BLACK AND WHITE.
In an isolated part of barren country, where the grass was sparse and
coarse, the soil poor and stony, and the timber stunted and scraggy;
where, in fact, everything for which the white man had neither use nor
need was to be found, and where nothing existed that he or his stock
could utilize--a black-fellow's camp was situated.
It was a primitive affair, as black-fellow's camps always are. A few
long, thin sticks, looped and stuck in the ground, and with a
miscellaneous collection of bark and branches laid over them, formed the
huts, or gunyahs, which gave a temporary shelter against wind or rain,
and could be left standing, or thrown down, when the tribe moved,
without loss. Small fires smouldered near each, and, round about, half a
dozen chocolate-coloured piccaninnies, innocent of clothes, ran and
played, laughing and chattering to one another. In the shade the men
were lounging, indolent and indifferent, wearing such cast-off clothes
as they had been able to beg or steal from station hands, and smoking
tobacco obtained by a similar process. In the heat and sunshine the
women worked at such tasks which need demanded--the search for edible
roots and grubs and the gathering of wood for the fires--or lounged, as
their lords and masters did, indolent and indifferent. An old man, whose
hair and beard were grizzled, and whose flesh was shrunk and withered,
sat in the shade of his gunyah, gazing dreamily and wearily at the
glowing ends of the sticks and the thin column of blue smoke which rose
so steadily in the still air from them.
He was the last of his generation; the last of the tribe who remembered
the days when first the white man came; the last to feel and sorrow for
the days when tribal law and tribal rite ruled the destinies of the
race. Very far back, when he was little more than a piccaninny, and long
before he was ripe for the ceremony which made him a "young man," he
recalled how his tribe had been perplexed by a story which had come to
them, by a tale of strange happenings brought from other tribes
somewhere away in the far distance. Later, when he was grown and had
been made a young man and a warrior, he learned the story in full, and
wonderful it seemed to him, as wonderful as it seemed to all his tribe,
old men and young men alike. For it meant the coming of that which would
explain and render clear all the mysteries treasured up by the wise men
and the old men, and shown, still in mystery and only in part, to the
young men as they passed through the stages of their initiation. In
short, it meant to him, and to his, the fulfilment of their religion,
the vindication of their faith, the perfecting of their creed.
In the matters of creeds and abstract faiths many men make many
methods. Some are fitted for the daily use of men counting into
millions; some touch only a minute few, and shrink from the common gaze;
some, again, serve the needs and lives of men having simple ways, and
some sustain a despot's power and hold the race as slaves: but in every
case they are false and wrong save the one that a man may hold. The
religious faith of the tribe to which the old black-fellow belonged
formed a pitiful mass of crudities, oddities, and absurdities to the
white men when they came, or to such white men as stopped for a moment
to think on the matter at all. But it was very real to the old
black-fellow, as it was to his comrades and tribesmen, when it came to
be unfolded to them in all the impressive solemnity of fast, vigil, and
ceremony. How could it be otherwise when the ordeal of bodily pain
accompanied every step in the knowledge of the mysteries?
Overhead, by the Southern Cross, a black patch shows in the sky. The
white man calls it the coal-sack, and explains how it comes about. The
black-fellow looked at it in wonder, and worked his brains for the
reason of its existence and the use that it might serve, and gradually,
unconsciously, inexplicably, there crept into the lore of the nomad
tribes the story of its origin and the use it had to serve.
The stars of night were camp-fires, alight on a mighty plain; the
Milky-way was a she-oak grove; and the gentle winds that blew at night
waved the trees and shook the boughs, and so made the fires gleam from
beneath their shadow, fitful and subdued. By every fire a black-fellow
camped on his journey over the plain--the journey that every man must
take when the days of his life were done; for in the long ago a man had
strained till he found what the black patch was. It was an opening
through to the mighty plain; but when he had reached it, he longed for
his brother to join him and wander over it with him. Looking down he saw
his brother, and called to him, and, to help him up, threw down a rope,
up which the brother climbed. But when he also reached the plain, he
wanted to turn back and go down again, and lowered the rope to do so;
but before he could start, he saw that another black-fellow had caught
hold of the rope and was climbing up. And when he came up, he also threw
down the rope again to one of his tribe; and the two brothers, becoming
impatient, set out to march across the plain to where it touched the
earth, where they could get down without the help of the rope.
A falling star, the white men said, was the rope the black-fellows saw;
and they laughed as the blacks crouched down in fear by the camp-fire
when they caught the flash of a shooting star. But that was
afterwards--after the time when the things had happened which made the
old black-fellow sad and weary.
The journey was long over the mighty plain--so long that as a
black-fellow wandered he wore out the colour of his skin and became
white. Somewhere in the dim, unknown past, a legend told how some of the
black-fellows had really come back from the plain, reaching the earth
where the end of the plain touched it; but when they rejoined their
tribes they had not been recognized, and so had gone away again in
anger. None had come since then, but the tribes treasured up the hope
that some day the mistake their ancestors had made would be forgotten,
and those who found their way across the plain would come back and tell
them of the land above. The hope, fostered on legend and ceremony, grew
at length into a creed, and from a creed into a faith, and the time was
looked forward to when the wandering black-fellows, grown white in the
journey, should come back; for then it would be no longer necessary to
climb through the black patch, nor to fear the falling rope. Then would
drought or flood cease to trouble, for plenty of food and plenty of
water would be every man's share when the people of the great plain came
back.
When the old man was a piccaninny the story travelled from the south
that the white men had reached the earth again, and had come in tribes
and in tribes of tribes, more than the black-fellow could count, more
than the black-fellow could understand. When he was made a "young man,"
he was told of it, and told how men of his own tribe, who had gone up
through the coal-sack by the blazing rope, were coming back; and how,
when they came back, the black-fellow's life would be never-ending, with
food enough every day to satisfy his appetite, and no flood, no drought,
no sickness, nothing but life--free, happy, and enjoyable.
And the old man had seen the white men come.
He had seen them come with their flocks and herds--the food the
black-fellow knew was coming. He had seen them come with shouts and
rage when the black-fellow ate the food they brought him. He had seen
them swoop on a tribe at peace, without a sign that they sought for war,
till the warriors lay on the red earth, dead, slain by the power the
white men had. He had seen them ride where the children played; he had
seen them charge where the women stood; he had seen the gunyahs set on
fire, the war-spears burned, the tokens scorned, till his race had fled
from their tribal lands to the barren ridges and sandy plains, where
they starved and died off one by one, till he was alone--and his faith
was gone.
The creed and the faith he had learned and loved; the tribal lore and
the ordered rite; the lesson, the trial, and the test of strength--they
had all been wrong when the white man came. And now he was old and worn
and sad, there was one idea, one hope, he had--that before he died he
might wet his hands with the blood of the men who had spoiled his life.
As he sat blinking at the glow of his fire, just as he had sat for days
past, he heard a sudden commotion amongst the men who were lounging in
the shade, and, looking up, he saw four horsemen approaching through the
bush. The men had also seen them, and were going towards them to beg
tobacco. Some young gins stood by a gunyah, and he saw one of the
horsemen point to them, and turn and say something to his companions.
The sound of their voices came to him--and then he saw two of them ride
at the men till they scattered and fled, while the other two rode at the
gins.
The old man sat without a move or a sound through all the turmoil and
confusion; but when the men wandered back, hours afterwards, when the
sounds of the horses' hoofs were growing faint in the distance and the
sky was ruddy with the setting sun, they found him sitting by his fire,
with the clothes of the white race flung away, his old withered body
daubed with splodges of white clay, and with a mass of white clay
plastered on his head. He was slowly rocking himself to and fro, and
chanting, in a quavering voice, a weird and mournful song. Everywhere
else there was silence; no fires glowed by the gunyahs or anywhere, save
near where the old man sat, and neither woman nor child could be seen.
The ways of their fathers were little to the men, for the time that
should have been spent in teaching them the customs and the creed had
been spent in fleeing from the bullets of the white men and seeking
out-of-the-way barren spots where neither white men nor the white men's
stock were likely to penetrate; but they knew enough to understand the
signs of deep mourning the old man had assumed, and to recognize the
dirge as the wail for those who had fallen while defending their women.
As the men came nearer they came slower, till they crept up to the fire
where it smouldered, and sat round it, silent and uneasy, as the sun
sank out of sight and the moon came up, while the old man crooned his
dirge. The white light of the moon showed over the trees, throwing into
profound shade all else, save where the glow of the fire showed red. The
air grew chill now the sun had gone, and it was long since the men had
fed; but they still sat silent round the smouldering fire.
Suddenly one arose with a gesture of impatience, and, stepping back
behind the old man, flung off the ragged shirt and trousers that he
wore, and shook out the tangled mass of his hair free from the
compression the slouch hat he had been wearing left on it. A lump of
white clay lay on either side of the old man, and the younger, yielding
to some impulse which was upon him, stooped and daubed himself over with
it in streaks and splashes, and then went back to the fire and sat down
again.
The old man sang neither louder nor faster, nor gave any sign that he
saw or understood; but another of the men got up and flung away the
clothes he was wearing, and daubed the white clay on his naked skin, and
came back to the fire again. Then another did the same; then another,
and another, until all were naked, and all were daubed with clay, and
all were sitting round the fire, silent, as the old man crooned.
As the last one came back he looked up. Presently he ceased his dirge
and spoke, telling in an apparently unimpassioned way of the doings of
the warriors when he was a young man. He spoke of the pride the tribe
felt when one of their men faced and fought, single-handed, the band of
another tribe; and told how once one man had followed the enemy day and
night, while the moon grew old and died, and grew again before he caught
them--caught and slew them. Tales of daring, tales of vengeance, of
wrongs redressed, of vows redeemed; tales of the tribal might in the
days when their fathers ruled, he told them; and as they heard,
something of the old spirit came again to them as the inherited
instincts of countless generations stirred their blood and warmed their
hearts. The sloth they put on with the cast-off clothes of the white
invader fell away from their natures as the voice of the old man droned
in their ears. Half-forgotten memories of the war corroborees, danced in
the far-off days when the tribe was ever moving and ever fighting
against the white men; recollections of blood-stained figures of
warriors, left on the camping-ground when the rest of the tribe fled
before the storm of the white men's bullets, flitted through their
brains; stray shreds of tribal wails and dirges, melancholy and
depressing, which had terrified them in their childhood, seemed to blend
with the voice of the old man, and the eyes which had been dull and
heavy began to grow bright and to glitter. Soon the breasts began to
heave as the men breathed faster; the white of a man's teeth gleamed as
he opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again in anger as he
realized that the words which came to his lips were words in the white
man's tongue. Quickly a man sprang to his feet, and stood with the red
glow of the embers playing over his swarthy skin and the spots and
streaks of the wet white clay. Another sprang up and leaped away into
the darkness, but returned a moment later with a bundle of long, thin,
pointed sticks, which he flung to the ground by the fire. They were the
spears the men had made, rough, crude implements compared with the
balanced and decorated weapons their fathers had known, but such as
would serve to satisfy the hereditary impulse of a decadent race for the
weapons of their sires. With one accord the men reached out and seized
them, springing to their feet, and standing, with quivering muscles and
tremulous hands, as the struggle between inherited instinct and acquired
fear went on for the mastery of their beings.
The man who had brought the spears, and in whom the old spirit lingered
more powerfully than in the others, took a spear in either hand, and
pranced round the fire, stooping down over the points of the weapons,
and chanting, in a subdued voice, a fragment of a war-song. The old man
caught the rhythm and the words and took them up, beating time with his
withered hands; and as he did so, the others joined in the dance, the
instincts of the black-fellow only in their beings--the instincts which
brought back to them the impulses which moved their forbears, the
instincts which made them fling aside the methods and the fear of the
white man, as they had flung away the clothes of which they had learned
the need from him.
The self-constituted leader, alive with the spirit of revenge, moved,
still chanting, away from the fire--away in the direction the white men
took when they rode off from the raid. Upon his heels the others
followed, stepping as he stepped, moving as he moved; and the old man,
glancing after them as they crossed a patch of moonlight and disappeared
into the shadow beyond, hugged his arms together and laughed within
himself--the untrained, slothful decadents had gone out upon the
war-path, naked, painted, armed, as their forbears used to be; moving as
their forbears used; hating as their forbears used; and, in his
ignorance of instincts, it was to him a miracle wrought by the spirits
of his race illumined once more by the flicker of his dying creed.
The clear, nerveless moonlight lay over the bush like a flood of white
transparency, revealing everything it touched with the distinctness of
day, and hiding everything that escaped it in a veil of impenetrable
shadow. From amid such a shadow there gleamed, red and angry, the
smouldering embers of a big camp-fire--such a fire as white men make,
with large logs piled up. All flame had long since fled from the fuel,
now reduced to a heap of red embers, glowing the brighter now and again
as a faint breeze fanned it. Without throwing enough light to illuminate
the scene, the ruddy gleam extended far enough to reveal, dimly, the
figures of four men lying round the fire, rolled in blankets, and
sleeping the heavy slumber of weariness.
Beyond the reach of the fire-gleam, and moving well within the shadow
away from the bright moonlight, a dozen figures moved stealthily towards
the sleeping men. They approached in single file, stooping down till
their chins touched their knees, and moving so warily that each one
stepped in the footprints of the others, and so silently that, while the
sounds of the sleepers' breathing came on the air, no sound followed the
movements of the approaching figures. Steadily, stealthily, they crept
onwards, until the leader was within a few feet of the nearest sleeper.
With a gesture, visible only to those close behind him, he raised his
arms, and the men following him divided into two lines, one passing to
his right, the other to his left, until they had formed a complete
circle round the four sleepers.
A faint whisper of a breeze seemed to pass through the air, and the men
stood upright, each with the right arm thrown back to its full extent,
and with a long, thin spear quivering in the hand. Again the breeze
seemed to whisper, and the outstretched arms swung forward, and the
quivering spears were thrown, and mingled with the loud, harsh shout
which came from each warrior's throat, was the cry of pain to which each
wakening victim gave vent as he recovered consciousness and agony at the
same moment.
Three of the four struggled fiercely to wrest out the spears that pinned
them down, and the watching warriors made ready to throw again. One of
the four lay still, and the warriors paid no heed to him; but under the
shelter of his blanket, ignoring the anguish of the two spear-wounds he
had, he was feeling for his revolver.
A streak of flame, the echo of the shot, and the death-shriek of one of
the black-fellows were almost simultaneous. To the wounded white men the
sound of the shot was a signal of hope; to the unwounded blacks it was a
terror and dismay, and without more than a glance at their comrade where
he lay, they turned and fled into the shadows of the bush.
"My God! they're burning out my entrails," one of the white men
groaned.
"Lie still, you fools; lie still. You're only doing harm by struggling,"
the man who had shot called out.
Another of the four had ceased to move, though three spears were stuck
in him. The man nearest to him managed to wriggle over and up on to his
hands and knees.
"Gleeson's dead," he cried.
"Hold on, Tap, you fool!" the first man said. "I've a spear through my
thigh and another in my left arm, but I'll have them out in a moment,
and then see what's wrong with you."
"Give me water--water," the man on the other side of the fire groaned.
Tap, least wounded of the four, took heart as he saw Barber wrest out
the spears that were sticking in his leg and arm and bind up the wounds.
But he shuddered when Barber came over to him and jerked out the spear
which had passed through the muscle under his shoulder.
"You're not hurt. What are you howling about?" Barber said roughly, and
passed over to Walker, who was just breathing. "Speared through the
stomach," he said in a whisper to Tap; "he'll be finished in two
minutes. What are you doing now, you fool?" he asked quickly, as Tap,
having neither the nerve nor the courage of his companion, reeled and
fell fainting to the ground.
Barber stood for a moment looking down at him, and then glanced at the
others. Walker no longer breathed, Gleeson had not moved, and the
black-fellow lay where he fell, on his back, with a red stain spreading
from a spot on his chest over the smudges and smears of the wet white
clay.
"It's saved me a lot of trouble," he remarked callously, as he went to
the fire and threw more wood on to it.