“Something you forgot,” answered Howell.
“Me? I didn’t forget anything.”
“Oh yes you did!”
“What is it?”
“Dunno. Feller up town gave it to me. Said you’d forgotten it. Something for the lady, I think. Catch.”
Howell tossed the parcel and skipped back out of sight. It fell on the deck near Heather, who picked it up. Mark turned the ship back to sea, shouted to the blackboy, then went to Heather. “Something for you?” he asked.
“For you isn’t it?”
“He said for the lady.”
“Yes—but something you’d forgotten. Shall I open it?”
“Yes—wonder what it is?”
After unwrapping many layers of brown paper, Heather came to a small cylindrical object screwed up in tissue paper. Mark was leaning over her shoulder, pleasantly near her hair. She unscrewed the tissue and revealed a charred beer-bottle cork. She looked up at Mark in surprise, to be still more surprised by the sight of him. His face was crimson, his eyes glazed. After a moment she asked, “Why—what is it?”
Mark grinned feebly, and answered, “Oh—er—a—er just a bit of a joke.”
“Joke?” she murmured, staring.
He chuckled weakly and took the cork and tossed it overboard, foolishly to windward, so that it flew back and fouled his white shirt and lodged in the sling of his arm. He picked it out and flung it to leeward, hard. But there was no escape from the memory of it. There were corks by the score in the sea, and on the beach where they landed, and in the bottles of soft-stuff they had for their picnic. For the rest of the afternoon Mark behaved quite guiltily. There was no kissing.
That night Heather called on a knowing acquaintance of hers, Mrs Daisy Shay, proprietress of the Princess Alice Hotel. In the course of conversation she carefully asked what jocular significance could be found in a burnt cork. It was not specially to ask the question that she called on Mrs Shay; she called by prearrangement; but she went filled with curiosity and not a little foreboding about the incident of the afternoon. She learnt to her horror that the men of Capricornia said that once a man went combo he could never again look with pleasure on a white woman unless he blacked her face. And she learnt much more that horrified her, some of it about Mark, who owed money to Mrs Shay.
Next day she did not go up Murphy Street as usual to meet Mark coming in from the hospital, but went for a walk round Devilfish Bay that kept her out till sundown. Next afternoon she went for another long walk, and again the next, after which there seemed to be no further need to avoid Mark. Instead of calling at the house on the third afternoon, Mark went to the First and Last Hotel and got drunk. Next day he had to leave the hospital.
It was Mark who did the avoiding subsequently. He guessed what had happened, and realised that the dream was ended, knowing that while white women might forgive a man any amount of ordinary philandering they are blindly intolerant of weakness for Black Velvet. For a while he felt bereft. He cursed Heather, not knowing that he had caused her much weeping. Then he shrugged off the yearning for her company and sought that of the delighted Chook instead. When he met Howell he tried to quarrel with him. Howell persisted in arguing that he had done him a good turn, saying that any fool could get married, that it was the strong man who did not.
About a week later he got the promise of a job in the railway-yards. By making this known, he was able to quiet his creditors. As soon as his arm was healed he went to work as an Inspector of Rolling-stock. His duty was to examine and oil the wheels of rolling-stock. It was not at all laborious. The rolling-stock of the Capricornian Government was limited, and little of it ever rolled.
WHEN Mark and the other men left Flying Fox, Ned Krater stayed behind, congratulating himself on having got rid of a set of pests. The pests had been gone about a month when, taking advantage of the mild weather following the Equinox and the end of the Wet, he set out in his lugger, accompanied by six natives, to fish for trepang among coral reefs that lay some twenty miles to the east of the Tikkalalla Islands. One still starry night, while the Maniya, with captain and crew sound asleep aboard, lay at anchor among the reefs, a cockeye bob, as violent as unseasonable, roared down from the north. Before her crew could bear a hand she snapped her cable. In a moment she was engulfed in mighty seas and whirled away like an empty box and smashed to pieces on a projecting reef.
Four of the natives were lost. The others and Krater had the doubtful fortune to be hurled high on to the reef and saved from drowning at the expense of being terribly maimed. One blackboy sustained such severe injuries to the head that, though he remained unconscious, it was not long before he was raving mad. The other boy had his right arm broken, his left ear torn off, and a great slab of flesh stripped from his left thigh. Krater was lacerated all over and had half his starboard ribs stove in.
Thus these favourites of doubtful fortune found each other in the peaceful dawn, objects of interest to a horde of crabs and a flock of seagulls. The boys had lain down to die, as it was the custom of their race to do when life seemed not worth living. But Krater, in spite of his more than sixty years and the fact that, when he breathed, blood gurgled in his chest, rose and took stock of things. He found the dinghy cast up, battered and waterlogged, but evidently seaworthy; and he found as well the lugger’s jib and a sweep and a tangled mass of rigging. He thereupon decided to have the dinghy floated and rigged with sail. Being unable to shout at his dying comrades, he attacked them with a piece of wreckage and convinced them that they were still alive and living with a whiteman.
They were unable to move the dinghy until the tide fell at noon. But Krater permitted no idling, because he guessed that the others were dying and desired to use whatever life they still possessed. He never thought that he might die himself. He felt immortal. First he had them bind his chest with rope in order to restrict his breathing and so ease the pain in his lacerated lung; then he had them help him fashion a mast from the sweep and attach wire stays to it and tear the jib to the shape he desired and make a bailer from canvas and wire and bent wood. The boy who was becoming mad was valuable because he had two sound hands that could be forced to hold things. When Krater was done with him he tied him to the coral to prevent him from making himself sick by drinking of the sea. He wanted his assistance in the task of moving the dinghy, and hoped to be able to make further use of him during the voyage to the Tikkalalla Group. Thus while the day advanced, cloudless, windless, burning hot.
The dinghy was moved and emptied. It was badly sprung, but not so badly as to daunt Ned Krater in his purpose. He stopped the springs with rags torn from the jib and with plugs of wood, thus occupying himself for half the afternoon, while the boy with the broken arm lay in the hot water watching, and the other, now quite mad, lay lashed to the coral howling.
In the middle of the afternoon the madman’s raving and struggling to get at the water became intolerable. Krater went to him, and after studying him for a while, released him. He uttered a joyful yell and scuttled into the water like a crab. While he was drinking, Krater took up a heavy piece of wood and crept on him and struck him on the head with all his might. The boy rolled over in the water, struggling violently. Then he gained his knees and turned on Krater. Krater struck at him again. He jerked his head aside and took the blow on a shoulder. He did not make a sound. He gaped, as though surprised.
“I’m only puttin’