Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [8]
The boys’ laughter echoed back from the granite rocks. They started to strike comic postures, each striving to outdo the other in their grotesque abandon.
Mary watched them. She would have dearly loved to join in. A year ago – in her tom-boy days – she would have. But not now. She was too sensible: too grown-up. Yet not grown-up enough to be free of an instinctive longing to share in the fun: to throw convention to the winds and join the capering jamboree. This longing she repressed. She stood aloof: disapproving. At last she went up to Peter and took his hand.
‘That’s enough, Peter,’ she said.
The skylarking subsided. For a moment there was silence, then the bush boy spoke.
‘Worumgala?’ (Where do you come from?) His voice was lilting as his laughter.
Mary and Peter looked at each other blankly.
The bush boy tried again.
‘Worum mwa?’ (Where are you going?)
It was Peter, not Mary, who floundered into the field of conversation.
‘We dun’no what you’re talking about, darkie. But we’re lost, see. We want to go to Adelaide. That’s where Uncle Keith lives. Which way do we go?’
The black boy grinned. To him the little one’s voice was comic as his appearance: half-gabble, half-chirp; and shrill, like a baby magpie’s. Peter grinned back, eager for another orgy of laughter. But the bush boy wanted to be serious now. He stepped noiselessly up to Peter, brushed his fingers over the boy’s face, then looked at them expectantly; but to his surprise the whiteness hadn’t come off. He ran his fingers through Peter’s hair. Again he was surprised; no powdered clay, nor red-ochre paste. He turned his attention to the white boy’s clothes.
Peter was by no means perturbed. On the contrary he felt flattered; proud. He realized that the bush boy had never seen anything like him before. He held himself very straight, swelled out his chest, and turned slowly round and round.
The bush boy’s dark tapering fingers plucked gently at his shirt, following the line of the seams, testing the strength of the criss-cross weave, exploring the mystery of the buttonholes. Then his attention passed from shirt to shorts. Peter became suddenly loquacious.
‘Those are shorts, darkie. Short pants. You oughta have ‘em too. To cover your bottom up. Haven’t you any shops round here ?’
The bush boy refused to be diverted. He had found the broad band of elastic that kept the shorts in place. While he fingered it, the white boy prattled on.
‘That’s elastic that is; keeps your shorts in place. It stretches. Look!’
He stuck his thumbs into the waist-band, pulled the elastic away from his hips, then let it fly back. The resounding smack made the bush boy jump. Thoroughly pleased with himself Peter repeated the performance, this time adding a touch of pantomime, staggering backward as if he’d been struck. The black boy saw the joke. He grinned, but this time he kept his laughter under control; for his examination was a serious business. He ended up with a detailed inspection of Peter’s sandals.
Then he turned to Mary.
It was the moment the girl had been dreading.
Yet she didn’t draw back. She wanted to; God alone knew how she wanted to. Her nerves were strung taut. The idea of being manhandled by a naked black boy appalled her: struck at the root of one of the basic principles of her civilized code. It was terrifying; revolting; obscene. Back in Charleston it would have got the darkie lynched. Yet she didn’t move; not even when the dark fingers ran like spiders up and down her body.
She stayed motionless because, deep-down, she knew she had nothing to fear. The things that she’d been told way back in Charleston were somehow not applicable any more. The values she’d been taught to cherish became suddenly meaningless. A little guilty, a little resentful, and more than a little bewildered, she waited passively for whatever might happen next.
The bush boy’s inspection didn’t take long. The larger of these strange creatures, he saw at once, was much the same as the smaller – except that the queer things draped around it were, if possible,