Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  She raised her voice again: ‘Why shouldn’t I be? They killed my baby . . . destroyed my womb . . . my book . . . my . . . my . . .’ Her voice broke. The curly head dropped to her hands, elbows on the table. She croaked it out in sobs: ‘Made a coward of . . . of . . . my Jeremy . . . oh, ah!’

  A moment. Then the head came up, to look around, while she sniffed back the tears, muttering, ‘Where’s that waiter?’

  ‘I think you’ve had enough.’

  She swung on Jeremy. ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes . . . let’s get out of here. I want to book in at a hotel. Are you living somewhere?’

  ‘What’s it to do with you?’

  ‘I want to take you with me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To Lily Lagoons. You’ll only get yourself into trouble here.’

  ‘But not as part of the Scrub Bull’s harem!’

  ‘Alfie!’

  She leaned across again, hissing, at the same time reaching for her handbag lying on the table, ‘You are a decadent man, Jeremy. Bruno Schroeder judged you right. And he was right in saying that it was the Jews that made you what you’ve become.’

  He reached for her hand. ‘Now don’t be silly!’

  She snatched her hand away.

  Her voice rose: ‘Jews . . . that damn Jewess . . . Red Rifkah! If it hadn’t been for her, for her, with my help you would be master of this country today . . .’

  ‘That’s foolish talk, girl . . . Free Australia talk, Schroeder talk . . .’

  ‘It’s the truth. I could have made you a hero!’ She almost shouted it, rose, swung away from the table.

  He rose, too, whispering, ‘Alfie!’

  The black eyes welled with tears. She turned from him, went rushing from the lounge. People were looking. Jeremy stood for a moment, then went after her. But out in the foyer was a great crowd, herding because the place would close at six. She might have gone in any of three directions. After standing looking about, he headed out the way they had come. He stood on the steps looking out on the street, which was crowded now with people pouring out of offices.

  At last, with a sigh, he stepped down to the pavement. A taxi pulled in to set down a fare. He got in, asked to be taken to that hotel near Central Station that had been his last abode in freedom in this so-civilised place where he had known little but savagery.

  At the hotel they found the record of his having stayed there and also his baggage. It seemed they had notified the police of his disappearance, and been told it was known where he was. He allayed suspicion by saying he had been concerned with National Security business. They let him book in again.

  After dinner he paid another visit to those central parts of Central Station, and by devious means booked a berth on a train leaving for Brisbane next night. From there he went to the GPO to wire home, asking for whatever help Fergus could give him to facilitate the journey. Thereupon he strolled to the Quay and bought himself a ticket for a trip to Manly. Perhaps there was some idea in him of looking his last on what was so essentially Australia while yet so alien to him who had featured in a fantasy as the Last Australian.

  As they passed Garden Island he showed an interest in the place that surely must have aroused suspicious interest of his few fellow passengers at such a time as this, had he not chosen a spot to sit alone and those who were near not been engrossed in their newspapers and perhaps the war they were involved in on the other side of the world if not next weekend’s races. Even more so, when they rounded the island, and suddenly were abeam a mighty ship, towering black against the Southern Stars, seeming to rake them down with her rigging, her three great funnels. He stared as if living in the fantasy of The Last Australians. Or Jeremy might have been wondering how often HMT Queen Mary had been in and out of this harbour, by way of which had come in chains those who had sired a Nation so odd that its sons were even eager to give their lives for the Motherland that had dealt so brutally with their forefathers as to deserve to be remembered here by no other symbol but the Ball-and-Chain. It was freely said that the great ship was so fast she could deliver her passengers for their rendezvous with death within a fortnight.

  VII

  With the help of Fergus Ferris, Jeremy reached Lily Lagoons, that refuge surely as meaningful to himself now as for those weaker ones for whose protection from the brutal world he had established it, well in time to join in preparations for the Beatrice River Races.

  Rifkah and Prindy were already there, working their own horses, but right ready to confess that doing so without the Mullaka wasn’t easy. Fergus also conceded that training horses here was something that couldn’t be done properly without the Boss about. There could be no doubt about that, the way he was received by animals as well as humans. He had scarcely stepped from the Junkers, and was still being clung to by weeping Nanago and Rifkah, when the beasts, led by Elektron, rushed him. They were not only the horses, although only they got near enought to sniff him and a sniff was all that jealous Elektron would allow. The old stallion himself nuzzled him, even chewed him a bit, and by the way he eyed him, might have been as aware of the great change in his condition as the snivelling women. It was not only Nan and Rifkah who wept over him. Tears streamed down many a black and brown face. From their whispering, the simpler ones evidently though he was come back wounded from the war, because they were using the term Rotten Sodjer, long used in Murringlitch to denote a veteran of kuttabah wars.

  Jeremy soon dispelled all grieving for him with his cheerfulness, his obvious delight in being home. He went round looking at everything. He entered his den as if it were a holy place. That night over a great dinner of roast bustard and sweetbucks and pawpaw, with jack-fruit pie and honeyed coffee, he declared that nowhere on earth could anyone eat more sweetly or wholesomely than here at dear Lily Lagoons, and that he’d have his Head Read if he ever left the lovely place again. After that dinner, they had a jolly evening out under the mangoes, with lights strung in the branches, pulsing to that heartbeat of the place, that soft Home-home-home-home! Jeremy had brought gramophone records for everyone. For Rifkah there was a huge one packed with Children’s Folksongs in Yiddish, for Prindy a selection of light classics, including La Golondrina, for Nan some new Cowboy stuff. There was a surprise also for Jeremy. Prindy, on the verge of puberty, was at the fullness of his boyhood voice, a very strong and sweet soprano, a fact that it seemed had been taken full advantage of at the Mission both for religious and entertainment purposes. Lately he had foregone much of his playing music for singing. He sang La Golondrina for them, to the subdued accompaniment of the record. It roused the sleeping butcher birds and started them off, so that he was bound to sing back to them his Butcher Bird Song. He also sang duets with Rifkah, including a brand-new one off the record, and in Yiddish, so quick were those ears to master sounds, Rozinkes Mit Mandlen, Raisins and Almonds, a lullaby:

  Unter Yiddele’s vigele, Shteyt a klor veis tzigele . . .

  Under Baby’s crib is a tiny white goat, Baby and goat grow up together . . .

  Shlof-zhe Yiddele, shlof.

  Jeremy plunged into activities for which he had come back with the latest in equipment. Most of it was concerned with veterinary practice. However, a very important part of it was primarily for human use. This was the wherewithal for manufacturing Sulphanilamide and derivatives of the drug, concerning which he had received instruction from Bruno Schroeder, whose firm had dealt in it, the original, called Prontisil, being a German patent. While in hospital Jeremy had learnt that supply of the drug in Australia was now limited to military use. He also had learnt from Schroeder much about the pharmacology of the Sulphanilamides not yet known here. As he told Rifkah, when she reported on her lavish use of what he had supplied her with for treatment of the gonorrhea the Japanese had left behind them on the coast: ‘If your patients weren’t about the toughest people on the earth you’d have killed most of ’em by now.’ But apparently she’d had great success, and was most eager to learn all he had to tell her about t
he drug’s toxicity and how to remedy it. She and Prindy helped him set up the intricate apparatus required for the manufacture, a job beyond him, limited as he was in use of his left arm. They also helped him build a contraption designed to train the arm to better functioning.

  Thus with manifold interests was he able almost utterly to ignore what just then had practically the entire civilised world by the ears if in no closer grip, as nothing ever had it before or has since; namely that combat in the sky, as it had to be between the two races of Supermen, the Irresistible German and the Immovable English, already being called The Battle of Britain. Only the local newspaper brought news of the world’s madness, as Jeremy called it, and that already stale enough not to count.

  But it isn’t easy to hide from the world in these days. Along with the stale papers, one mail-day there was a letter for Jeremy with an English stamp and post-mark, it read:

  For Jeremy Delacy,

  I cannot address you in the conventional manner, because at this moment, of all persons, I bear you the deepest resentment. I write only to strike you, only hoping that you have anything in you sensitive enough to feel the blow. I consider you responsible for the futile death of my gallant, talented, and noble father. As no doubt you will have learnt by now, dear Daddy died on the beach at Dunkirk. But for your shattering his dream of a great and glorious British Commonwealth with your Irish-convict-colonial treachery, he would never have been involved in the Little England lunacy which has caused this frightful debacle. At least he has been spared the humiliation of defeat that inevitably awaits those of us who have so far survived. That is not meant as amelioration for you. Had my father lived, as he should have, had you served him faithfully, he would have formed that Commonwealth, which in collaboration with the victorious Third Reich, would soon have put down the mongoloid Japanese, the semi-Tartar Russians, and all other inferior races that presume equality with us who raised them out of barbarism. Daddy’s word to the High Command here to avoid conflict with the Führer, so as to concentrate on Imperial Power, would have been taken, and his old and noble comrades would not have resigned themselves, as he did when he returned to them a broken man, to the madness of the Little Englishism that put the half-bred Yankee Churchill where he is and England where he has dragged her. We are in even direr straits than at the time of the Armada, having no Elizabeth or Drake or anyone like them any more.

  England will fall before this year is out, to become a vassal of the Reich ‘That Will Stand a Thousand Years’, when as brothers in blood and culture we might have stood as its closest ally. Australia will soon enough fall to the Japanese, to become a slave State, which is all the wretched country and its low inhabitants are fit for. I only hope you may survive to bear the chains, and know that you yourself forged them, by betrayal of my darling daddy.

  I have no more to say to you, no mind even to think of you again. I spurn you for what you are — a dirty damned colonial.

  Lydia Vaisey.

  Mad as the letter might have been, it cast Jeremy down for days. As he told those close to him, it reflected the awful madness abroad in the world today. The Germans were not the only Irrenation. When he heard from Fergus that there was official talk of cancelling the Race Meeting because of the desperate plight of Britain, he said, ‘It’s to be hoped so. I’d cancel my part in it, only for my people here. They live by recurring ceremonial. This is the grand annual one for them now, where the Making of Young Men used to be before. No Beatrice Races would mean the end of the world to them.’

  Fergus said that most whites he’d talked to sounded as if they felt like that about it, too, only they thought of Britain’s being beaten as certain end of the world and any sort of pleasure impossible while the abyss yawns, as it were: ‘Mad bastards! I never realised how stupid my countrymen are, almost to a man, till this Battle of Britain thing. Even those you know have some degree of radicalism are identifying themselves with the Old Dart. I can’t make it out. The fact is that we’re not at war at all. We’re involved politically because we’ve no true political identity of our own. We have men standing by to go into battle who’ve sworn allegiance to the King of England. But we’re still not actually at war, and won’t be till someone actually declares war on us. D’you know that even Finnucane, who started out boasting about his neutrality, is worried about the likely defeat of Britain? He’s a changed man. They say he spends most of his time listening to the radio . . .’

  ‘Wishing, maybe,’ Jeremy commented.

  ‘No . . . he’s really worried. You can tell by the look of him. Anyway, he’s one who says the Meeting should be called off, the one who benefits from it most.’

  ‘He’s only being Irish.’

  Jeremy would not comment on anything Fergus had to say, except flippantly. Of the reported growing hysteria in the land as the distant battle neared the climax that everybody was predicting for it about Race Time, he said, ‘I think it’s the rule in madhouses that when one loony starts raving they have to sedate the lot.’

  The idea that the Battle of Britain would be decided coincidentally with the Beatrice River Races, that is about the middle of September, was not just a bit of the local lunacy of the time. Perhaps Winston Churchill had sown the seed for it with his frequent broadcast exhortations to his people to gird themselves to meet the unconcealed intention of the enemy to invade Britain by air and sea as soon as the weather suited the adventure. Perfect weather for war in Europe was traditionally just before the Northern Autumnal Equinox.

  Then Fergus, in a rush because he was back in business to fulfil bookings he had made to fly the more remote and affluent bushies in to the Races, was there again to say that the Meeting was to take place as usual — well, hardly as usual, as he explained: ‘The Service Heads want it . . . to Boost Morale, they reckon. Seems like the Army, Navy, and Air Force boys, all dressed up to kill and nobody to kill or kill them, are getting browned-off, as they say these days. Captain Toby’s going to be Patron, instead of the Administrator. They’re going to put on two special trains, for Army and Navy Personnel . . . and the Air Force’ll fly their men in. Then they’re going to have regular race meetings in Palmeston. Seems like the boys’re boozing too much and doing their dough on swy and poker. Everybody’s saying it should be the biggest turn-out yet. But old Shame-on-us doesn’t look any happier. I don’t suppose he’ll cheer up till he’s certain his old enemies are licked. I wonder will he put on free beer that day?’

  Captain Toby, commander of what was called HMAS Palmeston, was he who formerly had captained HMA Survey Sloop Arafura, with the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. His new command was not a ship, as made to sound, but the Port Palmeston Naval Depot, centre of which was a block of offices even remote from the sea. Fergus told the Lily Lagoons people an amusing story of how the place was run just as if it were a ship, even to having a Bos’un piping and the staff’s — no, crew’s — saying they were Going Ashore or Aboard according to their movements out onto Smith Street or off it. ‘No doubt about it,’ he said, ‘the bastards’re mad. You should see the moustaches the Air Force blokes’re sporting now. The higher the rank the bigger the mo . . . commissioned rank, of course. The shit aren’t allowed to wear ’em. You’d think at least flying an aeroplane would bring a man down to basic realities. But, of course, for the most part these blokes are only bomb-jockeys. I’ve struck only a couple who regard an aeroplane as anything but a weapon of war. The fact that I won’t have it on as a means of murder’s declassed me completely with ’em. Since this latest lunacy’s been on I’m regarded as a sort of moral leper. They’re all just rarin’ to go and get killed in the Battle of Britain.’

  Thus, just when it looked as if, indeed, the end of the world had come, and at long last the white cockatoos of Beatrice River might yell their kingship of the river timber unchallenged the year round, and the Beatrice goats wander at happy will scavenging what they could from their two-legged kin without having to suffer that hideous banishment to the mercies of the dingo and
the eagle in the bush, there was the dispossessing human mob again, shattering the pristine peace with axe and hammer in camp-building, with its discord of communication, its roaring motors, howling aircraft, screaming trains. Beatrice River Races on again!

  Official beginning of the Meeting was, of course, declared by the President of the Committee at the Racecourse on the Thursday morning. But of course, it was always accepted that the Festival itself began with that classic influx from the train and the storming of Finnucane’s all-too-ready-to-capitulate citadel. Thus it began this time, festive enough and to spare, with all those boys in khaki, naval ducks, Air Force blue. But was it really a time for festival, despite the brave showing?

  Even in booze the mob were arguing the Battle of Britain.

  ‘Next couple o’ days’ll tell.’

  ‘What d’ yo’ reckon?’

  ‘Poor old Poms coppin’ it.’

  ‘Yo’ mean they’ll get beat?’

  ‘Did I say that, sport?’

  ‘Say’t you mean.’

  ‘You tryin’ ’o make some’n’ out of it?’

  ‘You pro-bloody-Hun, eh?’

  ‘’Ere, break it up, you two . . . keep the stoush for the enemy.’

  ‘’E said . . .’

  ‘I never said nothin’. Course there’ll always be an Englan’.’

  ‘Yeah . . . so long’s she can hang on till our mob get there.’

  ‘There’ll always be an Englan’ . . . an’ Englan’ shall be free . . .’

  If Englan’ means as much to you as Englan’ means to me. Red, White and Blue, whaashit mean to you . . .

  Finnucane, tapping a new barrel, looking nothing like Mine Host of former days, his eyes hooded, bushy brows rumpled in a frown that could have meant anything — anger, perplexity, distress — felt a touch on his arm, turned to see his daughter Bridie. She screeched above the din, ‘Telephone!’