A Kindness Cup (17 page)

The treacle of summer. It filled the courtroom in glutinous waves. Mr Sheridan had gone so far as to remove his coat—and that without diffidence. He did some paper-shuffling, refilled his water glass from the jug.

So far as can be ascertained, he said, peering hard through his spectacles at the packed room, there is no certain evidence that Lieutenant Frederick Buckmaster acted altogether improperly in the affair at Mandarana on the twenty-fourth of June.

He paused to glare at Dorahy who had let out a snort of rage. No certain evidence, I said, and that I mean. My colleagues and I have sifted all the evidence brought before this select committee and our findings are that, while there were certain irregularities in the proceedings of that day, the entire unhappy events were the result of wrongly placed enthusiasm, a perhaps too nice sense of injustice and the understandable grievance of men who found the difficulties of living—and I mean pioneer living—aggravated to an unbearable pitch by the extra annoyance the blacks posed to their efforts.

Annoyances! hissed Dorahy. His hands were clasped so hard the knuckles ached, and the ache spread up his arms till it touched the acute perimeters of his mind. Unheeded, sweat dribbled its way down the nape of his neck. From outside the fragmented words of passers-by floated improperly in, to the annoyance of the magistrate who frowned and cleared his throat.

Hideously, Dorahy became aware that Lieutenant Buckmaster, seated down from him two rows and to the right, was beginning to grin. A twitch, like some frightful tic, attacked the schoolmaster's knee. He leant forward as Sheridan continued speaking.

While our findings tend to absolve Lieutenant Buckmaster from deliberate malice in the matter, nevertheless the court feels it must warn him against acting uncircumspectly or with undue haste in other matters of this kind. Distance, and consequent delay with the arrival of official advice, have had an adverse effect in the whole unfortunate business. However, Lieutenant Buckmaster is warned that in future he must not act without due consultation with his superiors, even if the delay seems impossibly difficult in the circumstances.

Warned! cried Dorahy over the shocked and packed room. Warned! He was on his feet babbling.

Mr Sheridan glanced at the assisting constable, who shoved his way along the rows until he could reach Dorahy.

A travesty! A farce! Dorahy kept shouting. Strong arms were propelling him to the aisle. Within the blur of faces round him only Buckmaster's shone with the greasy clarity of success. You! he cried incoherently. You you you!

As they got him outside into the brighter day, he could hear the magistrate resume his monotone summation.

You must try to keep calm, sir, the constable kept saying. He felt sorry for the silly coot. Try having a bit of a sit-down in the shade.

Dorahy was weeping hopelessly, the tears and the sweat griming his fanatic face. Let me back in there, he kept begging over and over, pushing beyond the constable's barrier arm at the closed courthouse door. Let me back.

Sorry, sir, said the constable, who was firm and kind as well. If you don't stop it, I'll have to take you in charge. He steered him to a bench alongside the hall. Just sit there, like, for a bit, he said. It's the bloody heat getting at us. That's what it is.

He stepped back and took up a guard's stance by the doorway.

Dorahy came to his senses slowly. He wiped his face off with the arm of his sleeve and sat there till the heart quietened. From the courthouse came the shuffling sounds of the assembly rising, but he didn't move. He sat his shame stubbornly there and watched as they came out, watched and watched and found no words for it.

I
T
is the last night.

Take time over this, over the pathos engendered by the lamps, the slow rain on the iron roof of the hall, the wistfulness of streamers coming loose. There are too many people and by now some of them have lost the crack-hearty jauntiness of that first evening and have their faces settled into the lines that betray their age and a grief for it which they attribute to this last act of farewell.

They are wrong. They have simply regained themselves as they are, not as they used to be. They are simply a crowd of elderly people, disappointed by time, who are longing to get home. And this common denominator, home, is not what they have come to visit after all but that which they have left.

They are more critical of the place, too. Its shortcomings are beginning to be listed on their tongues. They know they could never settle here again. They are glad they got away. They are disappointed in each other: the fabled jokester, the hero of other years, is disguised by fat and wrinkles, is a feeble punster at that, who worries about his audience more than his words, is become a bore with ill-polished shoes and a suit that sags. The beauties have turned shrewish. God bless the lot of them, for the unpleasantnesses that once irritated are beginning to reassert themselves. Skins are peeled from eyes.

Barney Sweetman is chairing again. Buckmaster is by his side. Their wives are on stage as well, dried-out ladies who are over-powered by Gracie Tilburn, guest artist in lavender silk. The flowers in vases are all lies, and they are limp from strategy. The bunting is conscious of hypocrisy.

In this hall, noisy with conversation, last-minute recognitions and bogus promises to keep in touch are made. It is sizzling with an amity in the centre of which Boyd's party is seated half-way from the door. Dorahy, pale with anticipation, can barely speak. Boyd, stocky as a bull, has his intransigent jaw set and jutting. He has the manic fanaticism of the recently converted.

When Sweetman stands and raises his hand for silence, the buzzing roar of the hall subsides as eyes focus on the big fellow who is more or less king of the kids, of the town, an infallible potentate. Up there he is speaking
ex cathedra
, and they prepare to hang on his lips.

‘Dear old friends,' he begins and his audience, strangely enough, instead of melting, hardens. They are not aware of it themselves, but they have fought forward to a sort of self-truth which sees themselves as less than friends. There have been too many petty arguments, too many misplaced remarks, a lack of delicacy in reminiscence; too much has been forgotten and too much remembered. ‘You are probably feeling tonight as I feel, tremendously sad on looking about this room and seeing faces familiar and meaning so much.'

The crowd generously goes with him. After all it's a bugger of a job, this speech-making. But they go only a little way.

‘We have had a week of recollections and memories, but more than that we have had a resurgence of the spirit—yes, the very spirit—that helped create this town. I find this moving, indeed.' He pauses—it is a moment when he could have wiped his eyes but doubts the wisdom of the gesture coming too early. He goes on in a voice calculated to wring.

‘The soul, or rather the life-blood of this town is its people. Yes. I say it again—those people who gave all they had to the building of it.' A more weak-minded claque cheers. Some women dab hankies. ‘All we have built here,' Sweetman continues, seizing the moment by its straggly forelock, ‘comes more or less from nothing. What you see now is the result of our work, our work and all we put into making this town what it is. I could name those people who are sitting before me with us tonight. But that would mean naming every one of you—' That's clever!—‘and looking around at one another as you are now you see there, in the faces on each side of you, in front and behind, those who were the builders of the future.'

Dorahy thinks he might vomit.

‘In those days,' Sweetman says, ‘you might remember the struggles we had with the south. You might recall the Separation League. The struggles to get coloured labour. The opposition from those who understood little and felt less about those problems peculiar to this part of the world. And all the time—I repeat, all the time—in the face of these difficulties, we pushed ahead doing what we believed to be right, sacrificing all for the sake of those who would come after.'

Prolonged cheers. They are melting again.

‘Yes,' he continues when the blast subsides, ‘we were unpopular boys in the Separation League.' He allows himself a roguish grin, but it comes out crooked. ‘We were firebrands then. Younger, of course. But firebrands. And I choose that word especially because we were burning with zeal to promote the interests of this town.'

His choice of word stuns Boyd and Dorahy. The monstrous cheek of it, and Sweetman, legs apart, braced before his world!

‘We were interested only in what concerned the good of us all. Dear friends, tonight, as you are on the eve of departure, I want you to take away memories of those times and remember how we fought together. No battle against the nation's enemies has more sincerity and strength than the battles we fought. There is no greater comradeship than that which we had.' He stops to allow them all to dry their eyes. ‘Now that we are all of us nearing the twilight of our years, there is this we can remember—what I have said tonight will shine as youngly for you now as it did then.'

The applause is sickeningly tremendous. People can drown in shallows. Dorahy is coughing into his wet hands while Sweetman smiles like a Messiah.

‘And now,' he says, ‘once again I have pleasure in asking your own Miss Gracie Tilburn to sing for you—as she sang earlier in the week—directly to your hearts.'

There is another storm of clapping and the pianist comes on stage to the worn upright. Gracie, splendid in that fluid silk, moves to the front of the rostrum, inwardly hesitant despite that outer assurance, and Dorahy and Boyd hold their breaths. She is torn between what she has been asked to do and what the crowd expects—and it is a wink that does it.

Centre front, Freddie Buckmaster catches her eye and closes one of his in a huge and vulgar implication. Her disgust rejects him afresh, and she hears her own voice saying firmly and richly through the pianist's opening chords, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, before I sing to you tonight, I ask you to give up a few minutes of your time to listen to Mr William Boyd. He has something to say to you all.'

The audience is rattled. The pianist half turns. Sweetman, who has regained his seat in showers of light, starts up, but not before he sees in the heart of the hall Snoggers Boyd standing on his chair and circling so that he takes the entire gathering into his compelling eye.

There is some uncertain clapping and a lot of murmuring. As Gracie resumes her seat, an isolated cry of ‘Shame!' rings out.

Boyd is standing perched there above the goggling crowd, an unimpressive man except for his voice, which will have profound and resonant convictions. Carefully he waits until the silence of speculation has deepened and then he begins, speaking quietly.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I will not take up much of your time.' He knows there isn't much. From the corner of his eye he can see Buckmaster père on stage gesturing to his son. ‘As you know I have been writing a series of articles for you each day on the very people who have loomed large in the progress of this town.' The silence has a trembling quality. The air quivers. ‘You are all aware,' Boyd continues, ‘of the misadventure that overtook the
Gazette
last Wednesday evening, when not only the next day's issue was destroyed but also the plates to set it up. When Mr Sweetman chose to speak of firebrands he couldn't have chosen a more apposite word, for the firebrands are still with us.'

He lets his allegation rest in half a minute's tension. The hall rustles. They get it. There are shouts of ‘Sit down, old man!' from the Buckmaster claque, and Barney Sweetman is observed leaving the stage. But Boyd merely pitches his voice above the beginning din.

‘My offices were destroyed, there is no doubt about this, deliberately'—he emphasises the word—‘and perhaps by the very spirit which Mr Sweetman said animated some of us in past years. Who would do this, I do not know for certain. But I do suspect. What I do know is that I was going to tell you all of a humbler soul than those who waged battle in the Separation League, a humbler spirit than those who fought to use coloured labour cheap, a meeker spirit than those who waged unceasing war against the blacks. I am referring to Charles Lunt who is with us in the hall this evening.'

The stillness is fragile. Boyd's wandering eye observes Sweetman in consultation with two bruisers of young men by the rear door.

‘Perhaps,' he goes on more loudly and strongly, ‘many of you did not know him. He was not a pushing man. It's more than likely you were unaware of him, for he practised his charity without airing it. But tragedy attended him. In his efforts to befriend those blacks who camped near his lonely farm, in his efforts to protect them, he lost a limb and almost lost his life.'

On stage Buckmaster is going mad. His insanity boils blood, thickens features, clogs the shouts and gabbled directions he is trying to give his bully boys who have come up the aisle and are struggling to haul Boyd from his chair. As Boyd wobbles with the dragging arms, and as Lunt is seen to rise beside him stumped by his wooden leg, other shouts of ‘Fair go!' and ‘Give him a go!' rattle from all over the room. The audience has been split in half.

Gracie Tilburn, her red hair ablaze, rushes to the very footlights and pleads for silence. It is so outrageous for a woman to assert herself among men, the hall is temporarily shocked and muted. Fred Buckmaster, shoving his way along the side to get at Boyd, is so appalled he stops to screech at her, ‘Sit down you crazy bitch!' Some devotee clips his mouth for that, and another tussle starts.

Finally it is Barney Sweetman who shows reason. Politically. His angel face torn, his age humped all over his thinning shoulders, he cries high-pitchedly from the very back of the hall, ‘Stop this, everyone. Stop spoiling the week.' His voice cracks suddenly with the effort of it. ‘Stop negating,' he croaks, ‘those very qualities I spoke of. Stop!'