps, that by some unhappy coincidence lay in a scatter at his elbow. The arbitrariness of it affected George with a kind of hilarity. The laughter that filled him, and threatened to break out and shatter every object in sight, echoed up from the other side of the world, as Cousin Alisdair, as if eloquent effusion was a family trait, shared even by fifth cousins, began to elaborate, all watered silk but with a glint of steel in his eye, the advantages of that other and rival graveyard – the one Georg
e had not aspired to. Friends in Sydney … Opportunities out there of the highest order … Splendid seed-ground … Seven years. (George felt the whole grey mass of it come down upon him.) In the meantime he would see that George’s mother was provided for, that his sisters had means to marry, and would be pleased, always, to hear how he was doing …
He was doing badly. The seed-ground, contrary to report, was rank and had been ruinous to him. He thought, and with bitterness, of that swaggering skip-kennel drawing his brows painfully together as he spelled his way through half a column of The Glasgow Herald, with no rich godfather to provide for him and no prospects, but, in having the whole town to swagger about in on Sundays, and so many girls to eye and make love to, and clean fingernails and an immaculate shirt, a thousand times more fortunate than he.
Everything that presented itself to his gaze in this godforsaken place told him how mean his life was, how desolate and without hope. Nobody cared for him. He never heard an intelligent word from one day to the next. Africa, he believed, would have tempered his soul to hardness and discovered the man in him. No such demands were made upon him here. The place worked its defeats in a low way. It was on every side oppressive, in all its forms clammy and insidiously sweet – lushness and quick bloom followed by a dank putrescence, so that the soul was at one moment garishly excited, brittle, overwrought, and in the next slothfully laid low. Even the natives were of a dingy greyness. Thin-shanked, dusty, undignified, the life they lived was merely degenerate, so squalid and flea-ridden that it inspired nothing but a kind of horror at what human nature might in its beginnings spring from, and in such a place so easily sink back to.
