Handsome as he was, with his black moustache and
big dark eyes rolling restlessly, I took an instantaneous dislike to his
cruel thin lip and cold proud mouth the moment I looked upon him. If I
had been wise, I would have drawn back from the expedition at once. It
is a foolish thing to bind one's self down to a voyage of that sort
unless you are perfectly sure beforehand that you have at least no
instinctive hatred of any one among your messmates in that long forced
companionship. But I wasn't wise, and I went on with him. From the first moment, even before I had spoken to him, I disliked
Lemarchant; very soon I grew to hate him. He seemed to me the most
recklessly cruel and devilish creature (God forgive me that I should say
it!) I had ever met with in my whole lifetime. On an Arctic expedition,
a man's true nature soon comes out--mine did certainly--and he lets his
companions know more about his inner self in six weeks than they could
possibly learn about him in years of intercourse under other
circumstances. And the second night I was on board the _Cotopaxi_ I
learnt enough to make my blood run cold about Harry Lemarchant's ideas
and feelings. We were all sitting on deck together, those of us who were not on duty,
and listening to yarns from one another, as idle men will, when the
conversation happened accidentally to turn on Queensland, and Lemarchant
began to enlighten us about his own doings when he was in the colony. He
boasted a great deal about his prowess as a disperser of the black
fellows, which he seemed to consider a very noble sort of occupation. There was nobody in the colony, he said, who had ever dispersed so many
blacks as he had; and he'd like to be back there, dispersing again, for,
in the matter of sport, it beat kangaroo-hunting, or any other kind of
shooting he had ever yet tried his hand at, all to pieces. The second-lieutenant, Hepworth Paterson, a nice kind-hearted young
Scotchman, looked up at him a little curiously, and said, "Why, what do
you mean by dispersing, Lemarchant? Driving them off into the bush, I
suppose: isn't that it? Not much fun in that, that I can see, scattering
a lot of poor helpless black naked savages." Lemarchant curled his lip contemptuously (he didn't think much of
Paterson, because his father was said to be a Glasgow grocer), and
answered in his rapid, dare-devil fashion: "No fun! Isn't there, just! that's all you know about it, my good fellow. Now I'll give you one
example. One day, the inspector came in and told us there were a lot of
blacks camping out on our estate down by the Warramidgee river. So we
jumped on our horses like a shot, went down there immediately, and began
dispersing them. We didn't fire at them, because the grass and ferns and
things were very high, and we might have wasted our ammunition; but we
went at them with native spears, just for all the world like
pig-sticking. You should have seen those black fellows run for their
lives through the long grass--men, women, and little ones together. We
rode after them, full pelt; and as we came up with them, one by one, we
just rolled them over, helter-skelter, as if they'd been antelopes or
bears or something. By-and-by, after a good long charge or two, we'd
cleared the place of the big blacks altogether; but the gins and the
children, some of them, lay lurking in among the grass, you know, and
wouldn't come out and give us fair sport, as they ought to have done,
out in the open: children will pack, you see, whenever they're hard
driven, exactly like grouse, after a month or two's steady shooting. Well, to make them start and show game, of course we just put a match to
the grass; and in a minute the whole thing was in a blaze, right down
the corner to the two rivers. So we turned our horses into the stream,
and rode alongside, half a dozen of us on each river; and every now and
then, one of the young ones would break cover, and slide out quietly
into the stream, and try to swim across without being perceived, and get
clean away into the back country. Then we just made a dash at them with
the pig-spears; and sometimes they'd dive--and precious good divers they
are, too, those Queenslanders, I can tell you; but we waited around till
they came up again, and then we stuck them as sure as houses. That's
what we call dispersing the natives over in Queensland: extending the
blessings of civilization to the unsettled parts of the back country." He laughed a pleasant laugh to himself quietly as he finished this
atrocious, devilish story, and showed his white teeth all in a row, as
if he thought the whole reminiscence exceedingly amusing. Of course, we were all simply speechless with horror and astonishment. Such deliberate brutal murderousness--gracious heavens! what am I
saying? I had half forgotten for the moment that I, too, am a murderer. "But what had the black fellows done to you?" Paterson asked with a tone
of natural loathing, after we had all sat silent and horror-stricken in
a circle for a moment. "I suppose they'd been behaving awfully badly to
some white people somewhere--massacring women or something--to get your
blood up to such a horrid piece of butchery." Lemarchant laughed again, a quiet chuckle of conscious superiority, and
only answered: "Behaving badly! Massacring white women! Lord bless your
heart, I'd like to see them! Why, the wretched creatures wouldn't ever
dare to do it. Oh, no, nothing of that sort, I can tell you. And our
blood wasn't up either. We went in for it just by way of something to
do, and to keep our hands in. Of course you can't allow a lot of lazy
hulking blacks to go knocking around in the neighbourhood of an estate,
stealing your fowls and fruit and so forth, without let or hindrance. It's the custom in Queensland to disperse the black fellows. I've often
been out riding with a friend, and I've seen a nigger skulking about
somewhere down in a hollow among the tree-ferns; and I've just drawn my
six-shooter, and said to my friend, 'You see me disperse that confounded
nigger!' and I've dispersed him right off--into little pieces, too, you
may take your oath upon it." "But do you mean to tell me, Mr. Lemarchant," Paterson said, looking a
deal more puzzled and shocked, "that these poor creatures had been doing
absolutely nothing?" "Well, now, that's the way of all you home-sticking sentimentalists,"
Lemarchant went on, with an ugly simper. "You want to push on the
outskirts of civilization and to see the world colonized, but you're too
squeamish to listen to anything about the only practicable civilizing
and colonizing agencies. It's the struggle for existence, don't you see:
the plain outcome of all the best modern scientific theories. The black
man has got to go to the wall; the white man, with his superior moral
and intellectual nature, has got to push him there. At bottom, it's
nothing more than civilization. Shoot 'em off at once, I say, and get
rid of 'em forthwith and for ever."