When the next issue of The Palmeston Progressive came out it carried a carefully-written bit in Fay McFee’s column reserved for such things, about the goings on of certain Missionary Men, reverend and otherwise, and certain officers of a certain Government Department noted for its leanings towards the methods of Adolf Hitler in dealing with its fellow men. It was too carefully worded for legal repercussions, Fay having sheer genius for libel without action. But there were others. First there was the renailing up of the doors between the quarters of the Misses McFee and Wyndeyer. Then there was the request by the Crown Law Office for Miss Wyndeyer’s resignation as Court Reporter on the ground of incompetency. Certainly she had been making a lot of mistakes of late; and, as Mr Doscas told her with much trembling of his chins, ‘You can’t afford to make mistakes in depositions, you know, Kitty . . . why, if we had Capital Punishment, it might even cost someone his life, mightn’t it? I’m terribly sorry. But they’re pushing me from on top. You’ll be able to get your old job back in the Post Office, I’m sure.’
Indeed, within a week of leaving the Crown Law Office, Kitty was again on the Post Office switchboard. And within a week of that again, she overheard a conversation between Father Gorgon and one of his Faithful, in which His Reverence complained that he didn’t know what he was going to do about an organist for the Church, seeing that Mr Dealney was leaving on the next boat, and Easter would be coming up, and no one in the town who could play anything better than a tin-whistle. That night she presented herself at the Presbytery.
It was not Father Gorgon she saw, because he was out, but old Monsignor Maryzic, long since pushed out of active clerical work by reason of his age and tactlessness, and just hanging about, as he sometimes himself said to those who still were friends of his, ‘Makingk a nuisance of meinself.’ He was an Eastern European of some sort, had been a great force in the establishment of Catholic Missions in the Australasian tropics. Miss Kitty told the Monsignor that she was not a Catholic, but would gladly convert to Catholicism to become the Catholic Church organist. ‘You have a beautiful organ,’ she said. He chuckled deeply at that, causing her first to stare in surprise and then to blush deeply, faltering, ‘I’ve often gone into your church to listen.’
He said, ‘Mein dear, you do not haf to be of our faith to play or sing for us. Der Catholic Church haf alvays been liberal mit der arts. Ve vant der best. Ve get der best. Ve pay for it. Let me hear you play. Vot can you play? Not der hymn. Can you play Mozart . . . yes? goot!’
The result was that Miss Kitty got the job, at a small salary, and on her own condition that she be permitted to convert to Catholicism anyway. Monsignor Maryzic undertook to instruct her for conversion in return for an organ recital of his favourite music after each lesson.
Somewhat later there appeared in The Progressive an exceedingly bitter attack on religion in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, as the Opium of the People and the Father of Fascism, by Fay McFee. It was also rumoured round the town that she had put nails in her side of the doors now.
IV
It was not long before Prindy was copying off Miss Lilyponds’s blackboard onto his slate, not mere ABC and words like Cat and Fat and Mat, but sentences like I did put one pig in a bag, and arithmetical calculations involving numbers up to 10, and was able to sing the Multiplication Table right up to 100 with the seniors. The other children observed his cleverness long before their teacher did, and whispered that it was due to his having been stolen away one time by a koornung, as they had heard. Some of the bigger girls tried to get him to talk about that experience, but without getting a word out of him. Then it was whispered that he’d had a Kirrikijirrit initiation and was circumcised. The oldest of the girls, Elizabeth Lake, challenged him to show his darra. When he ignored them they climbed up the wall of the boys’ shower to peep at him. It was like that for a couple of weeks, with his mother, sitting with him for half an hour each afternoon in Mrs Turkney’s conservatory, the only person he talked to — except for a couple of chats through the fence with King George as he was passing.
Nell was working in the Compound laundry, still at her one-armed dirty-linen sorting, by means of which she earned a few shillings a week that she spent with Peg-leg Queeny on lollies and biscuits she brought to Prindy.
He seemed content enough, spending his leisure mostly in Mrs Turkney’s garden weeding for her, while singing to himself. The job of weeding was given him on his first Sunday as alternative to attending Sunday School, where he had given offence by covering ears with hands during the singing of hymns. The Mission people, talking to Mrs Turkney about it, suggested that it must have something to do with the influence that Miss Wyndeyer had had on him. Yet he had looked even delighted when he saw the harmonium carried into the school room and the organist sit down to it, even if it were another lady. The hymns he had objected to before being removed for naughtiness were Jesus Loves Me, Tell me the Old, Old Story, Safe in the Arms of Jesus.
When Miss Lilyponds heard about the hands-on-ears business she told Mrs Turkney that he always did it when the children were singing with her those songs that were the delight of their schooling, it would seem: There was a Crooked Man who walked a Crooked Mile, Jack and Jill, Barney Google — the last her own particular favourite, because that was what she called her boy friend, whose name was Barney. Perhaps there was something wrong with the child’s ears, said Mrs Turkney. She would get Dr McQuegg to take a look at him next time he was along. The doctor was along quite soon, took the look, and over whisky with the Turkneys, reported that he could find nothing the matter, except an evident hypersensitivity to sound. He said, ‘Maybe he just doesn’t like the Bible-bashers’ voices . . . or Philly Lilyponds’s, either. I know I don’t . . . but what would only be dissonance to people with normal hearing, could be sheer cacophony to someone like him.’
Turkney said: ‘Cacophony . . . that’s a good one. Sounds like something out of the dunny . . . ha, ha, ho!’
‘That’s actually the literal meaning of it,’ said the doctor. ‘The caco part, anyway . . . something that stinks.’ They all laughed over it, even Mrs Turkney, who threw one of those double-barrel glances of hers at the whisky bottle and her husband.
Unfortunately, or so it seemed at the time, Mrs Turkney’s dislike for Miss Lilyponds was such that she could not help but use that word when relating the doctor’s report to her. Now, of several unpleasant things about Phyllis Lilyponds was that strident voice of hers; and it was not unlikely that she knew it. She must have gone away and looked up a dictionary to get the meaning. Next day when Prindy closed his ears with his hands as she began to lead the singing lesson with Barney Google, she leapt at him and struck his hands down, shrieking, ‘You don’t like my voice, don’t you, you like white nigger? Well . . . you’re going to hear it, whether you like it or not.’ So he had to hear it out: Barney Google, with his great big Googley Eyes . . .
Prindy was wise enough even to restrain his blinking with pain thereafter during the singing, even though it got actually worse, the children flatter and Philly sharper, for knowing that they were being listened to with much the same feeling as one had when the lid of one of the dunny seats was left up. He made up for it by singing to himself what he remembered of the sweetness he had heard from the gentle white hands of Miss Wyndeyer and his own songs, in corners of Mrs Turkney’s garden and in his own little corner of the dormitory when asleep and when the other kids crowded round and listened and marvelled, whispered of his being tulli-tulli, and hence at last endeared.
So Wet Season passed, leaving the land languishing in that Edenesque tranquility and fruitfulness its creator, the Ol’Goomun-Ol’Goomun, had intended for it always.
The Compound kids, that is the captive yeller ones, were able again to make full use of their playground since it had ceased to be only a wallow fit for pigs — Prindy with the rest of them, so that his mother, with the three or four others permitted contact with their children, had to spend her half-hour of an afte
rnoon largely yearning after him at a distance through the fence. The ingenious escape system under the fence still operated for those venturesome enough to go get the cocky-apples and bush-plums and leaf-sugar now to be gathered down in the gully below the Kerosene and smuggled in for sharing and those old enough and bold enough for what was called tchinekin. This was the bad time for ticks — shell-backs. Everybody who went out had to be as carefully looked over as monkeys by their mates, although with much more discretion. Shell-backs were hard to kill, at least by persons whose every action was viewed with suspicion. Pounding one with a rock, if not seen from the Boss’s house would be heard, even in the midst of a beery party. The established method of disposal was to put them in a Goona Tin, in which the big girls going to the kitchen for meals would take them for throwing in the fire. A Goona Tin was a tiny ointment tin issued to everyone weekly to put a bit of their goona in for a Hookworm Check. There had been no hookworm cases lately, because Prindy was supplying all the goona, as was the custom for new kids to do until they contracted. Having hookworm was not nearly so had as having to take the Carbon Tetrachloride that made one’s food taste like goona for a day or so afterwards. Besides, the hookies in their hunger made you all the more hungry for that rubbitch tucker.
On the black grapevine it came through to Wilhelmina that her Tweet’art David would be down in the gully any afternoon, calling like a coucal. David had done a month’s jail for his crime in connexion with her, and of course had lost his job with the Protestant Mission Centre. However the Catholics had taken him over, not out of Christian Charity, but because he was good with motors and they needed a new engineer for their mission schooner. How the Bible-bashers must have sneered at this double-barrel evidence of Papists’ cynical disregard of Christian Ethics to meet expedience! David sent word to say that he would be leaving for the Leopold Islands Mission soon, so don’t fail him.
Wilhelmina didn’t fail him. But the ticks she gathered in her trysting! They just about filled the goona tin that someone gave Prindy to hide in the chink of the concrete pier at the back of the classroom where he always sat.
It was surely significant of the strange docility of the Aboriginal Race with regard to white people, that none of the many so ill-treated children who had passed through this House of Humiliation called the Halfcastes’ Home and had held in their hands so often so potent a weapon of revenge as contained, like a piece of explosive Mercuric Fulminate, in those goona tins, had not thought to use it — until now — and perhaps significant of the non-Aboriginal heritage and instruction in the ways of Tchamala the disrupter of him who saw the opportunity and was moved to use it — he whose name was written on the roll as Prendegast Alroy.
It happened that Miss Lilyponds was in a particularly bad mood, perhaps through having difficulty with her Barney Google, whom even the kids had heard she was pursuing ruthlessly, a somewhat simple cadet Government Officer recently from the South. She had been giving the kids hell. She had even stood beside Prindy with head bent listening while he sang those favourite songs of hers with the rest, including Barney Google. It also happened that she kept her bike just behind where Prindy sat, and always hung her wide straw hat by its chin-ribbon on one of the handlebars. Just before dismissing the school for the day she turned her back on it and saw to her synthetic looks in her compact mirror, because she always rode down town to pick up Barney as he came from work. Prindy must have had it in mind for some time. Without rising he hooked the goona tin out of its hiding place, pulled off the lid under cover of his desk, and in a swift movement emptied the contents into the upturned hat. Anyone who knows shell-back bandicoot ticks knows how grimly they cling to anything that smells of a likely suck. Turning, Miss Lilyponds buttoned up the face that had been smiling at itself, and told the class it could get to hell. Then she went to her bike, donned her hat, and rode away. Only Prindy was interested in her departure. The other kids were racing for the playground.
They were able to play all next day, because Miss Lilyponds didn’t turn up — and the next, and the next. It took that long for them to learn that the lady was in hospital in a bad way. They got it not over the grapevine, but from Mrs Turkney, whose relish in the news could not be disguised in the slightest by her referring to Philly as a Poor Thing. Not only was the Poor Thing in great pain with the several tick-bites she had sustained on the head, but treatment had required the shaving of her scalp, and worse, when her young man Barney had come to visit her he had been obviously shocked by her appearance, and not only failed to visit her again, but had suddenly resigned from his job and caught the train down bush — or, as Mrs Turkney had put it, almost with a chuckle, Had Blown Through.
Perhaps the tongue-clicking with which most of the children heard the news expressed genuine sympathy, being what they were, even though they had all learnt long before this how it had come about. Even their asking if they might be taken by Barney Bynoe to visit her could have sprung from sympathy as much as curiosity about her looks without that one redeeming feature, the marcelled hair, and surely a small wish to gloat over one who had treated them so meanly. But Mrs Turkney said that the Poor Thing was refusing to see anyone, was lying in a darkened room, weeping her heart out . . . eeeee . . . ahem. They would be getting a special new teacher in a day or two, Mrs Alfie Candlemas, wife of the new Health Inspector, that nice tall dark man they had seen come round looking at the dunnies with Dr Cobbity.
The children cried out, ‘Alfie . . . dat name for boy!’
‘I know,’ said Mrs Turkney. ‘But that’s what she calls herself, I’m told . . . and she’s a very nice young lady, they say.’
‘How you spell name . . . Kennelmitch?’
‘It isn’t my job to teach you spelling . . . but it isn’t anything to do with Kennels, but Candles . . . and Christmas, like. Now, say it properly . . . Can-del-mass . . . Mrs Alfie Candlemas.’
The kids all sang it in their sing-song way, and went on singing it after Mrs Turkney had left them, gradually getting it back to the way they liked it — Kennelmitch.
They had another song to sing that night, softly in the dormitory, the first of many made for them by Prindy the Songmaker, strangely, or perhaps not really so in the circumstances, to that tune which evidently had previously so offended his ears, Barney Google.
Barney Google, wit’ his great big googley eyes,
Go long Hospital, gitchim great big surprise,
Mitchis Lilypon’ got no hair . . .
Now she cryin’: ‘Where, Oh, where,
Where gone my Barney, wit’ his great big googley eyes?’
When Mrs Alfie Candlemas arrived at the Compound it was in regal style, not because there was anything queenly about the slight young thing; but she was riding in a Rolls Royce — and a Rolls, whatever its age or condition, is like royalty, for ever royal. It was quite an old bus, and battered from a long hard journey overland. But even the kids crowding the fence, saw the difference in it from other cars the way they stared; and the Turkneys said frankly, ‘Well, what d’you know . . . a Rolls Royce!’ And the Candlemases, because both of them were there, smiled apologetically, as common people do who come by such uncommon things. Mrs Candlemas showed that she was a nice lady from the moment of arrival by waving to the children and wanting to go to them first, instead of up to have a drink with the Turkneys. She also kissed Mrs Turkney on the hard hairy cheek in greeting.
Naturally the first thing that had to be done over the drinks up on Turkney’s potted-palm and fern-hung verandah was to explain that Alfie business. The lady explained that properly her name was Aelfrieda, an old Saxon name, the feminine of Alfred, and meaning the same thing, enchanted. She said this with a pretty girlish laugh, adding, ‘Rat-bag!’ But what a dainty bag for rats! That’s what Mr Turkney’s pop-eyes plainly said, a fact that did not miss his old pudding-bag of a missus, the way her own eyes narrowed slightly. Alfie didn’t say it, but it was probable that she’d been given the name because of her funny little pixie-like pointe
d ears and that her father, of whom she spoke with the affection of a little girl, My Daddy, was surely a romantic type. She was talkative. In no time she had told of her origins, her vicissitudes, her aspirations. She was not beautiful. Her little turned-up nose and over-wide mouth left her looks far short of perfection. But it was truly a pretty face. Her cheeks were darkly rosy, her eyes quite black, her brows too, while there was a hint of black hair on her wide and mobile upper lip and on those pixie ears. Her hair, however, a curly mop, was brown. She said she was from Cornish stock on her father’s, My Daddy’s, side.
Daddy was Silas Tripconny, originally, a schoolteacher by profession (as she herself was by training) turned politician, as which he had been something of a celebrity in Federal Labor politics, but now in the political wilderness and writing and lecturing for a living. She said, ‘Poor Daddy . . . the pangs of plebiscites are too much for him now.’ But it seemed that he had passed on his yearning for a better world with his genes, because, as she said, ‘Frank and I are determined to leave the world a better place than when we came into it . . . aren’t we, darling?’
Frank’s smile was answer enough. It said: Anything you say, my enchanted one. But it wasn’t the vapid smile of a man simply lost in love. As he turned it on the others it curled slightly as if in challenge, as if to add: She is truly a fairy, and being her consort makes me a fairy king.
She told how they had married with the intention of going to some land of poverty, ignorance, and disease: ‘Where we could use our qualifications,’ she said. ‘There are plenty of doctors and nurses and Bible-thumpers going into places like India, Malaya. What they want is teachers and sanitary engineers . . . their need is first education and sanitation. What’s the good of food and physic in the midst of ignorance and filth? We came to Frank’s job here as a sort of stepping-stone to Asia, just across the way. I was only going to write for the time being, while we got together enough money to go on. I hadn’t any idea of all this.’ She waved a hand in a way to indicate the squalor of the Compound as a whole. ‘Down South we didn’t realise an Aboriginal Problem existed. We thought they’d just about died out, except for a few pockets living happily in reserves in remote places untouched by whites. My Daddy often used to speak of the great wrong we’d done them. I hadn’t any idea we were still doing it . . . and how! We were appalled as we came overland, getting further and further North, at what we saw . . . and the hostility of whites if you said anything! Why go to Asia, we asked ourselves? Our job’s here . . . right here. I saw Dr Cobbity, and asked if he could find me something to do. He’s awfully nice, isn’t he. He said, not just yet . . . but big things are coming up. I realise from what he told me that it’s a terrific task. Everybody against you . . . even the unfortunates themselves. But I’ve so wanted to be in it. Frank’s all right. He’s got surveys coming up, looking for leprosy, malaria, VD and things. But poor little me! There were only the Bible-bashers . . . and . . . I hope you’re not religious . . . but my Daddy’s a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. And suddenly there’s this lovely job offered me. Poor Miss Lilyponds . . . I do feel sorry for her . . . but I’m awfully glad, too. I feel even as if it was something fatal . . . fateful, I mean . . . as if it were done by someone deliberately for me.’
Poor Fellow My Country Page 48