Authors: Nevil Shute
She had the baby in an old American Army jungle hammock, which seemed to me a good sort of a cot for an infant on the trail; it had a waterproof roof to keep the sun off him and mosquito netting to keep off the flies, which were bad in that camp. They opened up this thing to show him to me, a well developed boy several months old, not very dark in colour. I said, “My, he’s a fine chap. When was he born?”
“January the 9th,” said Jock. “At Robinson River, at about five in the morning.”
January the 9th, I thought, was the third day after Epiphany, and five o’clock in the morning was the time when I had stood up, dazed and weary, to find the animals still standing round the house. It was a coincidence, of course, that this man’s name was Anderson; I had decided that I must put such thoughts out of my mind, and there was no going back upon that resolution. I stared down at the baby. “He looks very well,” I said. “What are you going to call him?”
The girl looked up at her husband with one of her rare smiles, and he laughed self-consciously. “The wife had an idea when he was born she’d like to call him Stephen. But I thought that I would choose to name him David, after my father. We’re agreed upon that now.”
It was imperative that I should hide any perturbation that I might feel and carry on with the business in hand as if there was nothing unusual about it. I turned to the girl. “You are quite happy about that name?” I asked.
She nodded. “David is his name.”
“David’s a good Christian name,” I said mechanically,
and while I gained time to collect my thoughts I glanced at the girl’s hand. There was a wedding ring. I asked, “You two are married?”
“Aye,” he replied. “Brother Fisher married us last September, over on the Roper River.” Not before time, I thought, and yet I thought the better of Jock Anderson for marrying the half caste girl who was to bear his child.
There was no more to be said about it and my duty was quite plain; it was to baptise this child into Christ’s holy Church. There seemed to be nothing to be gained by delaying, and so I told Jock Anderson that we would have the service right away before we ate, and he told the mother. Thinking back, I cannot remember that she took much part in our discussion; she was a very quiet girl, who spoke remarkably little, and that in a low tone. He gave her name to me for the register, Mary Anderson.
There was a little difficulty about the godfathers and godmothers, because Jock had made no provision at all for those. Phil Fleming was there, a black haired, lean, gangling lad of twenty who had little idea of what a godfather should do. It was impossible to suggest one of the black boys, of course, and Phil declared himself willing, so I had a talk with him privately and tried to make him understand what he was taking on. There was no godmother at all, but Mary was understood to say that her sister Phoebe would be godmother and that she had done it before, and so I allowed the mother to stand proxy for Phoebe, who apparently was working in a job at Chillagoe.
They had a clean bucket, and I washed it and filled it with rather muddy water and set it on a tucker box draped with my little altar cloth, to serve as a font. I arranged this in front of a couple of gum trees near the water’s edge on clean ground a little way away from the camp, we drove away the cattle, and then I got them all together and showed
them where to stand and what to do, and I began my service.
I have administered the Baptism of Infants many hundreds, perhaps thousands of times since I was ordained, and one would have thought that at my age I would have understood what the words of the service meant. Moreover, I have schooled myself to think about the words that I am saying as a trick to prevent the service from becoming mechanical, and this concentration had never before led me into any surprises in the Baptism of Infants. But when I came to the passage which commences, ‘Give Thy Holy Spirit to this infant, that he may be born again, and be made an heir of everlasting salvation,’ I had to stop, because suddenly I wondered what on earth I was talking about. It seemed to me that I had never said those words before, and I had to look at my prayer book to assure myself that there was, in fact, no error before I could collect my thoughts and go on with the service.
There were cattle all around us in the evening light, standing knee deep in the water, moving around with squelching noises, or lying chewing the cud. The smell of them was strong all over the camp. I coaxed the godfather through his responses and went on, and presently I took the child from his mother’s arms and held him in my own, and I baptised him David.
That was virtually the end of it, but that I had the same trouble with the words of the Thanksgiving, parts of which seemed to hold meanings that I had never seen in them before. And finally it was all over, and the child was back in his jungle hammock, and the mother was busy at the cooking place with supper, and I was folding up my altar cloth.
The supper was the usual thing—a roast of salted beef with potatoes, home-made bread, butter, and quantities of strong sweet tea from a billy, served on tin plates and in tin
mugs, and eaten sitting on the ground. The light was failing as we ate and the mother lit the hurricane lamp; in the last of the daylight I chose a spot under a tree to sleep, and unrolled my swag and made my bed ready.
I knew that they would go to bed early, for they would be up long before dawn cooking the breakfast and striking camp, in order to get the cattle mustered with the first of the light and get them on the road. But while the mother tidied up the supper things and nursed her baby at the door of the tent, I sat with Jock Anderson upon a log, smoking a last pipe with him before turning in
“He’s a fine child, Jock,” I said. “You must be proud of him.”
“Aye,” he replied. And then he said, “He’ll have a hard time with the colour.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” I said. “It’s not so important as some other things. He’s got a good mother.”
“Aye,” he said, “she’s a good girl.” He paused, and sucked his pipe. “I don’t know what the folks at home would say. They’d never understand, Brother. A man lives year after year and never sees a white girl that’s unmarried, and gets terrible lonely in the bush. And she’s a good wife.”
“I’m sure of that,” I said. “A white girl could never stand this kind of life. You ought to think about some settled job, Jock, for the child’s sake, now. Especially if you’re going to have any other children. Your wife’s doing wonderfully well—I can see that—but every girl should have a settled home when children come.”
“Aye,” he said slowly, “that’s a fact. She tells me that she’s in the family way again already.” He paused. “Jimmie Beeman, manager at Tavistock Forest, he said he’d offer me the job of head stockman, last year. He’ll be at Croydon races, and I’ll see him. Maybe I’ll break up this outfit, and go there.”
“He knows about Mary, does he?”
“Aye. He doesn’t mind about the colour.”
I said, “I should do that, Jock. You oughtn’t to ask your wife to go on droving with you with another baby on the way. It’s not fair to a woman, that. If Jimmie Beeman wants you at Tavistock, I should go there. He’s got a house, hasn’t he?”
He nodded. “I’ll think on it, Brother. He’s got a two roomed house out past his stockyard.”
“He’d probably build on another room if he knew that you’d stay a year or two,” I said. “I’ll have a talk with him next time I’m round that way, if it’ld help.” I paused, and we sat smoking, looking out across the waterhole in the still moonlight. “You know that girl he married?” I said presently. “Nan Fowler, daughter of old Jim Fowler on the railway at Julia Creek?” He nodded. “She was a school mistress at Charters Towers,” I reminded him. “They’ll be having their family along with yours, and she might start a bit of a school. You want to think about these things, now you’re a father.”
“Aye,” he said slowly, “that’s a fact. I dunno that schooling’ll be much use to him, though, with the colour.” He paused. “He’s a fine bairn,” he said presently. “As fine a bairn as I ever saw. He’ll be a big fellow when he grows up. He’ll make a good stockman, or a drover maybe.”
“You can’t tell,” I said quietly. “You ought to give him a good schooling. You never know what people will turn into. He might rise to be anything before he dies.”
We knocked our pipes out and turned in soon after that. I lay in my swag for a long time before sleep came watching the brilliant Queensland stars through the fine tracery of the gum leaves. I knew then that a corner of the veil had been lifted a little for me by Stevie Figgins under the hand of God, and I am still puzzled to know why this thing was done.
Because it means that I have been honoured in a way beyond my station in life; I am an obscure and unimportant man, a man like a million others doing the job each day that comes to hand, and not doing it very well. Who am I that God should pick me to reveal His wonders to?
And who was Stevie, to whom the full revelation had been made? But here I feel I am on firmer ground, because it is the way of God to deal with poor and humble men. If the Scriptures teach us anything, it is that God speaks seldom to the wise men or to the great statesmen. For His messages he speaks to poor and humble men, to outcasts, to the people we despise.
So there it is, and I can add no more to this account. I have written down what happened, and it has eased my mind to do so, and I shall now lock these exercise books away, put the whole thing out of my mind, and go on with my job here in this scattered parish. All that this strange experience has taught me has gone to confirm what I think I already knew, secretly, perhaps, and deep down in my heart. If what I think I have been told is true it means that we make our own Heaven and our own Hell in our own daily lives, and the Kingdom of Heaven is here within us, now, for those who have gone before.