by Thea Astley
The stillness is fragile. Boyd’s wandering eye observes Sweetman in consultation with two bruisers of young men by the rear door.
‘Perhaps,’ he goes on more loudly and strongly, ‘many of you did not know him. He was not a pushing man. It’s more than likely you were unaware of him, for he practised his charity without airing it. But tragedy attended him. In his efforts to befriend those blacks who camped near his lonely farm, in his efforts to protect them, he lost a limb and almost lost his life.’
On stage Buckmaster is going mad. His insanity boils blood, thickens features, clogs the shouts and gabbled directions he is trying to give his bully boys who have come up the aisle and are struggling to haul Boyd from his chair. As Boyd wobbles with the dragging arms, and as Lunt is seen to rise beside him stumped by his wooden leg, other shouts of ‘Fair go!’ and ‘Give him a go!’ rattle from all over the room. The audience has been split in half.
Gracie Tilburn, her red hair ablaze, rushes to the very footlights and pleads for silence. It is so outrageous for a woman to assert herself among men, the hall is temporarily shocked and muted. Fred Buckmaster, shoving his way along the side to get at Boyd, is so appalled he stops to screech at her, ‘Sit down you crazy bitch!’ Some devotee clips his mouth for that, and another tussle starts.
Finally it is Barney Sweetman who shows reason. Politically. His angel face torn, his age humped all over his thinning shoulders, he cries high-pitchedly from the very back of the hall, ‘Stop this, everyone. Stop spoiling the week.’ His voice cracks suddenly with the effort of it. ‘Stop negating,’ he croaks, ‘those very qualities I spoke of. Stop!’
The crowd looks from Boyd to Sweetman, who cannily takes a punt on reasonableness. Shrewdly he guesses at the course the crowd, this mindless animal, will take. Boyd is a village innocent after all. Sweetman knows all about crowds.
‘Let Boyd be heard,’ he pleads, giving his failed-playboy smile. He’ll go down as a fair player if nothing else. ‘Everyone has a right to be heard.’
The factions subside into murmurous dissidence while Boyd, flinging off the restraining arms, regains his balance. He gazes all about him and senses the split.
‘As I was saying,’ he continues, ‘there was a certain night that year, twenty years ago, when Charles Lunt paid dearly for what he believed, when he paid for the very respect he gave humanity.’ Boyd goes on speaking more quietly and persuasively now. The awakened crowd, scandal-hungry, ravenously wants every word. ‘. . . and it was there that someone from the town, Tom Dorahy, in fact, found him, lashed to the dead body of his native friend.’ Boyd pauses and looks about the hall, but his eyes finally come to rest on the stage. ‘Who would do a thing like this?’ he asks. The crowd is stirring and whispering, but the whispers hiss. ‘And two days after this, as many of you remember, a trumped up vigilante force rode out to Mandarana and in cold blood dispatched six of the natives from Lunt’s tribe. I call it Lunt’s tribe, for they were dear to him. But more—one of the terrified gins flung herself over The Leap, her baby in her arms.’ The crowd is dumb with it. ‘It lived, that baby,’ Boyd says into the expecting silence. ‘It was cared for by my wife and me and then by the Jenners. You all remember her. And then, somehow, whether it was an instinctive turn towards the protector of her people we will never know, but that young woman sought out Charles Lunt and has cared for him these last few years.’
Everywhere there are eyes, Boyd observes, polished and gleaming. They are watching his mouth, clutching at what it has to spill.
He says, ‘That was the story I intended telling you. It is nothing worth burning a building down for, as you can see, but it is worth the telling for it is simply another sample such as Mr Sweetman gave you of the martyrdoms this town exacted. Why anyone should want the story not told, you and I can only guess. It is a matter I leave to the consciences of those who tried to stop me. I make no accusations. The matter can stand there—but at least I have spoken out.’
Sweetman has guessed aright.
The crowd is embarrassed now. It has been told things it did not wish to hear—not now, not when it has been softened into a spurious amity once again. The champion of their mediocrity is twitching on stage before their astounded eyes, and even their mediocrity by this turn of events has been belittled. Sweetman had given them an image of themselves to treasure, and now it has been scrawled upon by this other man. Some resent, even hate him for it. Others, believing in the imperial order of things, have their loyalties to the town powers cemented. And many, teased by Boyd’s story, are filled with a grieving quality of love. Arguing and shouting break out. The crowd is two-headed. Everywhere people are standing and pushing out from their seats in an animal perplexity, and it is in vain that Sweetman shrills for order over the chaos.
As Boyd resumes his seat, the tension leaving him, he is suddenly aware of Lunt’s face, an aged and dreadful white, bending towards him.
‘Damn you,’ he is saying softly and penetratingly. ‘Damn you both. Damn you, damn you!’
He struggles upright, his wooden leg catching for a moment on that of a chair, and then he has shoved past the two of them to the aisle and is wrestling his way out through the crowd.
Shocked but immediately aware, Boyd is on his feet after him in silent pleading for understanding. Dorahy, stunned by this condemnation that has rammed the truth home at last, sits on for a few seconds, then, driven by an ego-wild need for absolution, fights his way up the aisle after them.
Through the sweet and the sour of it Lunt, Boyd and Dorahy push their way to the rear door. There is an acrid taste in the mouth. Arms seek to restrain them, either through love or hate. Hands clutch. Voices hail or accuse. But they can only shove sweatily through the praise and the blame towards the cooler rational night outside.
Buckmaster towering, blood-pressure up, is now screaming hoarsely for silence in the stifling room. He signals to the pianist and while she hits some expectant chords and while the audience, grudgingly accepting this signal at last, fights its way back to seats, the three squeezing through the doorway are conscious of having taken most of the hatred with them. And it is when they reach the top of the steps that some unknown, sour with self-disillusion, lurches out from the shadowed avengers who have been waiting for them and hurls Lunt brutally down the stairs.
From on stage Gracie Tilburn watches with horror, even as she takes up her position beside the piano, a small hate-pack headed by young Buckmaster, Romney and Armitage, surge out the double doors after them. She sees the Jenners jostled carelessly to one side; she glimpses Lunt being hurled and sees Boyd and Dorahy taking themselves after him.
Mechanically, she starts to sing.
Outside, Lunt is lying on the ground, his wooden leg hideously askew, his body sprawled face down. In his forced descent he has whacked his skull against a corner post and lies there utterly still. There is a small trickle of blood already blurred by rain.
Boyd bends over him, and then looks up at Dorahy.
‘Well,’ he says bitterly, ‘you’ve had your martyr.’
Then the pack is upon them, silent, and deadly because of this. The two men find themselves hauled by enemies who seem all clenched fist and boot to the private darknesses at the side of the hall where the gristle of their argument is stretched and torn.
While they endure the splitting punches and the duller agony of kicks, from inside the hall Gracie’s voice rises liquidly in song. She is telling of old acquaintance as Dorahy goes down at last, seeing Boyd, his face dark with blood, leaning sideways in slow motion. Dorahy is so tired he accepts the fleshly damage of his enemies like some peculiar blessing, lying on the rain-wet grass, his lips curled in the smile of pain. Somewhere close beside him Boyd is groaning into the air as Gracie’s voice soars and falls in nostalgic untruth.
The hate-pack is gone now, leaving them alone in the dark with the singing voice going on and on, endlessly it seems, through their battered ears. Full-throatedly, the audience joins in the singing and roars
chorus after chorus.
It has almost forgotten the victims already.