THE SEA IS MERCIFUL.
By the winds and currents, and mayhap, in nautical phrase, by the “act of
God” also, the boat in which Jean Petit and his three convict companions
had escaped from New Caledonia was carried south.
She drifted down outside the Great Barrier, was blown off the land to the
eastward of Sandy Cape, and blown back again towards Point Danger.
Jean Petit, alone, and grown strangely like a wild beast, looked out and
across with bloodshot eyes one morning and saw a hazy blue line at the
far western verge. A fair wind filled the tattered sail. Hour by hour the
line grew up and up like a bank of cloud, with uneven summits—up and up
out of the desolate, silent ocean.
The solitary convict gazed at this bank of cloud with eager, fascinated
eyes.
Often enough during the awful past weeks he had watched in the same way,
only to see the bank change shape and disappear as the sun grew stronger.
But this time the vision became every hour more definite and real. At
last he uttered a deep growl of satisfaction, which was his nearest
approach to a prayer, and a shudder of relief, of thanksgiving passed
through his lean frame.
Petit presented an illustration of the possibilities which underlie the
smooth, well-fed exterior of civilised humanity.
His hair fell down in matted skeins about his bony shoulders; his beard
almost covered his chest, and below its ragged edges his ribs stood out
one by one like the ribs of a corpse which has dried in the sun until the
tightened skin shows the outline of the skeleton beneath. His lips fell
back, and showed his yellow fangs.
The nails of his hands and feet were as long as eagles’ claws. He was
burnt copper-colour by the sun, and against the dark background of his
skin stood numerous significant sores.
The land which this horrid corpse-like figure regarded out of hollow
eyes was that portion of New South Wales which lies to the north’ard of
Woogoolga—a land alternating along the immediate coast, between hardwood
forests and scrubby sand-hills.
All day long the emaciated convict watched eagerly. Before nightfall he
was close enough to discern steep beaches on which the rollers broke in
white anger, and dark spray-wet headlands glistening under their bath of
seas.
The sun, with banners of scarlet and gold, sailed out through the gates
of the west, lending the white rollers a faint pink blush—the sea
answering to the wooing of her departing lover.
Snipe called along the edge of the sands, littered with brown sea-weed,
shells, pumice, and sponges.
Across a bank of thin fleecy cloud went a moving line of black swans,
going inland to the fresh water lagoons. They flew with their long necks
stretched forward, and as they passed over his head the man in the boat
could see the white on their wings and the scarlet of their beaks. The
swans were followed by a mob of black duck and teal.
Petit noticed that all these birds followed a certain direction, and
studying closely he observed a break in the surf where a narrow channel
ran inland, to broaden out again in a great spread of creeks and lagoons.
A red rock showed conspicuously at the mouth of the channel, and keeping
this to the port side of the boat, he came about and let the insetting
tide take him through.
The keel grated on the sand, and Petit rose up gaunt and unsteady in the
starlight and crawled ashore.
The escaped convict discovered that the rocks on the foreshore were
covered with oysters, and he fed. Refreshed, he crossed the beach in
search of fresh water. After walking some time he found it trickling from
a rock—clear and cold.
And again Jean Petit growled in thanksgiving, and throwing himself full
length on his back like a drought-stricken beast, he let the little rill
trickle into his mouth, overflow his lips, and moisten his chest.
At last, with a deep-heaved sigh, he rolled away from the spring and
with his head resting on the green damp moss, fell asleep.
In the morning Petit woke with the young sun on his face.
He rose, and with his hand shading his eyes, looked up and down. As
far as his eye could reach there were no signs of human habitation; no
evidences of life. He had landed upon a lonely and unsettled part of the
North Coast.
Hunger was still strong in him. He moved his cramped limbs in the
direction of the beach.
When he reached his landing place of the previous night he found the boat
gone! The tide had carried it out. He could see it drifting on the swell
of the deep Pacific, just beyond the edge of the breakers.
It was as well, he told himself, inasmuch as he had intended to stave
her in and sink her. The boat was a piece of evidence which he was not
anxious to leave behind him.
In a few hours no doubt it would be washed by the incoming tide against
the rocks and smashed to pieces.
As a matter of fact, the boat was, by a little series of coincidences,
in which the ocean sometimes indulges, carried round into the mouth of
the Clarence River to fall at last into the hands of Tom Pagdin. She was
first picked up by a fisherman near the Heads. He sold her to a dealer,
who had a little trade steamer running up one of the creeks. She had
broken adrift one night from the stern of the steamer, and the tide
brought her into the Broadstream, where a farmer found her with her nose
stuck in the mud next morning.
The farmer, in hope of a reward, in turn, had hidden her in the reeds,
and it was there Tom Pagdin found her. He surmised that she was a stray
boat, unhitched her, took her further up the stream one evening, and
planted her again in the reeds of the opposite bank.
Jean Petit presented a peculiar appearance as he slunk across the sand in
his rags, and disappeared in the bush.
The bush has seen many strange characters, of comedy and tragedy; has
witnessed in her solitudes many ludicrous and awful things, but none,
perhaps, more ludicrously awful than the hairy figure in streaming rags,
which stalked slowly along, like a bedraggled bird of prey, beneath the
shade of honeysuckle and gum.
For three days this beast-man, whom the clean sea had spewed up on the
land, went northward.
He made himself a lair under the rocks, or in the thick bushes at night,
and fed upon roots and berries, now and then descending the sandy hills
to the sea for shellfish and oysters.
Gradually those livid sores which had corroded his flesh as verdigris
corrodes copper, began to disappear.
* * * * *
Hans Holterman had run away from his ship in Hobson’s Bay to the
goldfields in the time of the gold fever. He had, like many more,
followed the Yellow Butterfly for years across mountain and gully and
plain, till at last the growing stiffness in his joints told him that it
was time to think of old age.
So Hans, who had never been a practical man, went prospecting for a
selection as he went prospecting for gold—in the further places,—and at
last pegged out his land.
It was not particularly good land, although heavily timbered; but Hans
believed it would grow vines, and he remembered the days, before he ran
away to sea, when, with his German brothers and sisters, he had worked
amidst his father’s grape vines by the banks of beloved Rhine.
So Hans set to the growing of vines, without thought of market.
It was not till the fourth or fifth year, when all his capital was gone,
that he realised he was thirty miles from a town.
But a vigneron he had decided to become, and a vigneron he must remain.
He had cleared and fenced and planted a twelve-acre block with Isabella
vines, which, being phylloxera-and-odium-proof, are certain to crop.
But the Isabella was not yet a popular grape in this country, and
Holterman’s Isabella proved a drug even on the local market, which
was not fastidious. After five years the grapes flourished, and bore
marvelously—soil, climate, and position being all eminently favourable.
Each latter vintage Hans added fresh barrels to the row of stained casks
in the outroom which served as a cellar.
His wine-press was a home-made box, tin-lined, with a long sapling for a
lever. He tied bags of stone to the sapling to get pressure, and drained
off the purple juice in a kerosene-tin bucket.
Hans Holterman soon discovered that his wine was practically unsaleable,
and this took the heart out of him.
He retired within himself, living in solitude, and worst of all—consuming
his own stock.
He drank a jug of wine when he rose, a jug at breakfast, a jug before
going to work, and thereafter throughout the day and night jugs at
frequent intervals.
Sometimes on Sunday afternoons would ride up to Holterman’s door bushmen
from the neighbourhood, and these in return for unlimited quantities of
new wine, supplied in opposition to the Licensing Act, they would leave
him a little silver.
This was practically Hans Holterman’s sole medium of existence. The few
shillings which he received from casual drinkers bought him flour, and
occasionally meat. The man who can buy flour and meat can live on the
land.
One evening at dusk, a ragged figure crept out of the shadow of the
forest and listened.