The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

Frances’s astonishment remained. ‘There are married convicts here?’

  ‘Certainly. The wives of the first-class convicts are allowed to join their husbands. It is an indulgence for good behaviour, a spur to weform. Your fwiends in Sydney who know so much cannot have known that. In your first letter to Mr Edmund Joyce, pway inform him.’

  ‘Who teaches the children?’

  ‘Amelia does her best.’

  ‘Perhaps I could help.’

  ‘To be sure, if it can be done without offence to Amelia. Wobert will not occupy much of your time. But you must also have some pleasure. There is the pianoforte, of course. I know you play. I fancy you don’t care for cards, but I am sure you dance. Oh, and you must know we are all mad for science on the settlement. You have seen the cases in the hall?’

  Frances had indeed seen the row of cedar cases in which, beneath glass, insects were pinned in rows or arranged in a wheel with an especially fine specimen as the hub. At home in Sligo there was a fox’s head in the hall, and a fish in a glass case, but she had never liked those, either. ‘I may ride, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘Well, we are short of horses . . .’

  But now the noise of shuffling and bumping outside made Letty hurry to open the door. ‘Be careful, Madge,’ she said.

  Madge Noakes appeared sideways in the doorway, rocking heavily from foot to foot, her upturned hands supporting one side of a desk. As she turned her back to shuffle into the room, Martin appeared on the far side of the desk. His eyes immediately sought Frances’s, but all her attention was fixed on the desk. ‘Mama’s desk!’ she wanted to say, but an instinctive scruple made her suppress any such expression of intimacy and delight in the presence of these two, in whose lives she could imagine neither.

  She stood aside to give them room to pass, while Letty, opposite her at a distance of six feet or so, directed the operation. The two prisoners, their backs bowed by the pull of the desk, passed laboriously between them, Madge Noakes brushing so close to Frances that her smell, of sweat and soap and burnt fat, was strong in Frances’s nostrils, and the movement of her shoulders, shifting her neckerchief to and fro, disclosed, only inches away, the pale puckered gloss of a horizontal scar.

  Martin, passing with his back to Letty, was still trying to engage Frances’s eyes. Without looking directly at him, she was aware of his avidity, his determination to make her look; and when she did look, with a slipped glance that seemed, even to her, an accident, she was shocked by his expression of beggarly gratitude. No punishment having come to him, he knew that she had said nothing of the morning’s incident, and had assumed that she had refrained for his sake. The heat of his look was telling her so.

  Pinned by that look, anger and offendedness seemed her only escape. She would tell Letty the instant he left.

  Gingerly, bandying their legs, they set the desk against the wall. It was of mahogany trimmed with brass. A bookcase with glass doors, flanked by pilasters, was set above the pigeon holes, and a pediment with urns on top of all. Memory suddenly brought Frances close to tears. She went forward and ran her fingers across its worn table. Letty came and stood beside her, smiling. Madge Noakes pulled a duster from her pocket and gave the doors a flick. Martin, with a glance at Frances and a swagger of his shoulders, hitched up his trousers.

  Letty opened one of the doors of the bookcase. ‘Thank you, Madge . . . Martin . . .’

  Without the ballast of the desk, Martin’s retreating footsteps on the polished boards had a timid straggling sound far more penetrating than Madge Noakes’s busy thudding. Frances spoke as soon as she heard the door shut.

  ‘The sight of Martin reminded me. I heard him talking to Robert this morning. Mrs Harbin told me it is forbidden.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I couldn’t hear his words.’

  ‘More to the point, p’waps, what did Wobert say. He picks up their words so fast.’

  Frances opened the other door of the bookcase. ‘I scarcely remember. I am glad it is still lined with the same green silk. Will he be punished?’

  ‘Alas, beginning to split. See?’

  ‘It hardly shows among the folds. Will he lose his privileges?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘It is not perished at all on this side.’

  ‘Cwying again!’

  ‘Mama’s desk!’

  ‘If you like, we shall give Martin another chance. Let us say nothing to Patwick. I shall speak to Martin and Wobert myself.’

  ‘Oh, very well. Letty, you ought not to lend it to me. Mama gave it to you.’

  ‘I don’t lend it. I give it. Mama didn’t know you would be the learned one. She would have wanted you to have it. You must have a place for your books. And you will compose your letters upon it. The cutter takes the mail to the Isabella at dawn tomowwow. If you wish, you may sit down now and begin.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The commandant had left Collison at the door of the prisoners’ hospital and was walking alone down the corridor. The hospital was seldom busy in winter. As he looked in at the door of each room the eyes of the few men lying on pallets moved towards his own, their faces remaining as impassive as his. In one room, Fagan, the man attacked in the wheatfield, was being attended by a kneeling orderly.

  ‘Knowles, where is Mr Cowper?’

  ‘End room, sir.’

  In the end room Henry Cowper was applying liniment to Lazarus’s back. ‘Don’t tell me that,’ he was saying. ‘Boylan is dead.’

  ‘Ees with the blacks in the bush,’ replied the stooping man.

  ‘You lie,’ said Cowper. The soldier who had brought Lazarus, instead of staying at the door, had put himself at the window overlooking the river.

  ‘Sir,’ said Lazarus, ‘Boylan is in the bush.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you stay there, too?’

  ‘Why, happenin’ to fall in with the wrong tribe—’

  ‘What, they didn’t want you?’

  Still stooped, Lazarus pointed to his arm. ‘When they done that to me!’

  ‘Sensible savages! Here, I can do no more. Take your shirt.’

  ‘Boylan seized the arm of one, to stop ’im.’

  ‘Boylan’s ghost!’

  ‘Sir, Boylan ’isself, I say, though cut and painted like a savage.’

  When Logan entered, Lazarus’s head was in his shirt, and Cowper was corking his bottle of lotion. When he saw Logan he grinned and slapped the cork home with his open palm. A groan came from Lazarus as the rough shirt settled on his back. His head emerged from the neckband, he saw Logan, and drew himself carefully upright. The guard at the window was standing at rigid attention.

  ‘Why has this man come back to you, Mr Cowper?’

  ‘A fresh outbreak of bleeding, captain.’

  ‘He brought it on himself.’ He turned to Lazarus. ‘Yesterday you said nothing about meeting an absconder.’

  Lazarus, looking fixedly at the wall beside the commandant’s head, might have been imitating the soldier. He said nothing.

  ‘Although you were questioned at length.’

  Lazarus said nothing.

  Logan spoke to the soldier. ‘Take him back to his gang.’ And to Lazarus he said, ‘Tomorrow you go to the treadmill.’

  Lazarus and the guard left. ‘He shouldn’t go to the treadmill yet,’ said Cowper.

  ‘Your medical sanction is not needed for the treadmill. Which one was Boylan?’

  ‘Nor is my medical sanction needed for twenty-five lashes or less. Yet now they say twenty-five killed Swann. Don’t you remember Boylan? He ran at the end of twenty-eight, from this room, with two hundred of Bishop’s stripes on his back. Bishop was drowned three weeks later. Ah, now you remember!’ Cowper was peering with curiosity into Logan’s face. ‘Your memory is very bad,
captain.’

  ‘There is usually little enough to distinguish them. Lazarus can’t have seen Boylan.’

  ‘As you heard me tell him.’

  ‘Boylan didn’t long survive his escape.’

  ‘Well, to be sure, he didn’t intend to. Or he wouldn’t have run in that state, in that heat.’

  ‘Intentions are irrelevant. The fact is, his body came down the river.’

  ‘Said to be his body.’

  ‘Said to be by you, man.’

  ‘Ah, but was I sober? The thing had been in the river. Did I just give it a name, and go back to my dinner?’

  ‘Whose was it, if not Boylan’s?’

  ‘Some are unaccounted for.’

  ‘Dead. Dead, or with the tribes in the north. There’s none about here now, and there were none about at that time.’

  ‘One could have been making his way down from the north. It could have been his body.’

  ‘Boylan’s. It came down at a logical time after he ran. And you swore to it. Proof enough! I’m not sending men into the bush to take one of their ghosts.’

  ‘Nor would I, captain.’

  ‘And yet,’ said the commandant, ‘Lazarus is not stupid.’

  ‘Not at all stupid.’

  ‘Perhaps he saw a light-coloured native, with a slight look of Boylan. Boylan? A flat-nosed, heavy-browed Irish?’

  ‘A fair description.’

  ‘Then that is it. Either he is lying to make mischief, or he saw a black resembling Boylan.’

  ‘The commandant has constructed an answer,’ said Henry, addressing the ceiling. ‘He is wise. He is not of a nature to bear unanswered questions. They are so disorderly. In the same way, he says he has put down buggery among the men, because he cannot endure it, yet knows it impossible to suppress.’

  ‘You are a childish fellow, Cowper.’

  ‘Allowances are usually made. You can’t have come about Lazarus and Boylan, because you didn’t know about it. What have you come about?’

  ‘The black prisoner. But first, your quarterly declaration. In your absence Whyte told me he has had none from you for a year, in spite of repeated requests.’

  ‘Which particular quarterly—’

  ‘The one declaring you derive no advantage from your situation.’

  ‘That one! Shall I furnish one to cover the four quarters, or four different ones?’

  ‘Ask Whyte. I’ve no liking myself for all their declaring and counting and listing and classifying. It’s like wasps round the ears. But do it! Do it today.’

  ‘I will. What about the black prisoner?’

  ‘Wait. Fagan is still here. Why was he not sent back to work?’

  ‘He wasn’t fit.’

  ‘You said he was only bruised.’

  ‘There are degrees of bruising.’

  ‘Because you said it was slight, I let Bulbridge off with a hundred. Fagan goes back to his gang today. Now, the black prisoner. Have his irons been removed?’

  ‘As you instructed.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Henry.

  He led the way to a small room, unlocked the door, and stood back to let the commandant enter before him. The two pallets on the floor were unoccupied, but an aborigine sat against the wall. Three weeks before, one of a hunting party passing by the settlement, he had been denounced by a prisoner as one of the natives who had speared a boat’s crew up the river. Now he sat with forehead resting on drawn-up knees, arms hanging, hands trailing the floor. The flesh of his legs and arms had sunk to the bone, and the grease and beeswax had worn from his hair and left it hanging in limp strands.

  One of Henry’s hands was in a pocket. With the other he swung his keys a little. ‘He will die,’ he said.

  Hearing his voice, the man raised his head. His cheeks and forehead were symmetrically scarified and the septum of his nose pierced to hold a thin bone. Though he looked directly at the two men his face was that of a man who stares at nothing and whose thoughts have turned so deeply inward that the channels of outer communication have ceased to exist. His head remained upright, as though, having raised it, it was not worth moving it again. The upper part of his chest, revealed by this movement, was as elaborately scarified as his face. Staring at him, the commandant spoke in a hushed yet argumentative voice. ‘But he is not old.’

  ‘Murray says he looked young when he was brought in.’

  ‘And he is eating,’ stated Logan.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Enough to keep him alive?’

  ‘Enough to keep another man alive. He is dying.’

  Logan scowled with some kind of frustration. ‘Why is he dying?’

  ‘I think, because he wants to.’

  The commandant continued to stare with bewilderment and indignation at the man, whose eyes were like holes full of dark shining fluid, telling him nothing. ‘A man cannot die,’ argued the commandant, ‘only because he wants to.’

  ‘They say these can—offensive as that must be, captain, to an officer of the Diehards.’

  ‘Who says they can?’

  ‘Persons who have seen it. I have never seen it before. I am much impressed with the delicacy of the operation. Consider our crude European ways. We must cut or smash ourselves, or immerse ourselves, or blow part of our bodies away—or at the very least, put ourselves in a position where it is likely to be done for us. But these have only to sit, it seems, and summon death, and death obliges. Note the smell, captain. You have smelled death before. Murray doesn’t know whether to be disgusted or fascinated, to write a paper for the Royal Society or to stop his nose.’

  ‘Will he recover if he is set free?’

  ‘Reverse that stink? I don’t know. If they can work one miracle, perhaps they can work another.’

  ‘I doubt if the evidence against him is strong enough to hold him.’

  ‘It has held him until now.’

  ‘A prisoner’s word.’

  ‘You took him captive on that word.’

  ‘I hoped to get support for it. I haven’t got it.’

  ‘It is true,’ mused Henry, as if to himself, ‘that the authorities in Sydney have become marvellously touchy about dead blacks.’

  ‘I can’t hold him without that support.’

  ‘Being prodded by London, you know, where they say, in effect, that we must dispossess the natives with kindness. Yes, in London the word is kindness, kindness, all the way. You see, I bring you the gossip. And there is more.’

  Logan dropped pale eyelids against this offensiveness. ‘We will have to let the man go.’

  ‘You will let him go. I will let him go. But will he go?’

  Logan went to the door and opened it to its fullest extent. He went back to the man on the floor. He stretched an arm, the forefinger pointing into the doorway.

  ‘Go!’

  There was certainly a flicker in the man’s eyes. Perhaps he looked at the door. But he did not move.

  ‘Go!’

  When again there was no response, the commandant’s face became a blotched red and the flesh beneath his eyes began to bulge. Henry, who had been inclined to titter at the first command, grew solemn-faced and stepped quickly between the two men.

  ‘Sir, perhaps he cannot.’

  The commandant’s arm dropped. His step backwards could have been an admission, the slight inclination of his head a nod of thanks. He took a few steps about the room, then halted and looked along his shoulder at the man.

  ‘He’s from a tribe near the Limestone Station. I’ll have him carried over the river. At once. He will be given a sack of food. Meat. Sugar. Bread.’

  ‘And you will leave him there?’

  ‘His weapons may be left with him.’r />
  Henry, standing at the window of his office in the hospital, saw the aborigine, on the opposite side of the river, rise slowly to his feet. At that distance he looked like a toy made of dark twigs. The barge was coming back across the river. Standing at Henry’s side, Logan was watching from beneath a hand held across his brows. ‘He is up,’ he said. Then, in a voice strained with anxiety, ‘On his feet, is he?’

  ‘Why, on his feet and moving.’

  The man was walking unsteadily, but had found the strength to carry the sack of food in one hand, his spear in the other. The commandant was silent. The office clock ticked on the wall. After the aborigine had taken about ten paces he began to lope.

  ‘Upon my word,’ said Henry, ‘Murray should be running at his side, taking notes.’

  The native was moving now at a steady pace. At first he struck puffs of dust from the ground, for he was travelling on the track of the working parties from the Limestone Station; but presently he moved off the track and entered long pale blowing grass that hid him up to his shins. Dark eucalypts stood in this grass. He passed behind a single tree, then out into the blowing grass again, then behind a small clump. Henry, familiar with that tract of land, knew when he disappeared suddenly that he had dropped down to walk along the bed of a shallow creek.

  Henry turned away from the window first. ‘Gone,’ he said, ‘to disperse his death among the eucalypts.’

  The commandant also turned from the window. ‘He was shamming.’

  ‘Oh!’ cried Henry. He burst into laughter. ‘What a man you are! There’s satisfaction in such consistency!’

  ‘Shamming,’ said Logan again. ‘Men in health cannot will themselves to die. I was in the retreat from Salamanca. I saw many a man lie down in the mud—’

  ‘I know,’ said Henry, ‘you told me.’

  ‘—lie down in the mud to die. But they were sick men. Or men whose endurance had failed, and who had to rest even though they died for it. But that man was not sick, and he was well-rested. He was shamming. And later, when I was in France, in—’

  ‘In the occupation. You have told me all this. Suicide had become a fad—’

  ‘A fad. Yes, I would call it that. France being a mortified country. Young men were blowing their heads off or cutting their throats, but I saw none sit down in health and waste away.’ The commandant started towards the door. ‘The black was shamming.’