The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  ‘Sir, one minute!’

  ‘I have the returns to certify, and those cursed reports to write.’

  ‘In Sydney I was called to the attorney-general’s office.’

  Logan paused at the door. ‘What of it?’

  ‘I was questioned about Swann.’

  ‘Cowper, what does this matter? What could you add to the affidavit you swore here, before me? Swann died of dysentery. You swore to it, and so did Spicer and so did Parker.’

  ‘And I was questioned about Lieutenant Bell.’

  ‘I expected it. I wrote to Macleay and asked that you be examined on the subject. He must have instructed the attorney-general.’

  Henry slapped himself on the forehead. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Cowper, just before you left for Sydney you told me that Lieutenant Bell had come to you after Swann died and suggested that you support a charge against me of undue severity. You refused. Very proper. Your only mistake was in keeping it from me. While you were in Sydney I decided that your story ought to be disclosed. And what better chance, with you on the spot? Is that amazing? I have nothing to hide.’

  ‘I wish he would come in and sit down,’ said Henry in a tired voice.

  Logan glanced at the clock. ‘I can’t hold the mail beyond dawn tomorrow.’ But he returned and sat down, while Henry, with exaggerated weariness and decrepitude, let himself down into the chair at his desk.

  On the desk was the beginning of a letter. ‘My dear father, I write you immediately on my return to inform you of my safe passage and to assure you . . .’ Henry picked it up and dropped it into a drawer of his desk. ‘The attorney-general asked me if I could recall Bell’s exact words,’ he said. ‘I said it was too long ago. It is. But I remember the gist of them well enough. And I tell you, sir, that if I were Smith Hall’s lawyer, I should call Bell as a witness for the defence.’

  ‘Let him be called!’

  ‘A man of good repute,’ said Cowper in a tone of warning.

  ‘Who was moved by personal animosity.’

  ‘That would be decided by the court. If I were Smith Hall’s lawyer, I would call Vincent, too.’

  ‘Vincent!’ Logan flung back his head and laughed.

  ‘A clergyman.’ Again Henry spoke on a note of warning.

  ‘A weak meddling fool.’

  ‘Stationed here for nine months. Recalled at his own request.’

  ‘And at mine. Most urgently, at mine.’

  ‘That is so. All the same, I would call him. And I would call Assistant Surgeon Lister too.’

  Logan leaned forward in his chair, put a fist on the desk. ‘Why, man, what evidence adverse to me could Lister give?’

  ‘He came to relieve me last year. He found the duties so distasteful that he asked to be returned to Sydney.’

  ‘He believed he would be treating only officers and their families. When he discovered his mistake he came to me in the proper way—’ Logan suddenly broke off, thrust his reddening face across the desk at Henry. ‘An honourable man!’ He thumped the desk. ‘A man of my own regiment!’

  ‘Oh, true,’ said Henry, ‘he wouldn’t wish to give evidence against you. But he would be on oath. And who knows what an honourable man may feel obliged to say on oath?’

  ‘Why, man, exactly what he said to me.’

  ‘Or to me—which was that he couldn’t stand the floggings.’

  ‘Well, sir, a good man may have a weak stomach.’

  ‘And that he thought them cruel and barbarous.’

  ‘Cowper, you lie!’

  Henry drew down his upper lip, scratched delicately beside one nostril, then beside the other. ‘I am glad I am sober,’ he said then. ‘Had I been drunk I would no doubt have challenged you. Well, we are spared that. I shan’t ask you to apologise. I know you are incapable of it. It would be almost more trouble than a duel. Besides, you are sorry. I see very clearly that you are sorry.’

  Logan gave a single sound, half laughter, half disgust. ‘It is the same with Lister’s words as with Bell’s. You can’t recall them exactly, and have distorted the gist.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Henry languidly.

  ‘And it is amusing, d’you know? to hear you speak as if I am to be on trial. I am not. Smith Hall is to be on trial.’

  ‘There is no saying what will come out at a trial for libel. The name of Patrick Grady may come out. Now, captain, don’t tell me you don’t recall Grady.’

  ‘I recall him. But if we are to mull over every mishap—’

  ‘He calls it a mishap,’ said Henry to the ceiling.

  ‘—every mishap,’ repeated Logan, rising to his feet, ‘the cutter will go down to the Isabella without my report in her mailbag.’

  Henry also rose to his feet. ‘Ah well, I expect at the worst you may count on me. Like Parker and Spicer, I have my post and my pay, and no doubt I shall protect them. Yes, if the worst comes, and Grady’s case comes to light at the Smith Hall trial, I think you may count on me. True, I am of vile repute, but in defence of my post and my pay I shall draw on my father’s credit, and use it for all it is worth. Unless a certain mood comes upon me—and it happens sometimes even when I am sober—a perverse mood, a truth-telling mood. Oh, dear me, captain. Oh, gracious, I hope that doesn’t happen. But now I will be serious, sir, if only to remove from your face that look of excessive contempt. In the past, my shocking actions made certain persons wish to displace me. I was spared for my father’s sake. I would pass on the favour. I make nothing of Captain Clunie being sent in place of Bainbrigge, because it could mean nothing. But you are aware of danger. I know you well, and you show it. You know there is official criticism of the number of runaways. That’s the danger at your back door. Don’t let it divert you from the one at the front. Smith Hall’s at the front. Don’t go to Sydney innocent and unprepared. Ah, but you are not listening.’ Henry broke into laughter. ‘I see you have a speech ready, and only wait for me to finish.’

  ‘Indeed, Cowper, I have listened. Listened with astonishment. Man, you have a maggot—’

  But seeing Cowper raise a hand, he broke off. The footsteps approaching in the corridor, tripping and scuffling and accompanied by chatter and broken cries, suggested a group of big children, but it was four women who appeared across the doorway, a washing gang from the female factory. Craning their necks, looking into the office with expectant gap-toothed grins, they saw Logan, and immediately all were silent and every head was turned front to display a rigid profile. Their male overseer, sufficiently in the rear to be warned by the change in them, shouted at them with terrible anger as he passed, warning them to look very sharp. All the footsteps, even and controlled now, continued down the corridor and died away as entered the various rooms.

  Henry Cowper was looking with amusement at the commandant’s face. ‘Polly and Nell and Mary and Margery,’ he said softly.

  Logan also spoke softly. ‘You were once a good friend to my family, but in my efforts to bring order and decency to this place, I have come to see your laxity as my greatest obstacle.’

  ‘But that is an old charge,’ said Henry, still smiling. ‘Come to the new one. You were about to say I have a maggot in the brain.’

  ‘I was. And I was also about to say that I have no fear of Smith Hall, and will show none, nor any great preparedness either, but will treat him with the same disdain the governor shows to those who slander him. And for the same reason—that my conscience is as clear as his. And I also say this—I have the greatest admiration for the system of punishment and reform that he and I—and you, sir; I would remind you of that—are privileged to serve. It allows for change if change is earned and deserved, but does not foster weakness and dependence. And I have the greatest admiration for the man who administers that system in this colony. Yes, and loyalty, sir. Loyalty to that man and
that system. One may criticise the system in detail—I do!—but to criticise it in toto is to talk like a Yankee traitor. Oh, you may blink your eyes, Cowper, and shake your head, and whisper to yourself, and try to make a joke of what I say. But if that system is undermined and brought down, it will be the end of British power. And that, sir, will be the end in this world of justice itself.’

  At intervals Henry had been whispering, ‘He means it, you know.’ He watched the commandant leave the room, then turned and addressed the clock on the wall.

  ‘He really does mean it, you know.’

  He took a bottle of rum from a drawer of his desk, uncorked it, and took a long drink. ‘It is like talking to a horse,’ he said.

  He put the rum back in the drawer. ‘Who knows he must reply, so gives a noble neigh.’

  Shaking his head and tutting, he opened another drawer and took out the unfinished letter to his father.

  ‘. . . I write immediately on my return to assure you of my safe passage, and to assure you . . .’

  He picked up his pen, frowned as he dipped it.

  ‘. . . that the first task of my free time will be to compose that Account of the Spiritual State of the Settlement which you have requested of me. At the earliest opportunity I also mean to send my brother Macquarie the promised case of insects which he has awaited so patiently. Unhappily, free time at present is exactly what I lack. The hospital is full, and only ten minutes ago, three beds were set up in the corridor . . .’

  Henry began to droop as he wrote, all his animation draining away. Presently he threw down the pen, jumped to his feet, rushed at the clock, and stopped the pendulum. Back in his chair, he took the bottle of rum from the first drawer and set it squarely on the desk. He opened the second drawer and drew out a handful of letters at random and spread them over the desk. Most were from his father, but some were from his brothers, sister, and stepmother, and some, like the one still directly in front of him, were begun by himself and abandoned. Gloomily drinking, he picked out those from his father and snatched at a phrase here and there.

  ‘May the Lord be with you and grant you abundant . . .’

  ‘. . . would also welcome an account of your own Spiritual Progress . . .’

  ‘. . . now that the governor’s eldest son is saying his lessons with me, pro tempore . . .’

  Henry then read snatches of his own.

  ‘. . . would have replied before, but a little rheumatism in the hands . . .’

  ‘. . . for poor Macquarie, but unhappily there is no one here at present who understands the preservation of insects.’

  ‘. . . and after Divine Service last Sunday, one man, of the most abandoned type, feelingly thanked me.’

  ‘Oh,’ he cried when he read this last. ‘Oh, what a whopper!’

  Enlivened, he flung them all back into the drawer. He took a long drink, then set before him a clean sheet of paper. He picked up his pen, dipped it.

  ‘An Account of the Spiritual State of the Settlement for my father, who believes in God but not the Devil.

  ‘Your son believes in God and the Devil.

  ‘Murray believes in God and the Devil. When he has supervised a flogging he comes in and sits with his hands over his eyes and shivers like a little dog.

  ‘The Commandant believes in the Devil and King George the Fourth.

  ‘Lieutenant Edwards believes in God the Superior Officer. ‘Mrs Bulwer, whom you have met, believes in God the headmaster and the junior dominie His Son.

  ‘The commandant’s wife believes in God the lucky charm, like a hare’s foot, which belief puts her with all the rest.

  ‘For all the rest, officers and officials and prisoners and soldiers, all, all, are pagans. They believe in ghosts, or arts, or in the dark sensational spirits of rocks and rivers and trees.

  ‘There may be one secret Christian among them, but I have not found him out.

  ‘I forgot to say that the commandant’s sister by marriage believes in a God called Reform.

  ‘The iron gangs enter the chapel first, father, so that the official party shall not be subjected to the indecent clanking of their chains as they mount to the gallery. While they mount, the other prisoners file in below, including some wives and children, who have been mustered in the barracks yard with the rest and inspected for cleanliness. Then come the soldiers, some with wives and children too. I wait, with my head bowed. The official party comes last, bright and solemn and mildly stately. Sometimes I am not waiting, but am tardy, and appear as suddenly as a jack-in-the-box.

  ‘Only once have I performed divine service before an enthusiastic congregation. Bishop the scourger was drowned just before Christmas. On Christmas Day the prisoners sang so loud and fervently that the very roof sang and shouted. The commandant stood in utter silence, as red and puffed as if he would burst. When the singing reached its loudest and most triumphal he abruptly left the chapel. He could not have them punished. “We thought he would be glad, sir,” a prisoner told me later, “to hear us joyful because of the birth of our Lord Jesus. Who is Our Redeemer, Sir.”’

  Henry was now writing fast and contentedly. He would not send the account, but even the fantasy of doing so was enough to release his energies. Though blunt and open with most people, he almost invariably lied to his father, saying what he believed would please him rather than what was true. He was never critical of his father. In common with most others, he saw him as a saintly man, and thought it a mark of his own unworthiness that he was bored, uneasy, and dishonest when with him, uneasy at the thought of him when away, and that even the sight of his handwriting on a letter could fill him with guilt and dejection.

  In infancy Henry had been his mother’s angel child, his imperfections not then detracting from his graces, which were the obvious ones of a light frame, golden curls, innocent blue eyes, and a cherub mouth. His mother died on the eve of their embarkation for New South Wales, and it was necessary to postpone the journey until the Reverend Cowper could decently take another wife. Henry was nine when they arrived in Sydney, fourteen when his father apprenticed him to Doctor Redfern. With his master, he worked at the hospital in Macquarie Street, where, behind an eight foot wall, treatment was given to convicts, merchant seamen, and the very poor. Doctor Redfern had an outside practice and a smart gig. Henry lived in his house but spent all his working hours in the hospital. At seventeen he was appointed hospital assistant at twenty-five pounds a year and free rations. He did all the dressings, stood by at operations, and distributed the medicines, sometimes to the wrong patients. He was also delegated to attend floggings at the barracks and jail, the older men having discovered that one raw back is much like another. In Sydney at that time the pride of the punished men was in taking it, as they said, ‘like a stone’. Between each whirr and thud of the lash was a pause of officially ordained duration, and after his first revulsion had passed, Henry began to find the regularity of the sound soporific. As men were strapped in succession to the triangles, and the compulsory prison audience shifted and coughed, Henry, in a sunny spot, out of reach of splattering blood and shreds of flesh, was often half asleep on his feet.

  At the hospital, duty was alleviated in various ways. Opium was stolen and sold outside, spiritous medicines were drunk, convict nurses engaged in sexual romps, and pranks played with cadavers. Into the hospital as a visitor, with a cane and a cutaway coat, came Nobby Clark, a free rogue. He flicked up the tails of his coat and jumped his rump to the edge of a table. He raised his cane. Henry admired him to the point of besottedness. Nobody had ever called him Buck before. With the tip of his cane he counted the buttons on Henry’s waistcoat. The colony was a damned miserable place, he said. He and Henry would go to Batavia. ‘The Batavian women, Buck! Obedient but frisky!’ And he told Henry how they could get the money.

  When scandal about the hospital spread, and it came at last to an enqu
iry, it was said that Henry was in the hands not only of this Nobby Clark, but of two others equally wicked, a convict nurse and an assistant surgeon. Henry himself made no excuses at all. When he heard people speak of the things he had done, it didn’t seem as if they were speaking of him. It was as if two persons had inhabited his body, and the one that had dominated from the ages of fourteen to nineteen had died. At twenty, cleared of blame for his father’s sake, he left the colony to attend the Royal College of Surgeons in London. At twenty-five he was appointed to the penal station at Moreton Bay at one hundred and thirty-six pounds a year. At that time the bodily vigour of youth was still defending his mind from self knowledge. He could not have said exactly when that defence had fallen, and indeed only knew it had fallen because a time came when he could not get rid of the thought that he could easily have been one of these prisoners. If they deserved their present state, then so did he, and moreover, two persons had never inhabited his body, but only one.

  It had never occurred to him to censure his father for giving him to such a business at so early an age. Indeed, when he pondered the matter, he thought the act indicated such trustfulness on his father’s part that it proved rather than disproved his saintliness.

  He was now thirty, and earned one hundred and eighty-two pounds ten a year. The light figure was distorted by a drunkard’s paunch, the cherub’s mouth puckered and drooped, and the golden curls reduced to a thin mousy pelt. But after sexual activity with a woman the old gentle innocence would revive in his eyes, and these women, who were usually overseers’ wives or convicts, were always nudging him, or hugging him, and telling him that he was really just a little boy. Now, as he sat in his office chair, drinking and writing, he hummed snatches of hymns, and occasionally burst into the words.

  ‘Com-ing unto thee . . .’

  ‘I remember (he was writing) that when I first came to this place, and took the services on Sunday, I was ambitious to reach their hearts. What an impertinence! I now think how right they were to ignore me. Indeed, for them it was the only sensible and decent course. More than anything else, father, I believe this will convey to you my Spiritual Progress, or the regrettable lack of same.’