by Hyde, Robin
‘Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap,’ went the woodpecker in the next cell.
Starkie picked oakum for two days, his broken nails shredding in the tangles of the mass that could be crumpled up to nothing at the end of a day. On the third day they put the oakum in his cell at 8 o’clock. At 4.30 it was still there. ‘Bluey’ showed his purplish face through the spy-hole.
‘What’s this, Stark?’
‘Take it away. I won’t pick it.’
For three days more he went back on bread and water, but not to the Dummy. On the Saturday he was marched into the Ring. Taylor marched before him, his shining black face expressionless as the Rock of Gibraltar. Dan Paul the murderer was three places up in the line.
Starkie heard the whisper, ‘Catch hold.’ He saw the stubby fingers that had smashed in a woman’s skull unclose and pass something along to the next man. The chain, keeping in perfect step, passed the fragments of bread and meat from hand to hand. He could grab at them, and swiftly, with one animal gesture, cram them into his mouth. The warder in charge of the Ring couldn’t or wouldn’t see. Little Hastings, the weak-chested Englishman, grinned at him. The convict who had given the alarm was somewhere in that moving circle round thirty feet of ground trodden hard by the feet of God knows what naked misery and despair. But for the rest he felt at that moment that not one of them was less than a friend. These men and their Ring, almost as old in their meaning as the circle that is the symbol of infinity, are the stone that the builders of society have rejected. But in this one quality, their queer subterranean loyalty to one another, they are worthy for the most part to be set at the head of the Temple.
That Saturday in the Ring was almost the last time he saw his fellow prisoners. He had started to cough, and instead of being sent back to the swamp gangs was put out to cut and wire tea-tree stacks in the bush, under the eye of a civilian—a tall, brown-skinned man, James Rannock by name. Rannock, on his grey horse, made no more of his authority than to wave a hand as he rode up and down the long roll of the tea-tree slopes. Wind and sunshine beat into Starkie’s body with a fierce new delight. Rannock fed his prison labour on honest bush food: fresh meat, billy tea, enormous flat damper scones cooked on the three-legged camp oven. Starkie had no joy in any man’s authority, but he would have run at stirrup for ‘the Boss’. To be spoken to as a man, to light his cigarette as he pleased, to borrow a match from the Boss if he hadn’t one himself … his head went back, his chest out, his hands, with their broken nails, handled the slim grey stems of tea-tree like an artist with his paint-brushes. There were no complaints from Rannock to the prison authorities. Yet always Starkie’s heart kept the sick dread of going back again—of the shut-in days with the oakum, the Dummy’s shadowy hell, the great blue dollops of mud churned up from the stinking swamp.
At nights he went back to the prison and slept in his old cell, with the Morse-tapper for companion next door. One morning, his cell was not unlocked while the rest marched off. He heard the abrupt, sharp orders…. ‘Right wheel … forward, march …!’ The boots rang along the corridor in that monotonous dreary tread which, with the twisted upper lip, is the stamp of the long-imprisoned man. Starkie’s thoughts raced frantically in his mind like mice in a cage. He tried to think what he could have done. He knew he hadn’t done anything, nothing really bad; but suppose something should have looked bad? He had been free with Rannock lately, suppose the Boss had reported him for cheek? That cringing terror of false appearances is a bogy of the caged life. He resolved not to show them, whatever happened, that he cared what they could do. But his throat tightened again, as it had done when he lay in the Dummy underground.
The door opened. ‘Bluey’ said, ‘March!’ He tramped along a corridor, entered the stores. They gave him his suit, crumpled and dishevelled in the twelve months it had lain tossed aside. He was told to strip, took off his white trousers, brown coat, peaked cap; put on, one by one, his old clothes. Queer … it was the suit for which he had bilked the little tailor up in the Wyndham Valley. But they had never landed him over that. He was standing in the office, somebody was giving him good advice. He listened in complete silence. Then they handed him twelve shillings and sixpence, his pay for the year’s work. He had served every day, though he had long lost count … there was nothing but the swamp, the Ring, the Dummy, the fresh air blowing among the grey, rough-barked trees of James Rannock’s tea-tree slopes. These things had eaten twelve months out of his youth. Suddenly he remembered that he had celebrated a birthday in gaol, and tried to recall whether he had then been out with the swamp-gangs or down in the Dummy. He couldn’t find the place. It didn’t matter…. He knew, anyhow, that he was now sixteen years old.
He was taken to the gate and told to go. The big building, its prison population poured out of it into mud-holes and punishment cells and the Ring, looked remote and lonely. The street outside the prison was just as quiet. Nobody met him, but none the less he wished that his clothes were not so outrageously crumpled and soiled.
4 Cup for Youth
BETWEEN Briscoe’s Corner and the little fish-shop were exactly seventeen lamp-posts. In the fish-shop, sitting on a high stool and swallowing down the sweet little rock oysters from Stewart Island, he felt comparatively safe. But the slatternly girl who thrust the food across the marble-topped counter stared at him, and turned aside to titter. His crumpled clothes…. He walked back to Briscoe’s Corner. Back to the fish-shop again, to stare in at the window, anxious that nobody passing by should notice him. He stood there until the white pool of the sunlight was gone from the streets, and instead, around each lamp-post, swam the cautious little aureoles of orange.
That night he spent four of his remaining eleven shillings on a bed in a small hotel. He had no sleeping-kit, and crept naked between grey-white sheets. In the morning, passing over the necessity of breakfast for the heavier need of hoarding the money he had left, he went back to Briscoe’s Corner. Although he had been born in this town, a door seemed to have closed between him and the intimacies of his childhood. He wasn’t going home. Nobody whose face was familiar went past. The passers-by looked harassed, and greatly intent upon their own business; even the mangy stray dogs loped swift and stealthy from one butcher’s shop to the next.
But Starkie had one acquaintance in Invercargill who was not likely to disown him—a collective acquaintance, with many slight differences in face and build, but always with the same stolid stare, the same heavy hand on his shoulder, the same heavy, jocose voice. This acquaintance came and stood beside him midway through his second morning at Briscoe’s Corner. The big paw dropped on his shoulder. The voice said, ‘Where are you working now, Stark?’
‘Looking for a job,’ he muttered, never looking at the big, bland face.
‘Don’t be funny, Stark.’ The grip on his shoulder tightened. ‘I’ll give you a job, my lad—two jobs. You can have a job at a ha’penny a day blocking the swamps, or a job at a dollar a day fighting for your King. What’s it to be?’
Something inside the mind of the boy who could have two jobs disliked the idea of being run by the police. He had served his time in tomb and mud-hole and irons. He twisted in the policeman’s grip.
‘I’ll give you a job,’ he shouted, ‘pulling yourself out of this!’ Then he took to his heels. The policeman, taken by surprise, floundered on his back in the middle of Briscoe’s window-display, splintered glass framing fat body and outraged face. In a minute a whistle shrieked, feet pelted. The running boy was out of sight.
That night Starkie slept in an extremely wet and mouldy haystack down in Roach’s Paddock, and found that the fascinating tramps who in his childhood had praised this form of sleeping accommodation were liars like the rest. The hay knotted toughly in his ribs, smelt of mildew, and was full of a tiny red creeping parasite which bit. For two days he spent his time dodging the public. He bought his food, sixpenn’orth at a time, warily over the counters of obscure shops. Always the eyes of those who served him seemed hard and watchful. Alwa
ys he listened for the sound of the whistle. He made a business of slinking through town on an elaborate, useless system of cross-streets, never proceeding straight in any direction. It was all purposeless, blind and hopeless. He would be picked up, and he knew it. But apart from the game of hare and hounds, he had nothing to do and nowhere to go.
It was on one of these elaborate games that the hare found himself outside the Drill Sheds. He had a feeling that They were on his heels. He edged down to the Zealandia Hall, noticed the flutter of the cotton Union Jack, and the straggling little queue of men in civilian clothes, fell in line with them. He was safe, camouflaged, doing what other men were doing without attracting the notice of the police. He was inside the hall, looking across a desk into the eyes of a clean-shaven man who snapped absent-mindedly as he asked a string of questions, but whose thin mouth had a good-humoured quirk at the corners.
‘Ever been in gaol?’
He jumped. But ‘No,’ he said stolidly.
The eyes of the Captain behind the desk stared with some amusement at his clothes, still bearing the creases of a year in the prison stores.
‘Nationality? Age?’
Starkie gave the nationality right, but his age as twenty.
‘Had any trouble at all?’ drawled the Captain.
Starkie shook his head.
‘Very well, Stark.’ The Captain bent his head, scribbled for a moment on a piece of paper. ‘Chit for Dr Bevan, rooms in Speight Street. Hop it, and report here when he’s done with you.’
Dr Bevan was easy. Hands that felt the stringy muscles in his lean body, shrewd eyes that stared at him. He went back with the chit to the Zealandia Hall, passed fit for active service.
Captain Grey pored over the chit for a moment, then barked at his recruit:
‘Ever been in gaol, Stark?’
‘Never, sir,’ said Starkie.
The hard face crinkled up in a sudden grin. ‘Very well, Starkie. You never were in gaol. Well, there’s a contingent leaving in about twenty days’ time—you can join up with that….’
Twenty days, and every copper in Invercargill on his tail, ready to box him up until the War was over and done with. For the moment, utterly disheartened, he could only stammer thanks and slink back to the streets again. That night he curled up like a dog and slept in a corner behind the hall. The mere shadow of the arrogant little cotton flag was some ghostly protection to him. In the morning he was inside the office again. For three days he waylaid Captain Grey, joining up with the queues whenever he could edge his way among them, camping behind the hall at nights. On the fourth day, down to his last shilling, he buttonholed Captain Grey as that self-possessed officer strode towards his lair, and begged to be allowed a preview of the War. Captain Grey, who knew precisely as much about Starkie’s past and present circumstances as Starkie and the police did themselves, screwed up his mouth, hesitated.
‘There’s no chance, Stark.’
Starkie broke down. Precisely what he said he could never afterwards remember, but there was a good deal in it about lamp-posts, cops, the Dummy, and a broken window-pane with a police official framed in the middle of it.
Captain Grey looked neither hurt nor surprised. At the end of Starkie’s tale, he said curtly, ‘A draft leaves for Trentham tomorrow. If anyone falls out sick, you can take his place. The train leaves at six a.m.’ He was gone, and Starkie looked after him as never yet had he looked after schoolmaster or ghostly consoler.
The first necessity was money. Starkie thought of the people in Invercargill who might at a crisis lend him money; and the list, when he considered it, was uncommonly small. But in the end he pitched on a friend of his father’s—David Kidson, the blacksmith. He caught the smith in his forge, mellow-tempered from the first of a cider brew, and had two pounds in his pocket and a clap on his shoulder almost before he had begun his story. Breathless with this success, he crept around the railway station, bundled himself into a train, and paid the guard for his ticket to the Bluff, where lurked in his memory the wettest little tavern he had ever struck.
When he got there he found that war had cast a gloom over a once companionable pub, and without wasting time came back to the Club Hotel, otherwise Mrs Wooten’s. Here he found what he wanted—soldiers of the King drinking His Majesty’s health. Nobody minded telling him about the soldiering life, especially when he pulled a crisp note out of his pocket and paid for a round like a man and a brother. By and by Starkie struck what he wanted, a comrade who couldn’t hold his liquor. The comrade’s name was Alec, for which Starkie liked him none the better; but he looked after Alec like a father after his first-born, presuming that the father wanted the first-born to die of alcoholic poisoning. Six o’clock closing, that most devastating custom of the New Zealander’s country, emptied the soldiers out of the bar; but for Alec the fun was only beginning. Starkie purchased two bottles of whisky and took his victim into town to enjoy the martial pleasures of whisky, women, and song. Every step was a risk, but necessary. The bottles did their best—but Alec, though by now in a condition of alcoholic love for all the world, miraculously kept on his feet. Starkie glowered at him, haunted by a dread vision of a six o’clock train and Alec on it…. It wouldn’t do. His arm around the waist of his erring friend, he steered him gently over the rough-metalled streets to the little house where dwelt an old relative of his, Dick Harris.
Dick Harris had a brew of his own. He didn’t uncork it for all the riff-raff in Invercargill, but it wasn’t hard for Starkie to whisper his plans while Alec finished the last amber drops of the whisky. A bald head nodded.
‘How’ll you keep on your own feet, boy?’
‘God knows. I haven’t had enough to feed a sparrow the last three days, and it won’t take much to knock me out. What can I do?’
The old man patted his shoulder.
‘Leave it to your uncle, boy,’ he chuckled. ‘Tea, laddie, tea … horrible womanish stuff—but it’ll do for you now. Get in there and keep your cobber cheerful.’
At 5.30 in the morning, Alec, with the rug drawn over him, had been sprawling in sleep for three hours. Some subconscious prompting half woke him. He stirred, stretched his arms, groaned, ‘Oh, God! …’
Old Harris pounced on him like a hawk.
‘One more drink, my boy—a toast to all you brave soldiers going away tomorrow.’
Outside the dawn was blue in the tangled trees. Harris had pinned the heavy plush curtains together; there was no light in the room but the splutter of candles, replaced so that their stubs were not too near the warning leap and flutter of death. Alec blinked, reached out his hand, tipped the glass.
‘Toas’—brave boys—goin’—’ His head dropped. His mouth opened wide in a rattling snore.
‘Yes,’ said old Harris with satisfaction, ‘that one was a knockout drop.’ His horny brown hand caught Starkie a tremendous blow on the shoulder. ‘Run, you bloody young cub! Run for it! Half an hour and you’re clear.’
One moment to wring that knotted old hand and he was out in the ice-cold air. It wasn’t, thank God! perfectly light. Out of breath, a shadow among a thousand other shadows, he landed on the station, burrowed through the crowd to Captain Grey.
‘Beg to report a man sick, sir. He can’t leave today.’
For a moment Captain Grey stared in silence at Alec’s papers. Then he laughed.
‘Give me those tickets.’
Starkie handed them over. Very carefully Captain Grey crossed out Alec’s fair name. ‘Now,’ he ordered, ‘get on board that train.’
There were about four hundred men in the draft. To Starkie, still breathless from running, it seemed incredible that tears should be streaking the sunburnt faces of so many among them. Women, patient little ghosts in black, lifted up heavy children in their arms, and the men piled against the carnage windows, or still crowding the station, bent down their heads and kissed again and again the curve of a woman’s face, a sleepy child’s face. The big feather-laden hats of the women were tilted b
ack at absurd angles by the men’s rough embraces; their veils, spotted with big black velvet dots, were torn like cobwebs. A very old man, whose rheumy eyes didn’t seem to focus their blank stare on any particular face, went past the window leaning on a heavy ash-stick, and groaning, ‘Eee, dear! Eee, dear!’ Then a young woman in grey tweeds, healthy as a sheep-dog, dashed up to Starkie, flung her arms around his neck and crushed her fresh lips against his mouth. He was taken by surprise, but the whole impulse of his being suddenly and fiercely wanted her.
Before he could speak or touch her, she thrust into his hand a little hold-all with cards of darning-wool, black and white thread, pins and needles, ran to the next window and repeated the performance. Craning as far from the carriage window as he dared, Starkie saw her breasts taut and her apple-red cheeks streaming with tears as she lifted herself to embrace another man. He felt furiously jealous and contemptuous. It takes a war to get some of them like that about the whole world of men….
Behind the wooden pillars and dingy brown walls of the station, the little he could see of Invercargill was a cup of mist, almost sapphire blue. The minute hand of the station clock jerked itself forward like a cripple on his sticks. A party of men started singing ‘Tipperary’. That somehow flicked a spark of enthusiasm into the wet faces of the women on the station. Some of the twisted mouths laughed, others shouted stupid, pathetic words of farewell.
‘Take care of yourself!’ ‘Come back soon!’
The train’s whistle shrieked, the crowded blur of faces and waving hands was jolted a pace backwards. Against the dark blue cup of the morning, men and women set their lips and unknowingly pledged one another.
5 The Khaki Place
THE STORESMAN opened his little slit of a mouth and gabbled, without pause for breath: ‘Two shirts—two singlets—two underpants—two socks—two boots—knife—fork—spoon—plate—blankets—sign here—C’rrect?’ Starkie, who had lost count somewhere about the underpants and had not the faintest idea whether his kit was in order or not, nodded speechlessly and signed as he was bid. He was given his tent number—D Lines, Tent Number Eight. ‘Hop along and you’ll find the rest of Otago there, all boozey,’ grumbled the storesman.