Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  No one saw anything of David for several days. Then suddenly the weather cleared, as it was likely to do for a matter of hours or days now and then. He came to the Presbytery again, somewhat surly this time, and told Glascock he would have the boat and things he’d offered. Glascock agreed readily, only too glad to get rid of him to waste time asking his intentions. David didn’t confide. In fact, when seen off at the beach by both pairs of lovers, he didn’t even turn to wave to them.

  Glascock sighed: ‘Good riddance. He’s always been a damn nuisance. I hope he goes back to the Proddies . . . whatever it is he has to tell them.’

  Leaning against him, Rifkah murmured, ‘Poor zing . . . so mix-up is he in ever’zing.’

  The four took advantage of the situation to go off in the cutter on a prawning expedition. It was the season of Gadeeia, the King Prawn.

  The wild wet conditions of the Intertropic Frontal System lasted the usual six weeks or so. Then the wind fell, rain turned to mist, sea to jade glass, green and blue. The idyll at the paganised Mission had continued untroubled since David’s departure. True, there were spats between the youngsters, but more as a form of self-assertion on Savitra’s part than antipathy. Prindy was inclined to neglect her, to go play music on his own or listen to it, or to sit with the grown-ups participating in talk beyond her comprehension. Religion and language were the chief topics of these talks. Glascock obviously was not only in love with a Jewess, but with Jewry. Whatever the urge to his intensive study of Talmud and Torah in the beginning, now he was trying to identify true Judaism with his conception of it as got from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. While he was quite contemptuous of the Christian Ethic now, he seemed ready to accept almost any Judaistic hocus-pocus, or at least to excuse it as legitimate human groping for truth; whereas he dismissed Gospel as the yammerings of half-wits, worse than the lunacy of Mohammedanism, since that was frank at least in the classification of men and admission of their irremediable weaknesses.

  At first Rifkah showed disconcertment over this change in him, until convinced of his assertion that he had been doubtful of Christianity for a very long while. Then quite joyfully she indulged his eagerness to know of the human practice of Judaism, as compared with the academic — the reality of the fast and feasts, of a Jew’s homely attitude to the awful Yahweh of the Law. He laughed to tears over the old Jewish joke she told him: that if God lived on earth He’d have all His windows broken. It was so human, he declared. A Jew could be at once so respectful and disrespectful — so different from the constant whining abjection of the Christian in guiltiness, or in hypocrisy. There was the lovely joke of the fact that the disrespect couldn’t be expressed in Hebrew, the Holy Tongue, but must be in Yiddish, a language made up for this purpose out of a hotchpotch of languages salted with the inimitable accidence of Hebrew. ‘Talking behind God’s back, as it were!’ he laughed.

  Thus while the world was tearing itself to pieces. Occasionally they listened to the news. The Japs were even riding bikes in their easy advance on that last bastion of the Glorious British Empire, Fortress Singapore — as the little fat man who still bossed it called it, shouting across the world from his dug-out deep under London, No Surrender!

  But Singapore, not so far away as distance was measured in those parts, seemed as remote from the Ocean Island as London. Likewise Canberra, where the Prime Minister in vain stormed-the-barricades to get his Commander home from Sister Street, Alexandria. The Russians, with the help of their frightful winter, were now beating the Germans back, and, so ’twas rumoured, starving, eating their fallen foes just as they had when they had put Napoleon’s Grande Armée on the run. Not only remote, but unreal, like the convoys of ships that passed within a few miles of the Island, going to and from Port Palmeston, sailing as dream-ships in the hazy sky.

  Not, however, that they were lost utterly to grim realities of the madhouse world. Glascock averred that they’d been left alone this long only because the patrol-boat, HMAS Melville, would have been kept away by the hazards to navigation to be expected in bad weather in these tricky waters. She should be paying them a visit any day now, but hardly likely to surprise them, when there was only one safe approach for a vessel of her size, which would bring her into sight a good half-hour before she would drop anchor. Besides, Sub-Lieutenant Pickles never failed to announce himself with a hearty tootling on his siren. The radio could not be used these days except in dire emergency. Nevertheless, everything was ready for a quick get-away by those not supposed to be there. Even the indulgent Pickles could not be expected to turn a Nelson’s eye to such a flagrant breach of wartime regulations as would be revealed by being frank with him — especially when his indulgence was largely due to his own infatuation with her who was chief of the delinquents.

  At a landing on a creek up in mangroves about half a mile to southward of the Mission Station a canoe waited fully equipped for a passage, if necessary, all the way back to the mainland. If they needed to put to sea, they might do so by way of a back channel out of sight from the main one and even, if navigated shrewdly, from the station itself.

  Well, Singapore fell. The doleful tone in which its knell was tolled by Jack the Ripper sounded silly after all the blather of No Surrender — or would have, were the futile cost of life in obedience to an idiot command not counted. Following it, was a nasty hint from Storm-the-barricades that, despite his insistence on having every Australian soldier home, Old Jack was covertly diverting the convoys already on their way, in a last desperate hope of bolstering the tumbling ruins of his Empire by submitting them to slaughter in Burma. Perhaps the first real crack in the Imperial Edifice was this necessity for the Imperial Master to have to try to do a sneak behind the back of a Damned Colonial.

  Two days after these historic proclamations, there was HMAS Melville coming into view of the Mission. Rather slow with her siren on this occasion. A blackfellow off the beach was already well on his way to the presbytery to report before its banshee wail sent the white egrets and the black cormorants whirling aloft from the islets — Whoop-whoop-wheeeeeeeep!

  The planned procedure of the delinquents was put into operation at once. Rifkah ran to change and get her ready bundle, while Glascock got rid of the messenger, saying he would be coming to the beach. She changed into slacks and man’s shirt and wide-awake and sandshoes. Ready to run, she clung close in last embrace with the rough and hairy male flesh that had given her her only joy in being woman — while he’d had the same from her female softness to give him fulfilment as a man — and all in the name of Sin, which perhaps is another name for Nature. As she withdrew, he said huskily, ‘Don’t come back if you don’t want to, my darling . . . but I’ll be always waiting.’ Then she was gone, racing to join the others already out and looking for her.

  Whoop-whoop-wheeeeeeeep!

  They trotted away into the scrub, into the mangroves. The robins and butcher birds gave warning so sweetly that Prindy’s grey eyes rolled with pleasure and his mouth so red in the golden skin about it moved as if he were mimicking the melody in breath as he would have in voice before he grew those whiskers. The fiddler crabs gave them the Nazi Salute and bolted to their holes, as no doubt the Nazis would someday.

  Whoop-whoop-wheeeeeeeep! The sound was subdued in here, cushioned by the dense greenery and the trickling ooze left by the falling tide.

  So low was the tide that they had much more difficulty in launching the canoe than anticipated, and while they drifted down to the sea, had to give their first attention to washing off the mud.

  Whoop-whoop-wheeeeeeeep! The patrol-boat was still a good way off by the sound of her siren, but close enough for her engines to be heard distinctly, an acoustical oddity that might be due to the intricate pattern of land and sea here, not lost to the sharp ears of Prindy, the way he cocked to listen as, paddling at last, they made their winding way out of the mangroves.

  The last reach of the creek ran southward, that is parallel with the mangrove-cluttered shore, but with
no glimpse of the waters beyond. However, these waters were hidden from view from elsewhere, too. Eastward lay a long island entirely grown with mangroves and jungle. The patrol-boat would be behind that. It was from eastward came the sounds of siren and engine. Ahead of them, sparkling in mid-morning sunlight, was the channel by which they would slip away into the maze. Now they were moving at a spanking pace, with the tide and all three dipping paddles strongly as they sat on wet behinds in the muddy bilge.

  They fairly shot out into open water, startling a couple of egrets perched on the last of the mangroves with attention fixed elsewhere — fixed on what those in the canoe had suddenly revealed to them, not plainly for the instant because of the art of camouflage, but once seen, as monstrously visible as the diving hawk must be when too late the victim becomes aware of it. It was a pinnace off the Melville, quietly roaring up the back channel from eastward, and barely quarter of a mile away. The paddling hands froze in their strokes. The eyes, grey, hazel, black, popped. In their insignificance of size and camouflage of muddiness, would they be seen against that background of grey and green? Perhaps they might not have been, had not Rifkah left off her muddied hat to dry after the washing. But what would concealment then have availed them, when the hawk was so obviously hunting them? A shout across the water. The egrets swung from seaward to the safety of mangroves elsewhere. The bow-wave of the pinnace was seen to swell, the engine heard to raise its voice. Prindy made a few wild instinctive-seeming dips with his paddle — then sat still. So fast was the pinnace overhauling them that the features of her crew could be recognised.

  The coxswain could be seen red-faced beneath his sailor’s cap at the wheel in the cockpit. Standing on deck on the right was another even redder of face, but soldier, not sailor, a sam-browned officer — Sigs Lieut Sims for certain. Even more certain the identity of the one who stood opposite, clad only in shorts and singlet, brown-skinned, almond-eyed as anyone who knew that figure well would know.

  The pinnace headed them off, as it were, then swung round to come slowly alongside them, with engine throttled back to a murmur. Sailors fore and aft secured the canoe with boat-hooks.

  A long moment of staring, with all faces expressionless, except Brother David’s, which wore a smirk. David could not blink and purple like Sims under the captives’ stares, but changed his smirk to a frown of righteousness. Then, surprisingly, Sims saluted Rifkah, mumbling, ‘How do you do?’

  Her answer was cold blink of those lovely eyes, that made him blink harder. But still he strove for gallantry, stepped down from the deck into the well of the vessel, and bent over the gunnel offering his hand to help her aboard. She looked past him at a sailor. He stood back and gruffly told the man to help the lady. She took the sailor’s hand readily.

  Sims then concentrated on Prindy, nodded to him. Prindy nodded back. Sims asked, ‘How you doing, young feller?’

  ‘All right, Sigs,’ said Prindy amiably.

  Sims said, ‘Better hop aboard. We’ll take your canoe in tow.’ Then when Prindy rose and gave his hand to Savitra, he too gave a hand, saying, ‘Is it true this young lady’s your wife.’ Prindy nodded gravely. When the two were aboard Sims put hands behind their backs to impel them in fatherly sort of fashion towards the cushioned stern, where Rifkah was already seated. Then, as if he were running it, although none of the crew paid any attention to him, he made a show of seeing to the passing of a tow-line to the canoe, and nodded when the coxswain revved up his engine, slipped in the clutch, and swung towards the glimpse of the Mission Beach now to be seen to northward. He then walked aft, halted before Rifkah who made him blink with her stare again, and clearing his throat, said, ‘Sorry about this . . . but Boss’s orders, y’know.’

  Coldly she asked, ‘Who is Boss?’

  ‘Colonel Cootes . . . head of Intelligence round here now. You know him, of course.’

  When she looked away, in the direction they were heading, he looked, too, and went on to talk, awkwardly, of the war. He spoke as if he expected invasion to be imminent: ‘The Japs have command of the seas to North of us!’ He waved dramatically.

  She might not have heard, her gaze intent now on the roof of the Chapel peeping above the distant casuarinas. His talk fell flat. Still he remained, staring with her. Then suddenly he turned to her again and almost panted, ‘I’m afraid I owe you an apology.’

  The lovely eyes turned on him, making him blink hard. In the same distant voice she asked, ‘Vot are you afraid of?’

  He heaved for breath: ‘Well . . . I didn’t behave so well last time . . . did I. So . . . so I’d like to apologise.’

  In the same tone she said, ‘It does not matter.’

  He looked eager. ‘That means I’m forgiven?’

  She addressed herself to the distant beach, where a knot of figures could be seen against the casuarinas. No sign of the sea off the beach from here, because the wide low-tide flat intervened. She said, ‘It mean only zat anyzing you say does not matter.’

  He swallowed hard on that. Still he couldn’t accept dismissal. He puffed: ‘I want to tell you . . . you know my sister . . .’

  She was watching one of the group in a white shirt detach and head towards the sea. It would be Glascock, the others the blacks. She said, ‘I do not know your sister.’

  ‘You know the one who helped us get the movie gear. I thought you could look her up down South. I’ll write to her.’

  The hazel eyes met his. He became animated again. ‘How’s the movies, by the way?’

  She looked away without answering. He hung for a moment more, then drew a deep breath, turned away. Glascock passed out of sight behind the screen of the point of the islet to starboard, beyond which the silver sliver of sea was widening slowly.

  Some minutes. Then they were rounding the point and having the wide expanse of wet tide flat revealed to them, and the jade of deep water, and another knot of people ashore at low-water mark disembarked from another pinnace. Then there was HMAS Melville, lying at anchor. Glascock had reached the knot. Soon it was to be observed that he appeared to be arguing with some of them, the way he was waving an arm about. Also, Prindy was able to name some of the others, in an indrawn whisper: ‘Monsignor . . . Mick Cusky . . . Mist’ Pickles . . . Cootsey.’ There were a couple of common soldiers, too, and some sailors.

  The pinnace ran on, ran in, to beach gently beside the other, bow into the shelf of sand that fell away steeply into deep water. A sailor leapt from the bow to hold her head. David also jumped overboard, but to head for Cootes, who was approaching. Cootes looked past David at Sims, calling to him, ‘Jolly good show, old man. Take ’em out to the ship.’ Ignoring those he referred to, he turned to signal the two soldiers on the beach to go along with them, but swung round suddenly on finding Glascock coming at him.

  Glascock demanded harshly, ‘Here . . . what’s this? Why aren’t those people to be allowed ashore?’

  The Coot’s chubby face jerked with fright. He gabbled, ‘Sorry, Father . . . but I can’t take any risks with them.’

  ‘I tell you those people were blown ashore here in a storm. I’m not going to see them dragged away like criminals . . .’

  Cootes went red. ‘They’re my prisoners . . .’

  ‘Prisoners be damned! You’re not a policeman . . .’

  Cootes’s voice rose shrilly: ‘I told you I’m I-One for this area . . .’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re I-One-Bloody-Hundred . . . you’re not going to treat these people like the Germans treat Jews.’

  ‘These people have defied the official order that all Bouches Inutiles be removed . . .’

  Glascock grabbed the neck of Cootes’s pretty khaki shirt, dragged him so that he bellowed in his frightened face, ‘You dare use that brutal Churchillian expression speaking of that girl who’s giving her life to working for the people you were supposed to work for? Yours is the Useless Mouth, you up-jumped bastard!’

  Eddy McCusky and Monsignor Maryzic laid hands on Glascock. He shrugged t
hem off, still roaring: ‘Lousy little runt!’

  The Coot got his wobbling eyes on his soldiers, squeaked at them, ‘Men . . . men!

  They came leaping to obey. Glascock was too quick for them. He gave the Coot a shove that sent him staggering backwards, over the tide-lip, there to lose his balance on the steep soft slope, and fall on his back in the water — Splash! All gaped, except the scowling perpetrator. Cootes went right under, to bob up again gasping and flapping wildly and looking scared to death, perhaps thinking he was out of depth, giving no heed to his beautiful cap floating away, but struggling for the shore, only to find that he could kneel on it. His men grabbed him, hauled him to his feet, while he coughed water. Glascock looked past him to Rifkah, to whom he called, ‘Do you want to come ashore?’

  She shook her head.

  The Coot became articulate, bubbling, ‘You’re . . . under . . . arrest . . .’

  Glascock would have leapt at him again, but for those restraining hands, which held now. He roared, ‘You’ll be under the water for good!’

  Cootes gasped to his soldiers, ‘Seize that man . . .’

  Monsignor Maryzic also raised his powerful voice: ‘Don’t be ridiculous . . . zis man is priest. You haf pipple you vont.’

  Cootes squeaked, ‘Acts like a priest . . . doesn’t he?’

  ‘Silence! I vorn you zat if you exceed your duty you vill pay for it.’

  The old Napoleon swelled up. ‘I am I-One!’

  ‘You vill be I-Nuzzing if I report you to General Vavell. Now go!’

  For a moment the Napoleonic scowl tried to master the natural authority in that square old face under the clerical panama. Then the Coot swung away, to order that the pinnace with the captives be swung in broadside so that he could board her. He had to be bumped up by his soldiers and hauled in by his lieutenant, looking so ridiculous that most of the observers grinned, including Prindy and Savitra. Nevertheless, once aboard he assumed command, ordered the pinnace under way. The Coxswain took the order from his Chief ashore, who winked as he nodded. The engine roared. The screw kicked up sand as she swung away. Glascock jerked free of his captors to wave. Rifkah and the others waved back. Oblivious to those about him, he stood and watched that bright head receding across water instead of coming closer as formerly. He looked as if he expected the miraculous again. It did not happen. A last wave from the deck of the Melville — and it was gone. It still did not happen, even though he waited minutes. At last with a sigh that sounded more like a stifled cry and with blue eyes rolling as if refusing to see any other thing except what was burnt into them, he turned, stumbled about as if undecided where to go. Then he saw what was part of the vision, the canoe pulled up high and dry. He went to that, stared into it. After a while he lifted out the bundles, came back with them and gave them to Sub-Lieutenant Pickles, muttering that they would be wanted. Then he wheeled away, went striding homeward across the tide flat. Homeward?