The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  Collison spoke first. ‘Smith. Odell. Packer, Costigan. Two of you are wanted to stitch him into blankets, and two to make a stretcher. Each pair to take the tasks turn about, or if you please, to cast lots.’

  Hardacre did not allow the pause in which their silence must make its mark and call for its response. ‘And you four,’ he said fiercely to his party. ‘Carter, Ferris, Snell, Reilly. You will take turns, two by two, at bearing the stretcher to the Limestone. From where it goes by water, Lazarus to row the boat. There—none can say the task is not assigned fair.’

  But now there was no evading the silence. Two of the prisoners folded their arms. Henry, seeing Collison grow red-faced and restless footed, took the horse a few paces forward.

  ‘Get—moving!’ roared Collison.

  ‘No. We will not.’ The man who spoke was Odell. ‘I speak for all of us,’ he said. ‘None will touch him.’

  The other seven assented together. ‘Punish one—punish all,’ shouted one.

  ‘We will not touch him,’ repeated another.

  ‘Why will you not?’ asked Henry from Murray’s horse.

  The youngest, a loosely jointed hobbledehoy, gave a foolish but frightened laugh. ‘It would bring a curse.’

  ‘It will bring an extended sentence if you don’t,’ said Henry.

  ‘The new commandant will not extend sentences,’ said Odell.

  ‘But if you do,’ continued Henry, as if he had not heard Odell, ‘it may mean the remission of the rest of your sentences.’

  Lazarus dropped the branch and came forward. He halted beside Collison and put the backs of his fingers low on his hips. ‘Remissions, is it?’ he said. ‘Remissions for these eight will mean less for the one who huz earned ees remission already. I know ’em! They ’ave not mercy enough for two, let alone nine. I will bring ’im in alone. I will do it all. Will stitch ’im up, bear ’im to the Limestone, and row the boat. Ee sez often I will end me days on the settlement, and I sez as often that I won’t. And I won’t. No, I will make sure of remission by earnin’ it over again. I will bring ’im in alone. And if ee thinks to defeat me at this stage by stinkin’, why, ee is wrong again.’

  Henry looked at Collison. ‘Collison?’

  ‘Let him,’ said Collison, ‘since the rest are only dogs.’

  ‘Lazarus,’ said Henry, ‘you say you can do it alone, but you will do it quicker if some of these make the stretcher.’

  Lazarus considered the eight with a workman’s speculative glance. ‘If I am to bear ’im alone, it is a pair o’ poles I need.’

  Ferris, the young hobbledehoy, stepped forward. ‘I can make a pair o’ poles.’

  ‘Strong and light? Braced at the ends?’

  ‘If you want,’ said Ferris.

  ‘Let him try,’ said Henry, as Lazarus hesitated. ‘And let these others chop down and trim the trees needed. We have little hope of reaching the Limestone Station before dark, but at least we shall make camp as near it as possible.’

  He dismounted as he spoke. While he opened his saddle bag to get the needle and the bobbin of thread, Lazarus squatted at the pile of blankets, choosing those he needed for the shroud and tossing another to Ferris. The flies had settled in large numbers on the body, but now that it was to be covered so soon, Henry thought it hardly worthwhile for anyone to take the time to swish them away.

  *

  By noon all except Lazarus had passed out of the confused terrain of little creeks and waterholes and had entered again the flat grassy country where they had found Logan’s torn clothing and the piece of his journal. Lazarus and his load, a hundred yards in the rear, were still traversing the gullies. Occasionally Hardacre or Collison would ask Henry if he were in sight, and Henry would turn, and rise in the stirrups, and announce that he was still coming on. But apart from this, he was unwatched and unguarded, for after all he had done to secure his remission, none believed that he would elect to become a fugitive again by dropping his burden at this stage and bolting.

  Workmanlike and quick, with that expression of set indifference the only sign of his revulsion, he had stitched the body into blankets. Taking over then from Ferris, who had joined the poles at the top, he had set them eighteen inches apart, braced them, and lashed a strip of blanket between them. To this he had lashed the wrapped body and near the heads of the poles had carved grooves to embed the ropes by which he would draw it. Where the poles would meet the ground, on their undersides, he carved them into smooth wedges. Henry, who had gone to the clearing where Logan had been ambushed, saw the finished job on his return, and thought how thoroughly it would have been approved by the man for whose transport it was intended.

  To offset the handicap of his load, and to protect the others from the smell, Lazarus had set out in advance, but when the wind had veered in the direction of those following, Collison, on Henry’s suggestion, had called to him to halt until they passed him.

  Henry had not yet begun to feel the effects of his abstinence from alcohol, but he knew it must strike very soon, and the expectation of it made him tense and dejected. Murray’s horse had been spelled enough. Alone, he believed he might manage to reach the Limestone Station that night, after all, but if forced to continue at the common pace, he would have a night’s camp before him. He found himself rehearsing a speech.

  ‘Collison, I will go ahead, and carry the news, and have them make the boats ready for the morning.’

  But how long would it take to make two rowboats ready? He would deceive no one. Besides, Collison was weeping again, and passing a sleeve across his eyes. With Collison a mourner, and the others so silent, tired, and plodding, it was like a funeral procession; it did not seem decent to leave it.

  And now, far behind them, Lazarus began to sing. Because they were walking into the wind, it barely reached them. At this distance it sounded like a chant. Perhaps it was one of those slow shanties, such as every man in the colony had heard on the voyage out. Henry turned in the saddle and saw that Lazarus had emerged from the gullies and had begun to walk in the open country.

  The flies were troublesome, and there was no tobacco left. Henry had smoked his last pipeful in the clearing where the commandant had been ambushed. Following Lazarus’s directions (and marking his trail lest he be lost) he had found it easily: a large grassy clearing, almost surrounded by eucalypts and chestnuts, and sloping away on one side to a deep cool shaded creek.

  The saddle had been taken away to the Limestone Station, and the footsteps made by Logan’s rush to the mare had been obliterated by those of the search parties, but the circle of cropped grass, though fresh green grass was pushing into it, was still discernible, and the chestnuts still lay in the blackened tree stump and were scattered about it. Before the stump was a log, on which it seemed likely he had sat while the chestnuts were roasting. Henry sat on it to smoke his pipe.

  One had only to stop making one’s own noise to realise that the bush, which had seemed so silent, was filled with a multitude of sounds, all so small that if one were the flinching or imaginative sort, it would be easy to hear them as stealthy. Logan had been neither flinching nor imaginative, and yet, as he sat watching the chestnuts roasting, the bush around him must have been full of the stealthy sound of men approaching. He must have heard it. How had he interpreted it? Did he, in a last self-deception, refuse to hear it as anything other than what he was used to? Or did he wait, tense and unblinking, for it to prove itself in a rush of feet? And if the latter, was the waiting a conscious gamble with his life, or only the strategy of a soldier?

  The suspense imagined by Henry communicated itself to his body. The sounds in the bush no longer seemed separate, but concerted and threatening. Pride made him sit and finish his pipe, but he puffed rather furiously, and it was with relief that he rose at last to knock it out on the stump.

  When he heard the rushing noise he simply fl
ed, and even though in his first steps he heard the shrieking, and saw the great flock of cockatoos rising from the creek, and even though a part of his mind was cool enough to remark that he had never seen so many at once, he continued to run, and was thankful indeed to reach the comparative shelter of the bush.

  The fear in his breast and throat was so real that it could only be assuaged by his threshing and crashing through the bush as if really pursued. Something, wild dog or kangaroo or big lizard, must have startled the cockatoos into rising, as something must have startled them into rising on that other morning, causing the commandant to leap to his feet and turn in their direction. As Henry crashed through the bush, his was again the only noise audible, but the rushing of wings, haunting his ears, became the rush of a hundred converging feet, and the shrieking became the yells of pursuers closing on their quarry. By the twigs, still green, littering the ground, and the snapped branches hanging raggedly down, he knew he had happened upon the way the commandant must have taken on the mare. His hat was knocked askew. When he emerged from the bush into a clearer space he set it straight and brushed himself down with shaking distracted hands. A heat at his thigh made him thrust a hand into his breeches pocket and pull out his pipe. He had no recollection of having put it there. He wondered then if Logan’s pistol lay somewhere among the trees at his back. If so, let it lie; he would not go back. In the distance he heard Hardacre shouting at the prisoners. Truly, the commandant had not got far. Perhaps on arriving at the spot where Henry now stood, he had found himself already cut off from the causeway, or perhaps he had not even known of it. Had he not been forced to put the mare at her fatal jump, he may have escaped, but the mare once down, and himself scrambling out of the gully and running on alone, they had easily caught him. Henry wondered if, in the last shocked strenuous moments of his life, he had seen a face familiar to him, but too much despised until then to be designated as the face of an enemy. Henry did not doubt that the despised face—Boylan’s or another’s—had been there. Neither he nor anyone else had bothered to dispute Hardacre’s assertion that the blacks did not bury their dead. His only question was whether Logan had seen that face as it bore down, and had recognised it as the clinching argument in a conversion that in this life he would never profit by.

  Lazarus, who had stopped singing, or chanting, now broke out afresh. But this time it was louder, and carried a note that made Henry turn in the saddle and look behind him in perplexity. He saw that Lazarus had gained on them, and was pulling easily, with both ropes over one shoulder, instead of one over each as before. And his face was raised to the sky, and he was singing.

  Henry felt the onset of a familiar anxiety, and a familiar dispersal of his concentration, both of which would be made worse this time by his knowledge that no appeasement was possible until they reached the Limestone Station in the morning. Mistrusting his own ears as well as his judgement, he turned back and looked for instruction at Collison and the others.

  Collison was looking angrily over his shoulder at Lazarus; Hardacre, at his side, was whispering to him; and among the eight prisoners appeared signs of fear and uneasy laughter. Henry now understood that while Lazarus’s song might not be cheerful, it was certainly outrageous. Indeed, he heard it now as exultant. He turned about and rode back towards him.

  But perhaps it was not exactly exultant either, unless there was such an emotion as funereal exultance. It was wordless, harsh, and full of hate, and yet was not debased, for while exulting in one man’s death, it paid tribute to death, and acknowledged the coming death of the singer. Henry came on, hoping he looked fierce, but wishing to weep, for in a flashing comparison he saw this man’s hatred against his own small and secret hatred, and this intemperance against his own, which put his craving so much in the forefront of his mind that no grief could be admitted for a man who had once been his friend. Lazarus saw him, stopped singing, and watched his approach in a calm and considering way.

  Henry pulled up and waited for him to advance. Furiously he swished at flies, but Lazarus hardly needed the points of cloth flapping from his hat, for the big grey cocoon, splotched now with dark stains, acted as a decoy.

  ‘You were singing,’ announced Henry.

  Lazarus nodded. ‘She draws good and easy on the flat.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Henry. The song was beyond his recall, dispersed into the vast sky. Had it in fact derived only from the wild shouts of the bullock drivers when a rough tract of country is surmounted, and the rest been supplied by his imagination?

  ‘Well,’ he said curtly, ‘you must stop. It’s indecent.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Lazarus, in uncaring assent.

  ‘Remember your remission,’ cried Henry, trying to be angry.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  But Lazarus was now rather mocking, for their eyes were holding a different conversation: Lazarus saying, ‘Then tell me who else will bring him in?’ And Henry shrinking and replying, ‘Well, just do as I say, that’s all.’

  When this silent conversation was over, Lazarus gave a humorous nod, and Henry turned and rode back at a canter to the party. For the first time he had tears in his eyes, prompted, he supposed, either by mortification or by his need for a drink.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘He is with God,’ said Amelia Bulwer.

  ‘Yes,’ said Robert, ‘with God.’ But he was watching Louisa as he spoke, and now swung on his crutches from Amelia’s chair to hers.

  ‘Pray, ma’am, what are you doing?’

  ‘Making a sketch of this room,’ replied Louisa.

  Lucy had tipped a box of blocks on the floor at James Murray’s feet. She was sorting them into sizes and did not appear to be listening.

  ‘This room?’ asked Robert in surprise. ‘Mama’s drawing room?’

  ‘Robert is thinking it is not much like it,’ said James Murray.

  ‘Because I called it a sketch,’ said Louisa. ‘I was wrong, Robert. It is a plan.’

  ‘A plan of the floor, Robert,’ said Amelia.

  ‘What the floor would look like,’ added Louisa, ‘if one were glued to the ceiling and looking down upon it.’

  Lucy raised her eyes with wonder to the ceiling.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Robert, with interest. ‘And there are the doors, and that gap is the window.’

  ‘Yes. Five foot wide. One would not think it.’

  In her bedroom, Letty shrieked. It sounded sudden, but by this time the three adults in the drawing room knew it to be the culmination of a bout of sobbing so low that it hardly reached them. Louisa and Amelia ignored it; James Murray gave a slight respectful frown; and Lucy, her eyes blank and her mouth open, looked towards the door and absently banged two blocks together. ‘But why, ma’am?’ cried Robert in a high anxious voice, ‘Why are you making this plan?’

  The shriek died away. ‘I am making it for Mrs Clunie, Robert. It is to go to Sydney, to the wife of Captain Clunie’s commanding officer, and when Mrs Clunie arrives at Sydney, she will study it, and will know how many of her pieces of furniture will fit into the room, and where. That is what all those figures are for. They are called measurements.’

  ‘I know, ma’am. Aunt Fanny has taught me to measure.’

  ‘Is Mrs Clunie bringing her furniture from home?’ asked James.

  ‘Yes, James.’

  ‘But she fears some of it is too massive,’ said Amelia, ‘and may buy some smaller pieces in Sydney.’

  ‘She would have lived in this house,’ said Robert, looking from face to face, ‘even if papa had not been murdered.’

  Lucy looked at him with her blank eyes, and silently mouthed the word ‘murdered’.

  ‘Of course, my dear,’ said Louisa, ‘because you would have been in India.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ said James to Amelia, ‘that she will discard the massive pieces?’

&nb
sp; ‘I am hungry,’ said Robert.

  ‘I hardly know, James. Surely not discard them. Lend them or sell them, perhaps. Do you know, Louisa?’

  ‘I am hungry.’

  ‘Well, since Captain Clunie doesn’t know himself . . . yes, Robert, Elizabeth will be here in a moment.’

  ‘I am hungry too,’ said Lucy with indifference.

  ‘Captain Clunie had a letter from Mrs Clunie by the Alligator,’ said Amelia to James. ‘The Hooghly was delayed. She wrote from lodgings in Portsmouth, expecting to sail any hour.’

  ‘Perhaps by now she will be at Rio,’ said James.

  ‘Very likely,’ said Amelia.

  ‘We have been to Rio,’ said Lucy to James Murray.

  ‘I have,’ said Robert. ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘I have!’ said Lucy. ‘Mr Murray, I have!’

  ‘I think—’ said James.

  ‘Mr Murray, she was not even born.’

  ‘Lucy will go there soon,’ said Louisa.

  ‘Oh, very soon,’ said James with enthusiasm.

  ‘Yes,’ said Amelia, ‘if Lucy goes to Ireland with her mama, Rio is on her way.’

  ‘Captain Clunie,’ said Louisa, speaking quickly to forestall Robert, ‘showed me a page of Mrs Clunie’s letter. She recounted how while she was waiting in Portsmouth her cousin, who is married to a ship’s captain, contrived to get her a short voyage on one of the new steam vessels. She said she found it too reverberative. If one stood at a certain spot on the deck, she said, she was sure one would jump up and down minutely for the length of the voyage.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Robert, staring in fascination into Louisa’s face.

  ‘I suppose there is no necessity to stand in that particular spot,’ murmured Amelia.

  ‘All the same,’ said James stoutly, ‘it is the vessel of the future.’

  Lucy had got to her feet and was jumping up and down.