The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  Composing herself, nodding—without much belief—at his promises to do what could be done with the Indian, she agreed to go up to the clearing for Act 5. He watched her finish the crossing and stride up to the place where the other players were gathering. He felt a rush of fraternal love for her. She had given him secrets, he was sure, that she could never pass on to Will Bryant.

  Ralph found H.E. sitting at his writing table in the parlour of Government House, at the foot of the only stairwell in all this vast space. This was the stairwell which had so teased the mind of Arabanoo and at the head of which he now lay in fevered stupor, his coma on this side of town running parallel to that of Harry Brewer over on the west side.

  By the parlour window sat Davy Collins. He nodded Ralph to a seat by the writing table. Ralph saw that H.E. wore a heavy coat and a fire had been set and was burning. H.E. looked starved. He stuck scrupulously to the rations, with the exception that he had a convict gamekeeper named McIntyre. It was probably a lifetime of griping naval food that had left him pale, and not only lean but crooked. It was known he had suffered extreme privations and dangerous business among the degradados, the convicts of Portugal, when as a young man he offered himself to serve with the Portuguese navy along the coast of Brazil. H.E. had confessed to spending time in a Portuguese penal city, Colonia do Sacramento, on the River Plate. There, H.E. had said during the first King’s birthday dinner nearly a year past, the Portuguese had placed their convicts beyond the Tordesillas line, drawn by the Pope to divide Portuguese influence in Brazil from Spanish influence along the Plate, the Uruguay, and the Paraguay.

  To test that line the Portuguese had founded Colonia do Sacramento far forward of the border, their own convict city. Yet it was not uniquely penal, H.E. had said, not all of it devoted to felonry; some of the land had been taken up by Portuguese orchardists, some by veterans of the Portuguese army. There was a time when Spanish ships in the Plate and Spanish artillery in the hills all about had this city of Colonia blockaded, and at that stage H.E. had been commander of the only Portuguese warship in the place. The township survived on illegal trading with Spanish farmers, a few fish, and dogs—wild and domestic.

  Significantly, when H.E. had spoken of Colonia do Sacramento, the unhappy city, it was not in connection with hard rations and poor food. It was more as a reflection on the ironies of that ancient line of Tordesillas the Pope had drawn out around the earth, from the Amazon to the Moluccas, to separate the claims of the Spanish from those of the Portuguese. The British, out of respect not for the Pope but for their ancient ally Portugal, had drawn the line further out into space still, almost ad infinitum. H.E. had remarked at the table on the monarch’s birthday a year before that his Letters Patent gave him power over all the country between this convict city to the east and the meridian of 135 degrees to the west, so that the line would not be violated even here, so far out in the earth’s undesired spaces.

  This unimaginable western meridian of 135, Ralph knew, lay sixteen hundred unvisited miles to the west of where he now sat, looking at the pallid governor and at H.E.’s frequent visitor Davy Collins. The spaces over which His Majesty had empowered H.E. had in any case little meaning when set against the reaches of criminality which still had to be traversed in the souls of the lags. H.E., though by temperament an explorer, a namer, a taker of longitudes and latitudes, here again, as in Colonia do Sacramento, lacked supplies. The fact seemed legible in his skinny frame. The fuel necessary for an inquiry into the millions of square miles which lay untagged in all directions was lacking. The Blue Mountains, forty miles away, beyond which the more ignorant lags believed China lay, were therefore as absolute an end of things as the edge of a flat earth would be. H.E. asked Ralph to sit down now, and Davy Collins asked after the play, and how Nancy Turner the Perjurer was performing? The old woman who worked for H.E. appeared briefly to ask Ralph if he wanted port, which he said he did not. When she left, H.E. began to speak.

  “It seems the native is dying,” he told Ralph. “But it is very strange, very strange.”

  “John White says it is smallpox,” said Davy. “But the native has no visible pox on the body. There is simply a terrible fever and a sort of poisoning within.”

  H.E. took up the story again. “In his periods of lucidity he is much distressed, Ralph. It is appropriate—though there are many closed-minded people who might think otherwise—that in his distress he should have the comfort of physicians of his own race. Indeed he cries out for such comfort.”

  “He calls out,” said Davy Collins, “for a car-rah-dy—that is what they call their priests. The name of the car-rah-dy is Ca-bahn. This Ca-bahn of course lives on the north side of the harbour, in the country from which we took Arabanoo.”

  H.E. began to cough, took out a handkerchief, and continued his instructions murmuring into it. “I have asked Captain Collins, as a man who understands the importance of our connection to the Indians, to lead a small party to find Ca-bahn, both as a mercy to poor Arabanoo but also because that is perhaps where we should begin in any case to make alliances with the Indians. I mean, so to speak, with … something like a prelate or pontiff of the natives. I thought of yourself, Ralph, as an adjutant to Captain Collins in this excursion, since you had never shown yourself infected with that rancorous spirit which we find among many of the officers here.”

  Davy said, “We will take two sections of men from your company, Ralph, and a small party of convict oarsmen and porters. We will camp tonight on the beach on the north side, and tomorrow go in search of Ca-bahn. It should not be too difficult a matter, and by now the outbreak of smallpox among them should have largely abated.” Davy Collins smiled. “You should be back with your playmaking the morning after next. I take it one of your convict players can oversee The Recruiting Officer until then.”

  Both H.E. and the Judge Advocate smiled at him now. He looked away. He heard his own voice emerge thinly in the room. “I must make provision for one of the players, the convict Mary Brenham, who was beaten three nights past by Black Caesar and who has just left the hospital. Though she has been offered to stay in the fishing camp with the Bryants, I do not know if that is a proper locality for her and her son.”

  He was ashamed of this maligning of Dabby, yet it was preferable to the shame of mentioning Wisehammer as a rival. Ralph was concerned as well by H.E.’s strange opinion of the Jews. If he confessed there was now a chance of Mary Brenham, one of the better she-lags, moving in for protection with Wisehammer, again one of the better lags, H.E. might well approve and tell him there was no need to make further arrangements for the girl. For as Dick Johnson would have complained, H.E. approved of the spirituality of Jews and natives, though not of that of Moravian Methodists.

  It occurred to Ralph that Dick Johnson was exactly the man who should be used in this extremity. “I’ve asked the Reverend Johnson,” he lied, “to take her into his household and under his protection. For the present time.” For God’s sake, not forever, he hoped. “I must now conclude these arrangements.”

  Davy, who himself had a weakness for a convict girl, looked at him a little ironically but would not humiliate a friend before a viceroy. “We will not be pushing off till three o’clock, Ralph. Is that sufficient time?”

  “Yes,” confessed Ralph.

  “You will of course bring Private Ellis, who will carry your supplies for two days as well as his own.”

  “Your support does not go unnoticed,” H.E. commented.

  Yes, Ralph would have liked to have said, but it’s Robbie Ross who in the near run has the say on my promotion.

  For the second time in a few days, Ralph found himself appealing to Dick Johnson in the parson’s admirable garden on the east side of the town. Dick’s devotion to his two acres reminded Ralph yet again that he had not been out in some time to his garden on the small island to see to Amstead, the convict gardener, or the state of his own turnips. The playmaking, and concern with Harry Brewer and Mary Brenham, had taken up all hi
s recent attention.

  Dick listened with sad tolerance as Ralph told his story. The girl had been beaten, she needed gentleness, and, since Black Caesar had threatened him, so perhaps did her placid small boy. One of the lags had a fancy for her and would now use Caesar’s attack as a pretext to offer her the protection of his hut. “I do not think it is under these circumstances that Mary Brenham should be forced to choose a companion for life,” said Ralph piously.

  Poor Dick took one step back, leaned on his shovel, and looked out over the early winter harbour which still dazzled as it did in high summer. When he looked back there was a tear in each eye. “I was not wrong in my original judgement of you, Ralph,” he said. “You are indeed a limb of righteousness. I shall insist the girl stay here until the black man is retaken and punished.”

  As he left the garden Ralph understood how thoroughly he had deceived an old, if small-minded friend. “That is the nature of love,” he murmured to himself Harry-like, and went off to pack for the expedition.

  CHAPTER 22

  Ca-bahn

  They landed on the very beach from which Arabanoo had been captured on the last day of the previous year. The late afternoon sun was still warm on that strand of fine yellow sand, but the heights of vegetation and sandstone platforms behind the beach, the platforms on which Ralph had once seen a magnificent native stand holding aloft a monstrous iguana, were growing dark already. Davy of course had his own map; given time he would reduce everything to a system. As Private Ellis, the Marines, and the few convicts who had been trusted to travel with them landed rations and arms, pots and blankets, from the two longboats, Davy sat in the long grass on the edge of the trees with Ralph and showed him how they would travel.

  Over the hill, said Davy, you came to a spine of land between the harbour and the ocean, and you continued along this—fine lagoons on one side where wild duck might be sighted, and the ocean headlands on the other. Davy hoped they would not have to go too far. Beyond the lagoons lay further hills and ledges and the inland water to the north which H.E. had called Pittwater. Perhaps Arabanoo’s relatives, driven along by gal-gal-la, had fled that far!

  The convicts and Marines assembled now three large bonfires along the beach; there was something about the gathering of wood, the companionable piling of it, which made their voices sound birdlike. A convict cook set up a metal traingle over a smaller fire already burning with a salty crackle. He would suspend the evening pot from that, and everyone’s beef for the day would go into it. The sight brought Ralph a saving pulse of elation. It must have had a similar effect on Davy, for now he winked, put the map away, and pulled out a silver flask of brandy and two tiny goblets, the sort of tricky personal accoutrement you would expect a man of his style to possess.

  “News of your wife by the Sirius, Ralph?” asked Davy, pouring the brandy.

  “She spent the Christmas with Kempster. You know Captain Kempster?”

  “I do, I do. We were fifteen years of age together in Nova Scotia.”

  “That is where you met your wife?” asked Ralph, grimacing a little as he took in some of Davy’s brandy. He was curious to see how a young man such as Davy would talk about an absent wife while maintaining a lag companion. There might be some instructive mental trick Davy had to pass on.

  “My wife grew up in Nova Scotia,” said Davy. You would have to assess his smile, Ralph thought, as fond. “She still has the outlandish mode of speech of that region, though when she writes she is far more literary than most of your English-born women. I like her American directness.”

  High on the beach, where the paperbarks began, Private Ellis was uncoiling Ralph’s bedroll. Further along the sand the evening’s first three pickets had been placed.

  Davy Collins said dreamily, sipping the brandy, “Nova Scotia has such a climate as to encourage embraces.”

  “Some people seem adequately encouraged to embraces here,” Ralph said.

  “Oh yes, except our stern master. H.E. seems not to need much love.”

  Davy poured more brandy still. “My wife attends literary circles,” he said, “and publishes novels under false names. She is very accomplished. She is quite beautiful as well, and I must be composed when I think of that—of a young woman of talent living singly in that lizard’s nest called London. It’s quite possible she would have been enchanted by this country. North Americans have a skill for dealing with the harsh. And certainly if she had been permitted to come with me there would have been no need for me to spend so much time in making a journal and annotating the language of the natives, and all the rest of the particular housework I engage myself with.”

  “If my wife had come,” said Ralph, staring off towards the escarpments where the last light sat, “she may not have been enchanted, but other problems would have been avoided.” He was not drunk enough to confess to Davy that the problem which would have been avoided was his wife’s prodigality with money.

  It seemed Davy thought Ralph was speaking of the temptations of the flesh, and that supposition caused him to smile briefly and privately. “It has sometimes bothered my mind,” he told Ralph in a lowered voice, “to consider what the government of Great Britain had in mind when they barred us from bringing our wives. Oh, I know it’s a tradition of the service that the wives of officers are considered to be too sensitive in upbringing to stand the stress of campaigning in the field as in foreign places. This is rather a different case I would have thought. Reports from earlier visitors praised the place, however remote it would be, and said it was fruitful and temperate. I wonder, couldn’t it have been seen as desirable that the lags should have models of marriage placed before their eyes—your marriage, mine? Oh, I don’t mean our marriages are perfect, Ralph, though maybe yours is. But I would guess that most of the time your marriage—like mine—is marked by delicacy, consideration, and a certain ceremony. From observing us close at hand, the convicts might have learned those things which it is harder to learn from observing the marriages of most of the Marines. The Marine marriages teach them no more than what they already know of the institution from their observations in the sinks and stews of Soho and Seven Dials and Stepney and Poplar—screaming, punching, violent rutting, and reckless infidelity. Not that I am a paragon in the matter, Ralph. But our marriages might have shown them there were different ways of proceeding.”

  The fragrance of the cooking meal, mixed with that of the salt air and the strange bitter eucalyptus smell of the forest, came to Ralph and caused him to smile.

  “Why did they not permit our spouses then?” he asked dreamily, without any particular passion at the moment against the Home Secretary or the Admiralty.

  “There are only two explanations,” said Davy. “First, there is the possibility they were so stupefied by custom they did not even consider our special case.”

  Ralph laughed. He liked Davy’s companionable disrespect. “And what’s the other explanation?”

  “The other one is more beguiling, Ralph. That they—being men fully aware of the normal male leanings—intended that at this distance of space we should take convict wives, and by treating them well and having influence over them, turn them into the future matriarchs of this lag society. Through the exercise of our desire for the comradeship of women and for the usual human solace, we were to make an exemplar of marriage out of a convict concubine—to use Dick Johnson’s rather exciting and fleshy term.”

  Ralph stared at Davy. He was the last man Ralph had suspected would turn into the voice of a rational Satan.

  Early in the day it was dismal journeying—they climbed over rock ledges, sometimes encountering the skeletal remains of an Indian stricken months earlier by the smallpox. It was the only sight of a native they had until well into the morning, and this surprised Ralph and Davy, given that the lagoons were so rich in animal life, that ducks made continual small migrations overhead and that those mounds of genial fur and flesh known as wombats occasionally crossed their track.

  They were beginnin
g to climb a spur of hills running north from the last of the marshes when they saw a group of native women fleeing through the trees to their left. More exactly they heard them, for the women ran with shrill pee-wit cries, clutching children to their hips and breasts. This chirping flight distracted the party for a moment from what was ahead of them, but then they saw standing in their path, perhaps twenty paces ahead of them, a tall native, three spears and a throwing stick in his right hand, a war club in his left, and a long, double-pointed bone thrust through the septum of his nose. He did not intend to let them come any further, and he signified it by the bellicose hooting he made in his throat.

  “This is what comes of capturing them against their wills,” Ralph murmured to Davy. The sight of barbed spears made Ralph angry that H.E. and Davy had with such levity ordered Arabanoo’s capture. Davy held his hand up to prevent the Marines from loading their muskets. “Do nothing,” he called.

  And with that bland, boyish frankness he and Johnny White had displayed on their excursions in Rio, he began to speak the language of the natives.

  “Arabanoo ba-diel!” said Davy carefully. He was speaking out of the very dictionary of the language he himself had made. His sentences grew in length. The native seemed to ignore him, keeping up the hooting, stamping his front foot, the one which would take the weight, Ralph understood, when the spear was hurled. Davy bravely raised his voice.

  “Arabanoo gal-gal-la!” claimed Davy.

  The native ceased his hooting and frowned. Davy went to step forward, but the native thrust out the knob of his war club to prevent him. “Diam o car-rah-dy?” asked Davy calmly. “Noy-ga Car-rah-dy!”

  He turned to Ralph and translated. “I am telling him Arabanoo is howling for a priest.”