The pair below slept soundly for perhaps ten minutes. Nanago woke first, saw the birds with eyes for a moment wide with surprise. Then she smiled. She looked at Jeremy. Carefully she withdrew the hand from his chest and touched his cheek with a slender finger. He twitched, as if to dislodge a fly. Her lips moved in soundless utterance. The wrens twittered and fluttered. Still with lips moving, she passed her hand down to his waist, with scarcely perceptible movements slipped the buckle of his belt, undid each fly-button, slid her hand inside. That woke him, blinking.
From staring at her, he glanced aloft at the now excited birds. Biaiuk were supposed to be concerned with Charada, Love Magic. He lowered his eyes to meet the brown awaiting them, half-growled, ‘What’s this?’
She giggled: ‘What you reckon?’
‘Eh!’ he cried, in response to the liberties she was taking, and tried to sit up. She stopped him with a kiss, and held him down, to smooth his face with hers in the Aboriginal way of making love, while still at play with her right hand.
He managed to say, ‘You been sing me.’
She giggled again, withdrew from him quickly, to rise to knees, in which position she whipped her dress up over her head, dropped it, then with two more swift movements was out of her drawers. She only had a shift on now. He sat up, muttering, ‘Eh, look out!’
She was breathless as she swung on him. ‘Wha’s matter look out?’ She grabbed at his trousers, hauled them down his thighs, brought her hand back caressingly over the erect darra. ‘Blackfeller fashion,’ she panted.
He pulled off his boots. She didn’t wait for him to remove his pants, but stood up, straddling him, so as to bring kumara level with his mouth. Seizing her by the buttocks, he drew his feet in under him so that he was squatting on heels. As he put mouth to kumara, she grabbed his hair, pulling at it while gurgling her delight. He ran hands up her back, round to her breasts, down to her jiggling belly. She dropped her head to bite his scalp.
Suddenly, crying out, so that the biaiuk flew up, grasping his shoulders, she lowered herself to her own haunches — down — down onto what awaited kumara. They clutched each other, rubbed faces as before, now wildly while they jigged in union — till suddenly she shot her feet forward, locked legs about his back, drew head and shoulders away from him, dropping backwards, dragging him on top of her. A spasm of complete union. They lay quivering, gasping. The biaiuk swept up twittering, sped away. Back came two sticky-beaking beinook.
It was the soft clucking comments of the bustards that roused the human pair.
Shyly they put themselves to right. Now the Sun was obliterated, a wind stirring from the South. She said, ‘Rain close-up.’
‘Yes . . . better be getting back.’
Before descending the bank they stood to look back at the mangan tree, staring as if to imprint it on their hearts, or to project their hearts to it in blessing. They kissed. She clung for a long moment. Then down, and back along the river now running purple, reflecting the sky ahead. They walked as before. But now mostly she went with hanging head.
At length he asked, ‘Are you crying?’
She shook her head, but blinked hard. He stopped, to raise her face, to kiss the welling eyes. He whispered, ‘Please be brave, my dear.’
She choked: ‘I got to cry lil bits . . . I lose my country.’
‘You’ll be able to come back to your country someday.’
Her head fell again. ‘You are my country.’
They went on. They came to a place, just below a sharp bend, where the river ran shallow over a wide bank of pebbles. She stopped suddenly, saying, ‘I stop here.’ When he looked at her in surprise, she added: ‘I wash myself. You go.’
Still he stared. She flung herself into his arms, straining to him. As suddenly she released him, gasping, ‘Mummuk,’ and swung to face the water.
He caught her hand and tried to pull her back. She jerked her hand away, panting, ‘You go now.’ She headed towards the water, stepped into it while he stared, calling back without turning, her voice strangled, ‘Mummuk . . . my husband.’
She went on splashing to the middle, stopped, but did not turn.
A moment. Then he called huskily, ‘Mummuk . . . my darling wife . . . yawarra.’
Her answer was a quiver of the shoulders. Still he waited. She remained rigid. He drew a deep breath, turned to go on his way. Twice he looked back before he reached the bend, and again before turning out of sight. Still she stood as he had left her, watched by a white crane as immobile as herself, perched on a snag, watching the white crane, if there were sight in her eyes.
She turned after he had vanished, stared for a moment at the void he had left; then uttering a high cry, she sank to knees in the water, groped in it whimpering, brought up a sharp-edged stone, smote her brow — smote and smote again — then dropped the stone and drooped her dark head, and howled like a mourning lubra while her blood and tears dripped into the widow’s blackness of the stream.
IV
Out at Lily Lagoons, Jeremy and Fergus accomplished to the last detail what they had planned so precisely to outwit their first enemy, that authority bent on ordering their lives without concern for any idea they themselves might have about it. The big jobs were: first, to fly stores and gear over to the other side of the Plateau: second, to stow the aircraft. The landing on the other side was that where the Coot had made his bivouac. They were lucky in finding blacks near at hand with whom to leave the stuff for packing back to the escarpment for dry stowing there. Jeremy rewarded them well and promised more rewards when he returned. At the same time, as he told Fergus, he expected a certain amount of pilfering. Subtle thieving from the kuttabah was practised as a kind of etiquette, he explained, the proper response to which was to pretend not to suspect it. Many a fool whiteman, he said, had lost his life in the early days by making a fuss over a few pounds of flour, sugar, tea in ounces, delicately extracted through tiny holes bored in containers. You only lost respect now — but true respect from the blackman was the rarest thing.
Returning, the Junkers was landed on the old Ring Place, and hidden camouflaged under nets Fergus had purloined for the purpose from the Air Force. One would fairly have to bump into it to find it. She was left with tanks full and all parts liable to deterioration sealed. Fergus reckoned she would be safe to fly after a good two years.
The pair became very close in their association. On one occasion Fergus was moved to say again he wished he’d had a father like Jeremy, that having a father you can’t fully respect is an everlastingly painful thing. To that Jeremy said, ‘I’d’ve liked a son like you, too, boy. But what’s this about fully respecting your father? Isn’t it part of the racket of religion? Everlasting honouring of your old man is surely a form of escape from being a man in your own right, isn’t it? Isn’t it more the natural thing to see your father’s weakness and want to be a stronger man than he? The father-worshipper . . . male, I mean, because it’s natural in the female . . . is always a craven. I suspect those two sons of mine of having a sneaking respect for me that compensated for their own lack of manhood, surely shown in their switching from me to the authoritarianism of their mother. Probably father-worship’s the fault of our Nation . . . John Bull always the Boss . . . or up to now, when it’s a switch to Uncle Sam. The Yanks showed their superiority over us by quickly declaring themselves independent of the Old Man.’
At one as they were in defiance of authoritarianism, even to fight it to the death, they were markedly different in their attitudes. When Jeremy offered Fergus his choice of the armoury he had maintained throughout the years with no more use for it than to kill pigs or put doomed animals out of misery, the young man picked the prize weapons, a heavy automatic pistol and automatic rifle, fingering them with obvious satisfaction and saying, ‘Now, any bastard tries to take me goes first!’ For himself, Jeremy took only a shotgun and a light rifle with telescopic sights, declaring that he had never yet killed a man and hoped never to do so. When asked what he’d do if th
e Japs came, he replied that if there were killing to be done, he guessed he could leave it to the blacks. As for killing animals, he hoped to be able to leave that to the blacks, also, except in the way of small creatures prolific in numbers that could be despatched with a stick.
Speaking of fighting the Japanese, he said, ‘It will only be to defend a portion of my country to live as I like in. If they come here, it’ll be because they’re forced to. I haven’t any quarrel with them. I’ll endeavour to outwit them the same as these other bastards. Resort to arms in self-defence means only to increase vindictiveness. Knowledge of the cause of vindictiveness is the only way to overcome it . . . if ever it’s to be overcome and Mankind persist as a blessing to Earth instead of a curse.’
Fergus tried hard to be allowed to stay on, offering his youthful vigour as inducement, even rather asserting it to impress Jeremy with his own failing strength when it was declined. Jeremy settled it, saying, ‘With the difference in our purposes, it could only serve a negative end, son. I want simply to stay on in my own country, to die in it, sooner or later, loving it as an old blackfellow does when he dies . . . his love born of his knowledge of it. I’ve got much to learn through unhurried observation to get that knowledge. My defiance isn’t vindictive, it’s imperative. I’m an old bull that’s left the herd . . . to die. That’s why I had to deny my poor dear Nan’s wish to stay with me. She said she wouldn’t intrude on me . . . that she never has. Subtly she has . . . snaring me with the comfort she’s provided. She’d do it again. All women will. Emasculating the male is the female’s business. I felt very mean in leaving her . . . still do. She’ll be very unhappy for a long while. But there’s a positive alternative for her . . . if she can take it. There’s one for you, too. If you stayed with me it would only be as an outlaw. No one can justly charge me with outlawry. I’m only insisting on the right of an old man to die where he chooses and in perfect peace. Your youth would drive you to impatient, angry acts. You’d soon be in strife that would hamstring you. You have a nation to build, man. Give all you’ve got to that . . . till it proves too much for you. It’s proved too much for me at last . . . but I still believe it’s possible . . . to make out of this community that True Commonwealth that’ll be an example to Mankind. So leave me to make myself one with the good earth . . . and you go back to teach others to love it, too . . . not for mean nationalism . . . but for the true salvation of men’s souls, which I believe can come only through all-abiding love for the wondrous thing he owes his origin to . . . Mother Earth.’
They talked of the tantalising differences in men, taking the differences in their own temperaments as example. Jeremy spoke of having himself grown up under the very shadow of constituted authority as a policeman’s son, of how he had never thought to question it till shocked by the stupid abuse of it as revealed by his brother Jack’s death; while Fergus, reared in indulgence if conventionality, had rebelled from the start and for no apparent reason. Jeremy wanted to know: ‘Why the difference and yet the sameness between us? Why the sameness of your upbringing and that of Cootes, and yet the utter difference? That’s what I’d like to find out before I turn my back on civilised man . . . so that I can think about it and have the sweetness of truth in my mouth when I die. Will you be pleasant to Cootes when he comes . . . if only for my sake?’
‘I won’t find it easy. I can’t stand the awful fake the fellow is.’
‘Well . . . keep out of the way. I’d like to get to the bottom of the fake. Anyway, quarrelling with him won’t do any good. Don’t forget, I want to put him off the scent.’
They saw the Old Year out, sitting tippling in the lounge, listening with interest to what surely must have been the first bit of news concerning Australia even to seize world interest enough to rouse comment. This was the controversy between the new Australian Prime Minister and Churchill over bringing home Australian troops fighting Churchill’s war in North Africa so that they might fight for their own country. What made it world news was the Common Enemy’s seizing on it as the first sign of the cracking of the British Empire. The Japanese, in a special radio session now being beamed regularly to Australia from Saigon, were advising Australia that now was their chance to get out of bondage to Britain and keep out of getting into it with America, by dropping out of this war they had no say in fighting and in which certain Japanese victory would be all to the advantage of the friends of Japan. The Germans were telling the Australians in North Africa that the Yanks Churchill told them were arriving in thousands to defend their country were already getting to bed with their womenfolk. Churchill broadcast to Australia that the Gallant Australians would throw away their Place of Honour in Military History by Letting the Old Side Down with such a craven thing as running home. Taffy the Welshman, who as Prime Minister himself, had jailed the new Prime Minister as a Traitor for resisting his Conscription for Britain Campaign, was screaming Traitor again. The new Prime Minister was yelling Storm the Barricades. Australia itself was split down the middle with Nationalism and Imperialism. Jeremy’s comment was: ‘We’re not a Nation but a madhouse of schizophrenics.’
The Coot was as good as his word about dispossession As From January 1. He arrived shortly before noon on New Year’s Day. The Watchers gave warning as usual, not knowing that they were doing so for the last time, that at long last the keep had been breached. When the alarm sounded, Jeremy and Fergus were together in the Big House as before. Jeremy repeated his injunction to Fergus to behave with restraint, and as a precaution sent him over to the annexe, saying that he thought he could handle things better for a start by doing it alone.
This time there were two military vehicles: a staff-car and a type of van specially built for military use and lately introduced into the country. It was from the latter that the first of the newcomers alighted. They were a brace of big soldiers, a sergeant and a corporal, armed with pistols, wearing caps instead of hats. So Colonel Cootes had kept his threat to bring along Military Police. Out of the other came the Colonel himself (but not in yellow boots and socks today) and his Sigs-Lieut Sims. Evidently trouble was anticipated, since it was left to the policemen to make the advance on the front porch, while the others appeared ready to duck for cover. Jeremy spoilt things militarily by emerging before the challenge could be called, countering it by calling himself, quite amiably, ‘Goodday.’
A moment of obvious disconcertment. Then Cootes returned the greeting, and approached. Jeremy said easily, ‘Are New Year greetings in order?’
Cootes smirked: ‘Well . . . I must say . . . hardly what we expected . . . but a Happy and Prosperous New Year.’ He extended a chubby hand.
Jeremy took the hand readily, saying, ‘I’m rather like a Chinaman about New Year . . . like to think of it as the time for wiping out all debts and difficulties and starting afresh. If only it could be made universal and binding, eh?’ He took in all the others with a glance and a wave of the hand. ‘Happy New Year.’ Then he addressed himself to Cootes again: ‘What was it you expected?’
Cootsey giggled somewhat: ‘Well . . . at least a shotgun blast . . . eeeee!’
Jeremy eyed him with seeming gravity. ‘You should know the rule here against discharging firearms.’
Cootes squealed with mirth: ‘Aheeeeeah!’ Then he looked serious, cleared his throat: ‘Of course I’m here to take over, you know.’
Jeremy answered matter-of-factly, ‘Of course. But let me do the last honours. Come in and have a drink. I’ve saved some beer for you.’
The Coot looked utterly relieved, said even humbly, ‘Thanks, Jeremy.’
It looked as if he would have left the others outside, only Jeremy called all in. He poured for them all while they stood in an awkward semi-circle. He raised his glass: ‘To 1942 . . . may it see the beginning of the end of all tyranny!’
Having seated them and refilled their glasses, Jeremy asked the Coot if other troops would be coming. ‘Oh, yes!’ Cootes answered eagerly. ‘. . . My entire unit.’ Jeremy’s eyes widened at the t
erm. Cootes went on: ‘I’m here now only to make a Rekky . . . and, of course, take over officially.’
Jeremy asked mildly, ‘What’s the official procedure of . . . er . . . taking over?’
Cootes shook his boyish curly head. ‘I really don’t know. Matter for the Judge Advocate’s boys, I presume. All I did was tell GHQ I need this place . . . and they signalled okay.’
Jeremy said, ‘In the Last Turn-out there was a procedure for commandeering. An officer was detailed to arrange things. Actually the unit CO signed a paper assuming full responsibility.’
The Coot shrugged. ‘Of course you were in other people’s countries, weren’t you, where I suppose some sort of international law had to be observed.’
Jeremy pursed his lips. Cootes turned to his men, and with regimental peremptoriness told them to see to the unloading of the dunnage. As they went out, Jeremy asked, even with a note of deference, ‘Mind if I stay on another day?’ Cootes looked at him suspiciously. He added: ‘Won’t get in your way. Just want to clean up a couple of things.’ He smiled. ‘Won’t feel so much like getting kicked out . . . if I can take my time.’
Cootes coloured slightly. Jeremy waved a hand about. ‘Been the centre of my little world for the best part of my life, you know . . . and my wife’s. She’s left things for you much as they were, you see . . .’
The Coot cut in: ‘I didn’t ask for furniture . . . only buildings and the site. You ought’ve taken your things out.’ He blinked before the intent grey eyes.
Jeremy sounded as easy as ever: ‘Where could I put ’em?’
Poor Fellow My Country Page 223
