Short fiction collected, p.20
Short Fiction Collected, page 20
Betty’s gray eyes silently blessed the lady. Then she said, “That’s all there is. I’m truly ashamed to bequeath such tawdry presents for my little ones.”
“Losh, child!” said Mrs. Allan, clasping her hand again. “Presents! Why, I’m planning the grandest Christmas—” She stopped, stricken by the sudden bleakness in Betty’s face.
“Christmas . . .” the girl echoed.
I meant to cheer her up, Mrs. Allan thought miserably, but I should not have mentioned it. Christmas is less than three weeks away for me and the children, but it will never come for her. And she is so very much a child herself . . .
“Christmas,” Betty repeated again, in a whisper. “I should like to sec that.”
As if the impact of realization had chilled her, she began to shiver violently, and clutched the threadbare old bedclothes to her breast.
“Och, ’tis that wretched ague again!” exclaimed Mrs. Phillips. She hurried Rosalie back to her trundle bed-where the baby immediately resumed squalling-and came to make motherly tucking motions about Betty. “Poor lamb! I’ll hie myself to the fire and brew some broth.”
“I’m so s-sorry,” Betty said to Mrs. Allan, through chattering teeth. “F-first I burn and then I f-freeze. If I could only m-mix the two, I’d be cozy as anything.”
She tried bravely to smile, with lips that had lost all color. But the twin fever spots still shone in her cheeks, scarlet reminders of the unextinguishable cremation fire within.
“It’s time I was going anyway,” said Mrs. Allan. Something impelled her to bend suddenly and bestow a gentle kiss on the girl’s icy forehead. “You-rest, Betty. I’ll come again.”
The girl gave her one last grateful look, then squeezed her eyes shut, burrowed under the covers and curled into a pathetically tiny bundle. The bed creaked to her shuddering, and the straw mattress crackled maliciously.
When Mrs. Phillips had shut the door behind them, Mrs. Allan let herself break down, and hid her face in an orris-scented handkerchief.
“I could never be an actress,” she sobbed unashamedly. “If my heart was breaking, I couldn’t hide it. But she.”
“She saves it for when she’s by her lonesome,” said Mrs. Phillips, snuffling herself. “D’ye think there’s nae feeling in her? There’s sac much she dasn’t show it. Were she to let you and Mrs. Mackenzie and the childer see her sadness, would it make anything easier for any of ye? To the vcrra brink of the grave, she’s thinking of her ain poor self last of all.”
As they descended the stairs, Mrs. Allan said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Phillips, but I cannot-I cannot-go through this again, or I’ll give way in front of her. I mustn’t come again until—until it’s time to come for the boy.”
“Awccl, ye saw-it canna be long, noo. I’ll send a messenger when ’tis time. Hist noo, the lad is playing i’ the shop. Ye’ll not let him see ye weeping.”
Mrs. Allan said affectionate good-bys to the woman and the boy, and departed into the bitter winter evening. She kept her head down, bucking breathlessly against the wind, as she made her way down Main Street. When she turned into 14th Street, she found the going a little easier. She raised her head, and realized that she was passing the two-story frame building that housed the theater.
Its facade was lavishly plastered with bills advertising the presence and merits of Mr. Placide’s “Virginia Players.”
One of the posters caught Mrs. Allan’s attention. Half torn away by the wind, it was fluttering like a signal of distress.
TO THE HUMANE HEART
On this night Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks your assistance, and asks it perhaps for the last time.
The generosity of the Richmond Audience can need no other appeal to—
“Beg your pardon, missis,” said a timid voice. Mrs. Allan turned, and a small, shabby man touched his hatbrim to her. The complexion of his face, pale-orange from a lifetime of make-up, identified him as one of the Placide troupe.
“That there benefit pufformance has bin called off,” he told her. “Missis Poe is jist too poorly to go on stage. But if so be you’d care to contribit the price of admission. He took off the hat and held it out, crown downward. “. . . I’ll see she gits it.”
Mrs. Allan, her eyes stung to weeping again by the wind, nodded wordlessly and fumbled in the pocket of her muff.
“Mrs. Allan is so good,” said Betty, between listless sips of the hot bouillon Mrs. Phillips was spooning into her.
“Aye,” said that lady. “Ye couldna wish for a better foster mother for your bairn.”
Betty looked across the room at her son. Playing with her “Juliet” nightgown, he had tangled it and himself into a knot, and now he was gurgling with laughter as he struggled to get loose of it.
“I do hope she’ll not let Mr. Allan be overstrict,” said Betty, and smiled adoringly at the boy. “My little Edgar is such a happy child.”
Elizabeth Arnold Poe
b. 1787
London, England
d. December 8, 1811
Richmond, Virginia
Aged 24 years
(This story is true. In memoriam.—GJ.)
Sooner or Later or Never Never
Gary Jennings’ author’s card is in front of us; it lists eight stories published here during the past ten years. Not a large lot, but it occurs to us that it would be difficult to find another card with such a wildly diverse, high-quality listing, ranging from the horror-filled “Myrrha,” (September 1962) to the delightfully absurd “Tom Cat,” (July 1970).
We guaranteed last month that this new Jennings entry would be the funniest story you’re read in a long time, and we’re not backing off one bit.
“The Anula tribe of Northern Australia associate the dollar-bird with rain, and call it the rain-bird. A man who has the bird for his totem can make rain at a certain pool. He catches a snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under water for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the side of the creek. Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake. After that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow; sooner or later the rain will fall.”
—Sir James Frazer
The Golden Bough
The Rt. Rev. Orville Dismey
Dean of Missionary Vocations
Southern Primitive Protestant College
Grobian, Virginia
Most Reverend Sir:
It has been quite a long time since we parted, but the attached Frazer quotation should help you to remember me—Crispin Mobey, your erstwhile student at dear old So Prim. Since it occurred to me that you may have heard only a sketchy account of my activities in Australia, this letter will constitute my full report.
For instance, I should like to refute anything you may have heard from the Primitive Protestant Pacific Synod about my mission to the Anula tribe having been less than an unqualified success. If I helped a little to wean the Anulas away from heathen sorceries—and I did—I feel I have brought them that much closer to the True Word, and my mission was worth its cost.
It was also, for me, the realization of a lifelong dream. Even as a boy in Dreer, Virginia, I saw myself as a future missionary to the backward and unenlightened corners of the world, and comported myself in keeping with that vision. Among the rougher hewn young men of Dreer I often heard myself referred to, in a sort of awe, as “that Christly young Mobey.” In all humility, I deplored being set on such a pedestal.
But it wasn’t until I entered the hallowed halls of Southern Primitive College that my previously vague aspirations found their focus. It was during my senior year at dear old SoPrim that I came upon Sir James Frazer’s twelve-volume anthropological compendium, The Golden Bough, with its account of the poor deluded Anula tribe. I investigated, and discovered to my joy that there still was such a tribe in Australia, that it was just as pitiably devoid of Salvation as it had been when Frazer wrote about it, and that no Primitive Protestant mission had ever been sent to minister to these poor unsaved souls. Unquestionably (I said to myself) the time, the need, and the man had here conjoined. And I began agitating for a Board of Missions assignment to the overlooked Anulas.
This did not come easily. The Regents complained that I was dismally near failing even such basic ecclesiastic subjects as Offertory Management, Histrionics and Nasal Singing. But you came to my rescue, Dean Dismey. I remember how you argued, “Admittedly, Mobey’s academic grades tend toward Z. But let us in mercy write a Z for zeal, rather than zero, and grant his application. It would be criminal, gentlemen, if we did not send Crispin Mobey to the Outback of Australia.”
(And I believe this report on my mission will demonstrate that your faith in me, Dean Dismey, was not misplaced. I will say, modestly, that during my travels Down Under, I was often referred to as “the very picture of a missionary.”)
I would have been perfectly willing to work my passage to Australia, to claw my way unaided into the Outback, and to live as primitively as my flock while I taught them The Word. Instead, I was surprised to discover that I had at my disposal a generous allocation from the Overseas Mission Fund; overgenerous, in fact, as all I intended to take with me was some beads.
“Beads!” exclaimed the Mission Board bursar, when I presented my requisition. “You want the entire allocation in glass beads?”
I tried to explain to him what I had learned from my research. The Australian aborigines, I had been given to understand, are the most primitive of all the peoples living on earth. An actual remnant of the Stone Age, these poor creatures never even got far enough up the scale of evolution to develop the bow and arrow.
“My dear boy,” the bursar said gently. “Beads went out with Stanley and Livingstone. You’ll want an electric golf cart for the chief. Lampshades for his wives—they wear them for hats, you know.”
“The Anulas never heard of golf, and they don’t wear hats. They don’t wear anything.”
“All the best missionaries,” the bursar said rather stiffly, “swear by lampshades.”
“The Anulas are practically cavemen,” I insisted. “They don’t even have spoons. They have no written language. I’ve got to educate them from ape on up. I’m just taking the beads to catch their fancy, to show I’m a friend.”
“Snuff is always appreciated,” he tried as a last resort.
“Beads,” I said firmly.
As you have no doubt deduced from the invoices, my allocation bought a tremendous lot of colored glass beads. I really should have waited to buy them in Australia and avoided the excessive transportation bill; they filled one entire cargo hold of the ship which took me from Norfolk that June day.
Arriving at Sydney, I transferred the beads to a warehouse on the Woolloomooloo docks, and went to report immediately to PrimPro BisPac Shagnasty (as Bishop Shagnasty likes to style himself; he was a Navy chaplain during the war). I found that august gentleman, after some search and inquiry, at the local clubhouse of the English-Speaking Union. “A fortress, a refuge,” he called it, “among the Aussies. Will you join me in one of these delicious Stingarees?”
I declined the drink and launched into the story behind my visit.
“Going to the Anulas, eh? In the Northern Territory?” He nodded judiciously. “Excellent choice. Virgin territory. You’ll find good fishing.”
A splendid metaphor. “That’s what I came for, sir,” I said enthusiastically.
“Yes,” he mused. “I lost a Royal Coachman up there on the River Roper, three years back.”
“Mercy me!” I exclaimed, aghast. “I had no idea the poor heathens were hostile! And one of the Queen’s own chauf—!”
“No, no, no! A trout fly!” He stared at me. “I begin to understand,” he said after a moment, “why they sent you to the Outback. I trust you’re leaving for the North immediately.”
“I want to learn the native language before I get started,” I said. “The Berlitz people in Richmond told me I could study Anula at their branch school here in Sydney.”
Next day, when I located the Berlitz office, I discovered to my chagrin that I would have to learn German first. Their only teacher of the Anula language was a melancholy defrocked priest of some German Catholic order—a former missionary himself—and he spoke no English.
It took me a restless and anxious three months of tutorage in the German tongue (while storage charges piled up on my beads) before I could start learning Anula from the ex-priest, Herr Krapp. As you can imagine, Dean Dismey, I was on guard against any subtle Papist propaganda he might try to sneak into my instruction. But the only thing I found odd was that Herr Krapp’s stock of Anula seemed to consist mainly of phases of endearment. And he frequently muttered almost heartbrokenly, in his own language, “Ach, das liebensiverte schwarze Madchen!” and licked his chops.
By the end of September Herr Krapp had taught me all he knew, and there was no reason for me to delay any longer my start for the Outback. I hired two drivers and two trucks to carry my beads and myself. Besides my missionary’s KampKit (a scaled-down revival tent), my luggage consisted only of my New Testament, my spectacles, my German-English dictionary, a one-volume edition of The Golden Bough, and my textbook of the native language, Die Gliederung der australischen Sprachen, by W. Schmidt.
Then I went to bid farewell to Bishop Shagnasty. I found him again, or still, at the English-Speaking Union refreshment stand.
“Back from the bush, eh?” he greeted me. “Have a Stingaree. How are all the little blackfellows?”
I tried to explain that I hadn’t gone yet, but he interrupted me to introduce me to a military-looking gentleman nearby.
“Major Mashworm is a Deputy Protector of the Aborigines. He’ll be interested to hear how you found his little black wards, as he never seems to get any farther Outback than right here.”
I shook hands with Major Mashworm and explained that I hadn’t yet seen his little black wards, but expected to shortly.
“Ah, another Yank,” he said as soon as I opened my mouth.
“Sir!” I said, bridling. “I am a Southerner!”
“Quite so, quite so,” he said, as if it made no difference. “And are you circumcised?”
“Sir!” I gasped. “I am a Christian!”
“Too right. Well, if you expect to get anywhere with a myall abo tribe, you’ll have to be circumcised or they don’t accept you as a full-grown bloke. The abo witch doctor will do it for you, if necessary, but I fancy you’d rather have it done in hospital. The native ceremony also involves knocking out one or two of your teeth, and then you have to squat out in the bush, twirling a bullroarer, until you’re jake again.”
Had I heard about this when I first heard of the Anulas, my zeal might have been less. But having come this far, I saw nothing for it but to submit to the operation. Still, someone might have told me earlier; I could have been healing while I was studying languages. As it was, I couldn’t delay my start North. So I had the operation done that very night at Sydney Mercy—by an incredulous doctor and two sniggering nurses—and got my little caravan on the road immediately afterward.
The trip was sheer agony, not to say a marathon embarrassment. Convalescence involved wearing a cumbersome contraption that was a cross between a splint and a truss, and which was well-nigh impossible to conceal even beneath a mackintosh several sizes too large for me. I won’t dwell on the numerous humiliations that beset me at rest stops along the way. But you can get some idea, reverend sir, if you imagine yourself in my tender condition, driving in a badly sprung war-relic truck, along a practically nonexistent road, all the way from Richmond to the Grand Canyon.
Everything in the vast interior of Australia is known roughly as the Outback. But the Northern Territory, where I was going, is even out back of the Outback, and is known to the Aussies as the Never Never. The territory is the size of Alaska, but has exactly as many people in it as my hometown of Dreer, Virginia. The Anula tribal grounds are situated in the far north of this Never Never, on the Barkly Tableland between the bush country and the tropical swamps of the Gulf of Carpentaria—a horrible 2,500 miles from my starting point at Sydney.
The city of Cloncurry (pop. 1,955) was our last real glimpse of humankind. By way of illustrating what I mean, the next town we touched, Dobbyn, had a population of about 0. And the last town with a name in all that Never Never wilderness, Brunette frowns, had a population of minus something.
That was where my drivers left me, as agreed from the start. It was the last possible place they might contrive to hitchhike a ride back toward civilization. They showed me the direction I should take from there, and I proceeded on my pilgrim’s progress into the unknown, driving one of the trucks myself and parking the other in Brunette Downs for the time being.
My drivers said I would eventually come upon an Experimental Agricultural Station, where the resident agents would have the latest word on where to find the nomadic Anulas. But I arrived there late one afternoon to find the station deserted, except for a few languid kangaroos and one shriveled, whiskery little desert rat who came running and whooping a strange cry of welcome.
“Cooee! What cheer? What cheer? Gawdstrewth, it’s bonzer to see a bloody newchum buggering barstid out here, dinkum it is!”
(Lest this outburst has horrified you, Dean Dismey, allow me to explain. At first, I blushed at the apparent blasphemies and obscenities commonly employed by the Australians, from Major Mashworm on down. Then I realized that they use such locutions as casually and innocently as punctuation. And, their “Strine” dialect being what it is, I never knew when to blush at their real deliberate cuss-words, because I couldn’t tell which they were. Therefore, rather than try here to censor or euphemize every sentence uttered, I shall report conversations verbatim and without comment.)
“Set your arse a spell, cobber! The billy’s on the boil. We’ll split a pannikin and have a real shivoo, what say?”
