Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

I had exactly the same feeling, she said. Certainly, I wanted to get away. But as well as that, I felt the same as you.

Even then, we make up half of our motives. All of us. Just to cover the fact that at the time we moved by instinct. We impose the reasons for it afterwards. What will you do now? Nurse in Australia?

Perhaps. But I want to go back there .

Oh, we all want to go back, he said, and he laughed in his secretive manner. But I think we’ll have plenty of time to organize that. No end is in sight.

I believe my file is marked so that I can never be made a senior staff nurse or anything grander than that—such as a sister. But I know I am going back.

Yes, he said. Do we want the sensational, you and I? To see how far humans will go in inflicting and enduring? I want to be with men who’ve had serious experience. If it were otherwise, I would have joined some hospital-visiting body before the war. I mean, the Friends do have such things.

But it is like a disease, she agreed. To want to tend deaths instead of births.

You don’t really want to see deaths, he said with certainty. I’m your editor and I know.

In the rest of the voyage, those who did not wish to perish outnumbered those who did. This was combined with the new watchfulness of sentries to ensure that throwing yourself off the ship was now difficult. Soldiers on deck told Naomi in excitement that both the padres had read from her “Sinking of the Archimedes ” in their sermons—though not anything on the folly of planners and generals. But on hanging on. Redemption being an hour away. So… a parable…

That Sunday afternoon a demented boy amputee swallowed caustic soda he’d found in an unlocked cupboard and died, scarlet-faced, gagging on emetics. And that was the last of it—the final act of avoidance of the home shore. His family would of course turn up at the dock in some Australian port—unless they lived too far out on remoter farms, insulated by bad tracks from any immediate crushing of hope. Their hopes would then be centered on the local railway station. They would be required in the end to swallow the bitter, tactful lie. Your son—weakened by wounds—perished of meningitis. Or pneumonia. Or jaundice.

A raging gale came on and kept men in bunks and distracted them with queasiness and the smell of vomit from concern for their testing homecomings. Naomi found herself immune from the disease. Her companion on the stormy decks was Sergeant Kiernan—the Quaker who wanted more of the war.

Was it to cut down on dockside grief that the Demeter slipped southwest of Perth—that rumored western city—and sighted the sharp lines of Cape Leeuwin in a clear morning rinsed by a furious west wind and then made for Albany? Only men of Western Australia would land there—in that hugest of whaling ports and at the small town beneath its bald foreshores. Albany’s scatter of human dwellings offered a discounted homecoming, and one from which men would need to be transported to other places by railway. There did not seem to be enough people here to acclaim heroes and to utter a compacted roar of praise. The bands and families on platforms and the banquets offered by grateful shires seemed far off. A few officials came out on launches to meet the ship. Then the Demeter ’s launches themselves began to be lowered to act as ferries.

So men who might have previously feared arrival on Australia’s mainland found this one—the huge harbor and modest whaling town of Albany—far too plain. As barges came out with fresh produce, a rumor started amongst the men that a feast had been planned to honor them in that port. They wanted to taste it, Australian beef and roast potato and currant pudding and bottled beer and all the rest. Take us ashore too! they began chanting over the stern as they saw the western men handing their sticks and crutches ahead to sailors, then following them edgily and with a jolt onto the deck of the launch.

That night twenty men of sundry wounds and experience stole a launch which stood tethered to the side of the ship. These had the small joy of walking the Albany wharfs and of a brief search for drink and for women. They were applauded when brought back to the Demeter under a guard of the military police. But their renown was brief. Their story depressed men in the end. They had dreamed and half feared that the Australian earth would drag them in like a ferocious magnet. But there had been no passion in the neutral arms of Albany Harbour. A late-assembled brass band ashore was heard remotely as the Demeter slipped out in the morning. Immediately they were claimed by the ring of storm which ran around the world at that latitude. Lieutenant Shaw—declaring himself immune to seasickness—invited Naomi to walk the decks. He argued he was expert on his legs now. It was true that he used the imbalance of his legs deftly to deal with the pitches and yaws and rolls of the vessel. Both overcoated, he and Naomi allowed themselves to be blown along the deck and climbed to the wing of the bridge. Wind threatened to whip them off it like leaves as they watched the white collisions of the ship with the ocean. There was no ship’s officer here on the exposed part of the bridge. Shaw turned to her to share his delight in the shifting pillars of spray. Flecks of it had settled on his face. Here—in the most private square yard of the ship—he was free to let that light of especial recognition shine unabated towards Naomi.

All right, he shouted, yelling because in this gale a yell was a whisper. I’ve shown enough cowardice and I ought to tell you straight. I feel a real pleasure in your company and I can see you are a first-rate soul of a woman. Me being the joker and you the rock. I reckon we could be world-beaters.

He let her contemplate that idea for a moment.

I mean to say, he continued, I read your item on the sinking of that ship and I thought it was of a pretty high order. It showed a stalwart soul. You are a clever woman too. If there are men who don’t like clever women, I’m not one of them. And then you’re beautiful as blazes—no small thing, that! Sets off all the other qualities in a most marvelous way. A most marvelous way!

The Demeter took a massive dip into the trough between waves. She nearly lost her footing and a real baptism of spray over the forepeak wet their heads. They both laughed. It was exhilarating. It was a stimulus to Shaw.

I favor you greatly. That’s the truth. I’m saying all of it in a bit of a panic, you see, because I know that with this wind behind us we’ll be in Adelaide and all the rest in no time. So I don’t want to postpone, even though this is an uncomfortable moment for both of us. Would you consider marrying me?

That ridiculous, wind-drenched shout of a question. She did stare fullface at him. Looking off to the side wouldn’t work. Yet what surprised her was how much pleasure the offer in itself gave her. It was far greater pleasure than discomfort. He hadn’t figured much in her inner and random imaginings, but she saw he was not repellent. The idea of sharing a table and bed with him, and all that, was not unpleasant. She could also tell he’d be ardent and that it would take a lot of coldness and meanness from her to make him think she was less than a decent woman. And there was the sudden and strangely attractive possibility of being defined. The concept of a ritual sealing, a lifelong promenade with no threat from Robbie Shaw and no foreseeable tempests. It appealed to her—the idea of a companion who had come through the Gallipoli slaughter with an even soul appealed to her. The doubt was whether she could live such a straightforward and resolved life.

People do say I have a future, he rushed to tell her, howling against the wind. I mean, in my area of Queensland.