The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  ‘Was I sober?’

  ‘You are sober now.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Henry. ‘Having just boasted of my special licence I can’t deny it so soon. Well, I shan’t. I’ll speak my mind. I’ll answer any question you want to put. Firstly to curry favour with you in case you take the command, and secondly out of sympathy for your delicate position here.’

  ‘It ought not to be delicate,’ Clunie said promptly. ‘I’ve been sent to take Bainbrigge’s place. That was my only clear instruction. Though it was implied that if the fifty-seventh goes to India the command would be mine.’

  ‘Or if Mr Smith Hall brings convincing witnesses—’

  ‘Now we are back to our conversation on the Isabella. Witnesses to what? To murder?’

  Henry sent out puffs of smoke for a long time in silence. ‘Returns of punishment,’ he said at last, ‘are sent to Macleay. Macleay may pass them to General Darling, to the attorney general, or to anyone they concern. So how would any commandant feel? He would feel that not to be stopped is to be sanctioned.’

  ‘Quite. And against that sanction, what harm can Smith Hall’s witnesses do?’

  ‘Smith Hall is entitled to trial by jury. And times are changing. Public opinion is changing. Punishment accepted as natural a few years ago is called wicked today by a small minority, and harsh by a larger minority. And tomorrow or the next day, the majority will join the chorus. The tide is on the turn, captain, and he—’ Henry did not bother to specify whom he meant—‘he is caught in the swirl. And the wonderful thing is, he doesn’t know it. Oh, he knows there’s some turbulence about. He knows that, and worries by fits and starts. But for the most part, he thinks it’s elsewhere, and that he’s swimming along as usual.’

  Clunie turned towards the lighted drawing room, and through the drifting smoke from Henry’s pipe, blue in the darkness, regarded the group at the card tables. ‘Perhaps he’ll swim through the turbulence.’

  ‘Perhaps he will. But not easily. Spicer told me you examined the returns of labour and punishment.’

  ‘Examined? I looked at them, certainly, for what they could teach me of my duties.’

  ‘What did you make of them?’

  ‘I had never seen returns before.’

  ‘You must have made something of them.’

  ‘They do seem to reflect the order and productivity of the place.’

  ‘Oh, order and productivity, yes. Is that all you noticed?’

  But Clunie did not regard himself as having a special licence. He had no intention of saying what else he had noticed. Especially to a drinking man, he would not say he had noticed that to be tried was to be convicted, or that lashes were given only in twenty-fives, fifties, one hundreds, and two hundreds. Why, he had asked himself, were there no thirties, forties, sixties? And as for the jump from one to two hundred, it had made him shake his head in disbelief. At the very least, it suggested a recklessness, a wild impatience, but even to himself, Clunie would not admit so soon that it suggested anything more. And to Henry he only said, ‘I’ve been here two days. The commandant has been here more than four years. He may very well have excellent reasons for what he does.’

  ‘Oh, certainly,’ said Henry in mild derision.

  Elizabeth Robertson had brought the children into the room, and Clunie saw Logan turn sideways in his chair to lift his daughter on to his knee. Robert, standing before the blue sofa, where Frances O’Beirne still sat with Amelia Bulwer, was proffering a sea shell to his aunt, and in the charming gravity of her acceptance, she met with Clunie’s approval for the first time. ‘A woman like Mrs Logan,’ he remarked, ‘must be a considerable influence for moderation.’

  ‘Yes. Even on her husband, perhaps, eventually. Did you see the returns for ’twenty-eight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A bad year. Not one of us survived it unchanged. Drought. The entire crop failed. Everyone on half rations. Trachoma, dysentery, scurvy. And ship after ship bringing more men to feed rather than food for those already here. It’s apparent you came across the name of Patrick Grady.’

  ‘I don’t know what makes it apparent,’ said Clunie, ‘but in fact, I did.’

  ‘You could find it in the hospital register as well, disclosing the same thing. Last year Bowman came to inspect us. Bowman’s the chief medical officer. All the records were open to him. Why not? The commandant had nothing to hide. His conscience is perfectly clear. Well, I don’t know what Bowman did or didn’t come across in the records, but I do know this—he went back to Sydney full of praise for the good effects of the commandant’s strict discipline. Those were his exact words. Yet here we have Smith Hall saying one of those effects was murder.’

  ‘Of Swann’s, not of Grady’s.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, they’ve got the wrong man.’ Henry spoke almost with benevolence. ‘Such things happen. Out of general rumour one name emerges, and it’s the wrong name. Perhaps Swann died of his twenty-five, perhaps of dysentery. There’s a doubt. There’s no doubt in Grady’s case. And yet in neither case can it rightly be called murder. Or so I tell myself.’

  ‘Smith Hall’s language is undoubtedly excessive.’

  ‘I tell myself that, too. And I remind myself that a soldier died under a sentence by the governor. And I ask myself how that gentleman viewed it. A casualty, sir, a simple casualty. And yet, there have been questions asked at home about that simple casualty. In the House of Commons.’

  Henry moved to the edge of the verandah to knock out his pipe, while Clunie, looking into the room, saw that Lieutenant Edwards had risen from the card table and was sauntering about bestowing his broad uncritical gaze on persons and objects and views through windows. Henry rose and came to stand beside Clunie. ‘You know I gave my medical sanction to Grady’s two hundred?’

  ‘If the man was in normal health, you would not have a case for withholding it.’

  ‘Not officially, no. Yet I wish my conscience were clear.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it is not,’ said Clunie with formality.

  ‘I insist it was no murder, yet perhaps could be persuaded that it was.’

  ‘Cowper, here is Edwards.’

  ‘I shan’t talk to a military man about men dying because they want to, and in any case that does rather raise the question of why they should want to.’

  ‘Are we never to hear the end of that black?’ asked Lieutenant Edwards, stepping through the doors.

  Henry lifted his watch from his pocket and carried it to the light from the door. ‘Eighteen minutes.’

  He went without another word. Edwards burst into laughter. ‘Cowper’s a real original.’

  ‘Do you like this station?’ asked Clunie suddenly.

  Oh, yes, it’s well enough. The shooting’s good, you know. There’s no hunting. One can’t hunt kangaroo, though Cowper does. Never lend him a horse, sir. He lamed his, and it had to be shot. It gets beastly hot in summer, of course, but not as hot as Madras, or the Indies. Yes, I like it well enough. The commandant’s the best of good fellows, and Mrs Logan is always as you see her tonight.’

  ‘Are Lieutenant Bulwer and Lieutenant Harbin cousins?’ asked Frances.

  ‘Why, no, but you are not the only one to remark on their likeness. It pleases them so much, I assure you, they are such friends. We were speaking of the samplers. At first there was no cloth to be had, but I was not to be thwarted. “The girls will learn fine sewing!” That was my vow. How you would have laughed to see me hunting up old petticoats . . .’

  Frances stopped listening again. Amelia had welcomed Letty’s suggestion that Frances should help her teach the children, and had not left the topic since. Finding that speaking of the children led Amelia, at regular intervals and by oblique means, to her own virtues, Frances had become bored and had contrived a pattern of murmurs, appreciative or acquiescent,
which fell roughly in the right places and left most of her attention free, at first for Henry Cowper and Captain Clunie, and then, after they went to the verandah, for the group round the card table.

  She could see only Patrick Logan’s back, so was not too much disturbed by the childish dread he continued to arouse in her. Mr Spicer and Mr Hansord she dismissed, not out of lack of interest, but out of frustrated curiosity, for by their very blandness and correctness such men always seemed to her positively enigmatic. Lieutenant Edwards, so handsome and pleasant, it was impossible not to like; but in her glances at the other two lieutenants, Bulwer and Harbin, a concentration of interest had soon appeared, and she now noticed with surprise that the likeness she had just commented on to Amelia was fostered rather than real: a matter of hair dressed in exactly the same style, a similar way of narrowing the eyes and letting the mouth hang open, and gestures they seemed slyly to copy from one another like boys playing jokes before their superiors. Once they both leaned over the table at the same time, heads together, to admire a brooch on Letty’s dress, and at another time they turned these same over-admiring glances on Louisa’s silver necklaces, exclaiming like birds in the same nest, and causing such an affectation of weariness in Louisa that she seemed to find a playing card almost too heavy to lift. When the children were brought in they bent over them in the same way, but the children had carelessly whirled out of their reach, Lucy to go to her father and Robert to present Frances with the shell she still held in her hand.

  Suddenly arrested by a remark of Amelia’s, Frances turned back to her. ‘But I thought the school was only for the prisoners’ children.’

  ‘No, my dear. A few are soldiers’ children. But you may judge of their quality by the fact that their parents permit them to learn their lessons beside the others. They are all much of a muchness. It takes the ut-most determination to draw them towards the light.’

  ‘What light?’ asked Frances, before she could stop herself.

  ‘The light of Mrs Bulwer’s own opinions,’ interposed Henry Cowper. He had just come in from the verandah.

  ‘I hope I am not so proud,’ said Amelia, steadily smiling at him. ‘I meant the light of Our Lord.’

  ‘You distinguish, madam?’ He bowed and continued on his way to the card table. Letty saw him coming and rose to meet him.

  ‘Henwy, you are leaving so soon?’

  ‘Yes. To give you a chance to serve your plaguey weak punch.’

  ‘Oh, Henwy . . .’

  Though Captain Clunie left soon after the toasts to Miss O’Beirne and himself were drunk, his early departure drew a very different response from the night before. The commandant, instead of the repressed resentment he had shown then, clasped his hand and cheerfully told him to sleep well, and in Laetitia Logan’s animated sweetness he could detect no trace of the flat dismay that for all her gallant wiles she had then been unable to hide.

  And yet, what in the situation had changed? Though conscious all day of change proceeding, Clunie had been too much at a stretch in receiving information to sense from exactly what quarter it was coming and in what it consisted. But now, as the door shut behind him, clipping off the sound of Mrs Logan’s piano and Lieutenant Edwards’s song, and he crossed the verandah and descended to the garden, he asked himself again what had caused such a change. He had received his assigned servants on taking occupation of Bainbrigge’s cottage that afternoon, but seeing no danger to himself on the short walk to the commandant’s house, he had come unaccompanied.

  The moon was in its first quarter and the road outside the garden rather dark. No change, thought Clunie, had taken place in his own explanation of why he had been sent. In Sydney he had decided that soon after Governor Darling had instructed Logan to prosecute Smith Hall for libel, rumours of the intentions of the defence witnesses, combined with news from England of questions asked about his own severity, had made him realise that his personal animosity for Smith Hall had trapped him into rashness. He had realised, in fact, that at the trial the cat may jump in unexpected ways, and had therefore resolved to send Clunie to Moreton Bay in case scandal should make it necessary to remove the commandant.

  All this Clunie had gathered from gossip or inferred from the very imprecision of his instructions, but much of what he had heard on the voyage, and had seen and heard today, had confirmed him in his opinion. Moreover, the one apparent contradiction had now been resolved.

  Clunie’s passage down the rough, dark, and unfamiliar road was so uncertain that he regretted not having brought a servant, after all, to light his way with a torch. The perplexing contradiction had been that since a soldier had died under one of Darling’s punishments, it would be dangerous (to Darling himself) to remove Logan because a prisoner had died under one of his. The solution probably hoped for was the posting of the fifty-seventh to India, but if that did not occur in time to save the situation, and revelations at the trial still made Logan’s removal expedient, some reason other than harshness must be found. Given the commandant’s efficiency in agriculture and building, his enterprise and courage in exploration, and the positive encouragement to strict discipline given him by the governor, Clunie had not been able to imagine what other reason could be devised. It was not until today that he asked himself what better reason they could give—and what reason more acceptable to London—than that Logan’s security measures were inefficient, allowing the escape of men who goaded the natives into aggression. By his worried preoccupation with these two matters, the commandant had given Clunie an answer he himself did not know, but had only sensed, so far, like an animal sniffing danger on the wind.

  Clunie was passing the cottage Murray shared with Hansord. The darkened window must be Hansord’s, whom he had left at the commandant’s house, busy at the buffet supper. Against the muslin curtain of the other, candlelight threw the shadow of a man’s head inclined to reading or prayer. Murray had been here only a few months. Pious and sensitive, how would he adapt to his tasks? Clunie felt sorry for Murray in his loneliness, for Logan in his teasing intimations of betrayal, and for the prisoners in their debasement. If he could palliate the condition of any of them without putting himself in peril he would do so. Otherwise, like any other sensible man, he would harden his heart. His weatherboard cottage, built in Sydney and shipped in segments to the settlement, had housed the first and second commandants. As Clunie approached he smelled burning fat and guessed that the light from the servants’ quarters came from a cruzie lamp. Tired, he had lost sight of the question asked as he stepped down from the commandant’s verandah, but now, ascending the two steps to his own small verandah, the answer came to him.

  What had changed was simply the commandant himself. At some point in the day, in a sudden and irrational reversal, Logan had decided that his fears of Clunie were unwarranted, that he was the finest of fellows, and that all was well. Clunie had already convicted him of recklessness and impatience, and now he called him confoundedly moody as well. His door was bolted. As he called for admittance and for light, he decided there was a danger to himself in Logan’s moodiness. He would be on guard against it. The two windows nearest the door were suffused with golden light, then the bolts were drawn, and the door opened.

  *

  As soon as the door shut behind Hansord and Spicer (always the last to leave) Big Annie went to the inside privy to take the buckets to the cesspool. She was a daily woman from the female factory, but tonight would sleep in the house. Letty was already in the bedroom and had rung for Elizabeth Robertson to bring warm water. The commandant went through the house testing locked doors, and then took his candle to the back door and waited for Annie to reappear. He saw her safely into the house, and was locking and bolting the door, when the sound of footsteps in the garden made him throw it open again. Frances, breathless, was leaping up the steps. ‘I thought,’ she said, panting, ‘I was locked out.’

  ‘Where have you been?’


  ‘Why—to the privy.’

  ‘How dare you, miss! That is for the use of the female servants. You are to use the one inside.’

  ‘The bucket was gone.’

  ‘When that happens, you must wait. Your sister must have told you that.’

  ‘She did. But I don’t care, I don’t like using it.’ She was combating her fear of him with a childish boldness. ‘It is like an invalid stool. Such things are used only in sickrooms. It hardly seems clean.’

  He had controlled his anger. ‘I will decide what is clean and what is not. Goodnight to you.’

  ‘Well,’ said Letty when he told her, ‘I can’t teach her ev’wything in one day.’

  ‘True. But pray explain to her that it is indiscreet by day and indecent by night.’ He was unhooking the neckband of his jacket. ‘I will not have the women of my household,’ he said with his chin raised, ‘exposed to the eyes of the gardeners in their comings and goings for such purposes.’

  ‘I will tell her, my love.’ Letty had finished washing, and now she picked up a towel and moved away from the wash stand to let him take her place. He undressed quickly, dropping his clothes to the floor. She stood by the fire, watching him as she dried herself with the small white towel. ‘Captain Clunie is ve’wy amiable, after all.’

  ‘A fine steady fellow. An acquisition to the settlement.’

  ‘If you had heeded me last night—’

  ‘I know. It was the letter. It was because no letter came.’

  No worry was audible in her voice. ‘It will come by the next vessel.’

  ‘I know. I know that now.’

  When he had washed he shook a towel from its folds and walked about the room as he dried himself. Letty, who left the house so seldom, showed no variation, either in face or body, of the creamy colour of her skin except in the three whiter mounds of breasts and belly still distended by her recent pregnancy; but although the skin of his body was paler than hers—being of that white with a tint of blue—and was quite as tender and delicate as hers, his face and upper neck, his hands and wrists, were red and blotched and coarsened. Once, when she had remarked on this variation, telling him that it was like embracing two different men, he had put a hand on a thigh and looked at the contrast with surprise. He showed very little awareness of any aspect of his appearance other than those dictated by his training. She put on her nightgown and as she tied the drawstrings at the neck she watched the tread of his white supple feet on the confines of a Persian rug. When he tossed the towel on to the wash stand she took his night shirt from the chair by the fire and proffered it with the neck held open by her hands. ‘I wish I could take some of that land in the south,’ he said as he put it on.