The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

‘Collison doesn’t know.’

  ‘Baker’s note spoke of blacks.’

  ‘It did. And the men who brought it said that stones had been thrown at the party by two hundred blacks. They said the men of the expedition told them so. So you see, it came to me at third hand. And of course I don’t believe it. Two hundred blacks indeed! In that case, would he have gone off alone? But no matter, no matter—these contradictions can be reconciled later. The present urgency is to tell Mrs Logan. Every prisoner on the settlement will be talking of it soon.’

  ‘They have been muttering of his death ever since they saw him across the river.’

  ‘Since they fancied they saw him.’

  ‘Could it have been him, after all?’

  ‘No, Murray, it could not.’

  ‘They said the mare was with him. Collison says he escaped on her. Could he have made his way back?’

  ‘No, Murray, he could not. Or why would he run off again?’

  ‘Why,’ said Murray hesitantly, ‘only in a fit of madness.’

  ‘Murray—’

  ‘He has been under strain,’ said the young man quickly, ‘and is subject to melancholy.’

  ‘Murray,’ said Clunie, ‘at present, it is better to suppose nothing. Nothing.’

  But Murray persisted. ‘Sir, it was on Monday they saw him. Three days before Baker’s message reached the settlement. Would they have made it up from the whole cloth? I am convinced they saw something.’

  ‘Very well, Murray. His ghost.’

  ‘Sir, that is exactly what they are saying. They say that Boylan killed him, and his ghost has come back to haunt the settlement.’

  Clunie heard again the commandant morosely saying, ‘They are great ghost seers, you will find.’ He was angry with himself for speaking of a ghost to Murray, and angry with Murray for not taking up the scornful intonation of his remark. ‘Did they say the mare was saddled?’ he asked.

  ‘They didn’t say she was not. So one assumes—’

  ‘Quite. But the saddle lies where he slept. Or did the ghost of the saddle have the kindness to rise and fly to the ghost of the mare?’

  But Murray was now looking alarmed. ‘Then he leapt on her bare-backed?’

  ‘Yes, Murray, he did.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Murray. They had reached the commandant’s gate. He paused with a hand on the latch. ‘Oh,’ he said softly again. ‘Poor lady!’

  Clunie was about to protest, to say that they must not yet assume Mrs Logan to be pitiable, when he heard someone running up the garden path towards them. In the next second Big Annie appeared, running up the short flight of steps cut into the bank. Her knees paddling into her kilted skirts gave the effect of a vigorous rustic dance, her eyes were shocked and eager, her lips intensely whispering. Clunie, in the mood to expect a messenger of disaster, was amused to see only this poor creature on her way home from her work, rehearsing her thrilling news lest she forget its detail, and running lest someone should tell it in the female factory before her.

  ‘Here is one who knows,’ he said quietly to Murray.

  She gave a cry when she saw them, and fell back in such a dramatic and despairing manner that Clunie almost laughed aloud. As she jumped to one side and bobbed low, a potato fell from the bundle under her arm and trundled off among the bushes. Clunie heard her scuffling to retrieve it as Murray and he continued on their way. ‘I hope they have not told Mrs Logan,’ he said.

  ‘Have no thought of it,’ said Murray. ‘All three have been most tender with her, because of the child.’

  Murray was right; it was apparent at once to Clunie that Letty was still in ignorance. They found her in the drawing room, with her sister and both her children. The women sat in chairs, Robert lay on the blue sofa, and Lucy played on the floor beside him. All except the little girl looked tired, pale, and peaceful: Robert was out of danger; the incessant work with the compresses, and the long close vigils, were over at last. ‘Wobert,’ said Letty softly to her son, ‘here are Captain Clunie and Mr Mu’wy, kindly come to enquire after you.’

  ‘Thank you, sirs,’ said Robert. ‘I am out of danger.’

  ‘Robert is not to die,’ said Lucy boastfully.

  ‘I will die one day,’ said Robert. He was handling a little Chinese box, sliding its lids, one by one, to reveal its many compartments. ‘But not for many years,’ he said.

  ‘Not for a hundred years,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Oh, before then.’ But he looked from Clunie and Murray to his mother, from his mother to his aunt. ‘Before then?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said his mother with a laugh.

  ‘One is always hearing of old men who claim to be a hundred and six,’ said Frances. ‘But now I think Mr Murray wants to look at your leg.’

  Lucy jumped up. ‘I will hold the box.’

  ‘I will hold it myself.’

  ‘Let me!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You see,’ said Letty to Clunie, ‘how well he is?’ She turned to her son. ‘Wobert, let Lucy hold the box.’

  Robert thrust the box in silence at his sister, who grasped it eagerly and began at once to open its compartments. ‘We are allowed to play with it because Robert was to die. Or else Mr Cowper was to take off his leg. And we are allowed to play in this room, too, and to eat cucumber.’

  Frances had knelt by the sofa and was taking the bandage from Robert’s leg, while Murray stood and waited. Clunie bent to Letty’s ear. ‘A word with you, ma’am.’

  As she rose he could see nothing in her eyes but courteous enquiry. He questioned again his wisdom in keeping her ignorant for so long, and to make a bridge for his news he said as they crossed the room, ‘What I have to say touches you closely. It concerns Captain Logan.’

  She halted abruptly and faced him. She was silent, but her eyes asked the question. ‘What is it? What has happened?’ And, as if it really had been asked aloud, the four at the blue sofa all raised their heads and looked at Clunie as if also awaiting his answer. Bowing, he put a hand beneath Letty’s elbow. He turned her about, and as he guided her towards the french doors he bent to her ear again.

  ‘My dear lady, he is missing.’

  She halted again, but then in obedience to the pressure of his hand went forward as if in a dream. They went through the doors and stood on the verandah. She put one hand on the rail and looked across the river as he told her the story. The wind that always blew from the river buffeted her short curls and moved them this way and that, and occasionally she raised a hand as if by touching them she could keep them still. She said nothing until he told her of the saddle on the ground, and the severed stirrup leathers. Then she asked, ‘Were they cut clean, sir, or hacked?’

  He thought it a strange irrelevant question, but in the next second was startled by its cool relevance. ‘I don’t know,’ he said soberly. ‘I will ask Collison.’ To break her husband’s plight to her gradually, he had left the part about the saddle and stirrup irons until last. ‘I have told you all I know. I will speak to Collison and visit you again tomorrow. A search party goes out at daybreak.’

  She nodded. ‘Sergeant Baker’s note mentioned blacks. Did he say how many?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Wobert told me he heard the women speaking by his bed. They spoke of hundweds of blacks hurling stones at his father.’

  Clunie drew a deep breath. ‘Well,’ he said with control, ‘either the women were passing on some wild rumour, or the child was in fever.’

  ‘In fever. Pwecisely! I discounted it on that score. Another day he saw his Aunt Cassandwa.’

  ‘Well, there you are! And we may discount it on the score of reason besides. If there had been hundreds of hostile blacks about, Captain Logan would not have gone off alone.’

  There was only the slightest
pause, but Clunie had the sense of a hitch, a caught breath. But then: ‘Pwecisely!’ she said again.

  ‘Hardacre’s party may have found him already. Let us proceed one step at a time. A message from the Limestone Station is our present hope.’

  ‘Of course.’ But she put both hands to her hair as if suddenly distracted by the wind. ‘Oh, sir, let us go in.’

  ‘Robert has broken the box,’ shouted Lucy, as soon as they returned to the room.

  ‘I have not,’ said Robert. His leg was bandaged again, the Chinese box in his hands. ‘I have only taken one of the little lids out. See, mama?’

  Letty bent over him. ‘Yes, yes, I see.’

  He was looking into her face. ‘Is my father dead?’ he asked quietly.

  Murray moved quickly forward, but she checked him by a slight movement of one hand. ‘Wobert, why do you ask that?’

  Now he looked frightened. ‘I should not have asked it.’

  ‘Dear little boy, I am not angwy. Tell me why.’

  ‘I heard the women speaking by my bed. I am sure I did. No, I am not sure. But I thought I heard them say that his ghost stood on the river bank, beside Fatima, and that he signalled for the barge, and then faded away.’

  ‘Papa is dead!’ cried Lucy. Her mouth became a wet red oblong and the big hot tears rolled out of her eyes as they moved in terror from face to face. Frances rose from her chair, but Letty, who was nearer, reached the little girl first. She gathered her into her arms and fell with her into a chair, holding her fast and rocking her, her eyes stern and staring, as if she commiserated in the child’s emotion but would not deny it. Clunie, after one helpless moment, mouthed at Murray to stay, then signalled to Frances to follow him out of the room.

  In the corridor he said to her, ‘Your brother is missing.’ He told her the story as he had told it to Letty, but with less sympathy, and indeed in rather an angry tone. The whole settlement had heard about her hysteria. Clunie considered that poor Martin, now in a gang, had been punished for her stupidity as much as for his own, and wondered that she had not had enough womanly sympathy even to enquire after him. The incident had made her fall again to her first low place in his esteem, and although she had redeemed herself partly by her untiring work during Robert’s illness, he was still wary of her. She was inconveniently intense and had been brought up badly. ‘And above all,’ he said crossly in conclusion, ‘let us have no encouragement for ghosts. If you have any steadiness, Miss O’Beirne, employ it now.’

  She was quick to take the rebuke, and so quick to blush for it that he regretted it. ‘I am sorry, Miss O’Beirne. You have shown yourself steady this past week. Continue to do so. Scotch that ghost story if you can. Why is everybody so ready to believe in ghosts? I can’t make it out.’

  ‘I am not one who is ready to believe in them,’ she said. ‘At least don’t think that of me. If a man and a horse were really seen standing there, let us not draw the worst conclusion, let us rather draw the best. He was dismounted from Fatima, let us say, and began making his way back to the Limestone Station on foot. He missed his way, and is now lost and wandering. And while he wanders, a runaway finds the mare and brings her in, hoping to gain a remission by his action. But at the last moment he loses confidence, and runs off again.’

  He could only stare. ‘Why, that’s quite possible.’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘Barely possible. I shall advance it as possible enough to scotch the ghost story, but not as possible enough to raise hopes for his safe return.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘well, I see I can leave it to you.’

  It was not until he had let himself out, and was walking through the garden, that his wariness of her returned.

  ‘Too much imagination,’ he grumpily told himself, ‘and too much logic besides. They must be at war in her. I don’t like that. A woman should be peaceful.’

  Frances found herself unable to return at once to the drawing room, unable yet to advance with cheerful and unfaithful words upon her sister rocking the little girl, upon Murray watching them with his woeful eyes, and upon Robert as he quietly and reflectively opened compartment after compartment of the Chinese box. Henry Cowper had been right in believing that she would find a way back into life, but wrong in believing that it would or could be anything so trivial as a dress. Indeed her disgust and self-disgust had been so violent, and her wish to die so strong, that only Robert’s danger had drawn her back. Pressed into helping Letty to nurse him, she had consented because to refuse would be to make too much fuss. But soon after she had taken her place by his bed, she had found herself leaning forward to tend him in an attitude she recognised as like her mother’s when she herself had lain ill of the smallpox. Again and again this occurred, her recognitions of the moments becoming so swift and overpowering that she would fleetingly believe herself to have become that dead woman. Letty nursed Robert by day and she by night, both relieved when necessary by the servants, and in those long nights the memory of her own illness had returned with magical clarity. Like this her mother had held water to her lips, like this had bent to the candlelight. She came to believe that her mother had left some residue dormant in her which had now awakened and was directing her. The link consoled and quietened her. Her fondness for Robert turned into love. If he had had some dangerous contagion she would have been as unfaltering in the face of it as her mother had been when facing the smallpox she had caught, and of which she had died. In the strength of Frances’s demand that Robert should live at all costs, she found a renewal of her own wish to live. But since his recovery she had found that if her wish to live could revive, so could her self-disgust. Her self-disgust, it seemed, was always able to renew itself at the fount of her own nature. When she had heard Lucy cry that her father was dead, one cool plain word had formed in her mind. ‘Good.’ And now she leaned her forehead against the wall and whispered, ‘Dear God, forgive me and grant me thy grace.’

  Since taking to prayer at unofficial moments she had at first been inclined to pray by paraphrasing the words of Bridie and Meg at home when they prayed to their Mary. ‘Dear sweet God,’ she would say. ‘Darling little Jesus.’ When these words did not make her prayers work she had reverted to the calmer address of the established church. They did not make her prayers work either, but she continued in them because they were what she had been taught, and because she could think of nothing else to do. They had not yet affected what she now thought of as the evil in her nature. They did not bring her peace. Their only obvious effect was an outward composure; she accepted it with gratitude.

  When she entered the drawing room again she found that calmness, or its simulation, had also returned here. Lucy had been given the Chinese box and was sitting on the floor sliding back its lids with absorption and satisfaction. Robert lay with his hands beneath his head and his eyes shut. Letty, by the window, was talking to Murray.

  As soon as Frances heard her sister’s high firm voice, she knew that she had decided that since the wait for confirmation or denial might be a long one, she must collect her forces, and hold herself in control, and busy herself with her duties.

  ‘James is telling me about the compwesses,’ she said to Frances.

  ‘They may not be stopped entirely, Miss O’Beirne, but reduced to four a day.’

  ‘As you say, Mr Murray.’

  She did not look at Murray as she spoke. Robert’s danger had brought them together in daily speech, but though she contrived to address him in the tones of their former pleasant friendship, she could never look into his face as she did so. She found a sort of comedy in the thought that an onlooker new to the scene may have taken her attitude to him for coyness. ‘Oh, to get away from this place!’ she cried in her heart.

  ‘It is a gweat thing that he is better,’ Letty was saying. For Fwances and I may now start to pack.’ She looked about the room and threw up both hands. ‘But gwacious! Where to
begin!’

  *

  Clunie was so surprised that he took off his spectacles, sat back in his chair, and stared at Collison across the table. ‘Are you quite sure of that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ On the table between them was Clunie’s unfinished dinner: a plate of pork chops pushed to one side, a dish of cheese, a bottle of port and a glass. In the centre of the table, between two candles, was one of Logan’s maps. Collison put a forefinger on the long wavering line which Logan, while tracing it with his pen, must have seen in his mind’s eye as the river itself. Collison’s forefinger indicated a sharp bend close to the tiny circle against which Logan had written, ‘First Camp’. ‘It was here,’ said Collison. ‘As we came up to the ford, here was this hill. At least two hundred of them. They covered the hill. We had struck camp an hour before. He was in advance, but when they roll the stones down, he falls back and waits for us to come up.’

  Clunie spoke half to himself. ‘Good God.’ Too much was happening at once. He had hardly arrived home from his interview with Mrs Logan before Lieutenant Edwards had come to tell him of a signal received from the Alligator. He warned himself against fragmentation of his attention. The Alligator must wait. He put on his spectacles and leaned forward.

  ‘Did he fire to disperse them?’

  ‘No, sir. He told me to. They moved off but closed in again as we forded the river. And they cried something to us. It sounded like “commidy water”. We took it to mean that they wanted him to go back over the water. He laughed when he heard it.’

  ‘He was in a good humour?’

  ‘You would say it put him in a good humour. He was in a bad humour when we set out.’

  ‘From here?’

  ‘From here, sir, and from the Limestone, and from the camp that day. The more so that day because the bullocks were slow. But when they said that, he laughed, and told me to fire over their heads. Which I did, and they dispersed, and he laughed again.’

  ‘Did you see any white men among them?’

  ‘Not to swear they were white. He asked me that same question. And I said I seen one that was thick in the leg, and another with lighter hair, and yet another whose face was paler. But so I might, I told him, and yet all three have been native blacks.’