Jim Sweetman, an ex-blacksmith, was a man who was accorded a good deal of respect among them. He was a big, stern-faced fellow who in all weathers wore a flannel vest out of which grey wire crawled. He disapproved of swearing and had only one oath of his own, which was ‘By Godfrey’, but was a dancer with the lightness of a man half his weight and half his age and was often seen with his three-year-old granddaughter on his arm, bouncing her up and down to the tune of a waltz. He did not impose his authority and no word of rebuke ever passed his lips, but there were few among them who did not shrink from the image they got of themselves when Jim Sweetman, with a look of sadness rather than scorn, fixed them for a moment with his gaze and turned regretfully away.
He had taken no part in the guessing game — no pleasure either. A lot of grown men and women idling about, grinning and shouting while a plain savage, or marionette or imbecile, jigged about and played up to them. And all this with not a stitch to cover him! Bad enough if he was what he appeared to be, a poor savage, but if he was a white man it was horrible. ‘Somebody get the fellow some proper covering,’ he thundered when it was clear that no one else had seen the need or was willing to forgo the spectacle long enough to remedy it. Flushed with shame, he snatched the rag from the man’s hands, pushed it at him, and pointed, then looked away. The man grinned. Very complaisantly he knotted the thing, but in an ineffectual manner, at his waist.
But now he was off on a new game. He had something else to show.
He banged his head with the flat of his hand and ‘H-h-head’ he hooted, then looked alarmed as if the word had popped out without his will. They watched, waited for more, but he was stopped for the moment.
It was the stammer. It belonged to someone he had thought was gone, lost, and here it was on his lips again. It had come back at the moment, up there on the fence, when he first found words in his English tongue. A weakness that was inseparable, perhaps, from the tongue itself. It dampened him a little. It set him back. But he swallowed hard and defied it.
‘Nose’ he yelled, clasping his own, and laughing outright at the ease with which he found the word and got it out. ‘Arm! M-m-mouth! Ear!’ He was shouting now for his own sake rather than to demonstrate anything, half drunk with what kept coming.
It was as if the language these people spoke was an atmosphere they moved in. Just being in their proximity gave him access to it. He breathed it up out of the air between them, snatched the words like buttons off their shirts, or hairs out of their beards. ‘B-b-beard’ he yelled — again, it was with him now, and would not go away — ‘foot’, holding one up and dancing awkwardly on the other; then, with an appeal to what he knew was the comic side of things, ‘arse’, and slapped his meagre buttocks.
One or two of the children laughed and clapped their hands over their mouths, all eyes. The smallest among them, their young thin faces very grave and intent, looked up to see how their parents would take it and, when no protest appeared, wondered if some new set of rules was in operation, and this blackfeller’s arrival among them was to be the start of something.
And now, with a spurt of excited energy, he lunged into the crowd, and before anyone could prevent it, had wrested a hammer from one of the onlookers, a hulking, harelipped youth, Hec Gosper, who in the first shock of the assault, and under the suspicion of some sort of native treachery, made the mistake of trying to wrench it back. The fellow was stronger than he looked; he hung on and a struggle ensued. They wrestled for the hammer, pulling this way and that, till one or two of the bystanders started barracking, and Hector, with a baffled look, and the realisation that he was being made ridiculous, gave up.
A cheerful youth but very sensitive of his standing, he felt the others had let him down. Some of the barracking had been for the black.
He stood with his shirt rucked up behind and dragged his forearm across his brow. The harelip meant that he had had to fight hard in the past not to be taunted. He was incensed now that the accident of his arriving on the scene with a hammer should once again make a victim of him. With a savage gesture, he pushed his shirt back into his pants and stood nursing his wounds.
But all the man wanted, it seemed, was to show that he knew how the thing was used. Holding an imaginary nail very daintily between forefinger and thumb, he raised the hammer and made a show of belting it in.
‘A nail,’ someone shouted, not realising that the earlier game was ended.
The man knocked in another nail, then, looking very pleased with himself, and with great solemnity, restored the tool to its offended owner, attempting as he did to pat the youth affectionately on the shoulder.
‘Get offa me,’ the boy hissed, and jerked his elbow up under the nigger’s chin.
The details of his story were pieced together the following afternoon from facts that were, as he told them, all out of their proper order, and with so many gaps of memory, and so much dislocation between what he meant to convey and the few words he could recover of his original tongue, that they could never be certain, later, how much of it was real and how much they had themselves supplied from tales they already knew, since he was by no means the first white man to have turned up like this after a spell among the blacks.
It was the minister, Mr Frazer, who examined him, in the hot little one-roomed schoolhouse, and the schoolmaster, George Abbot, who did the writing up.
The man was squeezed into a desk in the front row, with Mr Frazer opposite. George Abbot sat at his usual place, at the table on the dais, in front of a greenish blackboard cloudy with chalk dust and covered with sums in long division.
For the first half hour Lachlan Beattie was present. Since a kind of understanding had been struck between the man and his earliest interpreter, Mr Frazer thought things might go easier if he was there. But the boy was so bumptious, so ready to interrupt and contradict and take upon himself the main part of the proceedings, that George Abbot, who had to deal with him five days a week and was not inclined to be patient, told him to sit still and speak only when he was invited. Even Mr Frazer agreed at last that it might be better if he went back to his companions. They, in their delight at any sort of show, were hanging about in troops on the verandah, and whenever events inside showed a spark of action, jostled and shoved in the window frame.
Deeply humiliated before so many witnesses, who were only too happy to see him brought down, Lachlan departed, but comforted himself with the thought that in dismissing him they had lost their one chance of getting at the truth. Only he, as yet, had any clear hold on what the fellow was trying to say. He watched now from the sill, with a little smirk of contempt for the minister’s wrong guesses, which were many, and with the satisfaction, every now and then, of receiving from Gemmy a look of stricken appeal that he was impelled, with a shrug of his shoulders, to ignore.
The trouble was that Gemmy, in his childish eagerness to provide Mr Frazer with whatever it was he wanted to hear, leaped at every suggestion, and once his own meagre fund gave out was only too pleased to have Mr Frazer find words for him.
It was Mr Frazer’s belief that the sympathy he felt for the man, which was very strong, gave him an infallible insight into what he was trying to get out. When the poor fellow knotted his brow, and gnawed his lip, and hummed and agonised, Mr Frazer, all his body hunched and drawn forward till he was practically breathing into the man’s mouth, would offer syllables, words, anything to relieve the distress he felt at Gemmy’s distress, so that they sat, at times, at a distance of just inches, hooting and shouting at one another; on Gemmy’s side, odd bursts of sound, half-meanings at most; on the other, whole phrases that, whether or not they were quite what the man intended, found their way into what George Abbot set down.