Melbourne

Melbourne is the Australian city where the novel's central conflict was born. In June 1943, during World War II, First Lieutenant Samuel B. Bowden of the Judge Advocate General's Department was in the city as a passenger on the old Comte de Biancamano, a ship operated by the U.S. Navy. He had embarked wearing his Pentagon pallor and was bound for New Delhi and Theater Headquarters of the C.B.I. The city was a rest stop on a long journey, but it became the site of an encounter that would define the rest of his life and the lives of his family. It was here that Sam Bowden first met Max Cady, and it was here that the hatred between the two men was forged.

The Night in the Alley

The incident that bound Sam to Melbourne and to Cady occurred on a cold June night at two in the morning. Sam, drunk on Australian ale, which he described as being made of distilled sledgehammers, had decided to walk back to his ship from a hotel room shared with several others. As he got himself thoroughly lost in the great stone city with its wide, deserted streets and only a few lights burning, he heard a whimpering in an alley. He thought at first it was a puppy or a kitten, something he could smuggle onto the ship. Instead, he found a fourteen-year-old girl being raped by a drunken soldier. The girl was big for her age and very plain looking; her father had been sick in the night, and she had been on her way to her aunt's house to get help when the soldier caught her. Sam stopped and stared without comprehension at the pale tumbled legs, the brute rhythm of the attacker, and heard the animal whining and the meaty crack of the man's fist against her face. With comprehension came a high-wild anger. He wrested the soldier away from her and, as the man scrambled up, struck wildly with all his strength and hit the hard shelf of his jaw. The man grappled weakly, slid down, rolled onto his back, and, to Sam's astonishment, began to snore. Sam ran out and hailed a Shore Patrol jeep.

The Court-Martial and the Witness

Sam was held over in Melbourne for the court-martial of the soldier, who was identified as Max Cady, a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant with seven years of service and over two hundred days of combat in the islands. Cady had been pulled out of combat with a bad case of jungle rot and jungle nerves and sent to a rest camp near Melbourne. It was his first trip into the city. He was drunk, and the girl looked older than fourteen and was out on the street at two in the morning. These mitigating circumstances were weighed, but the court still gave Cady life at hard labor. Sam remembered how the sergeant had looked in court: like an animal, sullen, vicious, and dangerous. Physically powerful, Cady had looked across the court at Sam as though he would dearly enjoy killing him with his hands. Dark hair grew low on his forehead, and he had a heavy mouth and jaw, with small brown eyes set in deep and simian sockets. Sam could tell what Cady was thinking: that Sam was a nice clean non-combat lieutenant, a meddler in a pretty uniform who had never heard a shot fired in anger, and that the pretty lieutenant should have backed right out of the alley and left a real soldier alone. Sam knew how lucky his punch had been. The memory of that look, and the knowledge of what Cady thought of him, stayed with Sam for years.

The Origin of the Siege

The Melbourne incident is the root cause of everything that follows in the novel. When Cady is released from prison years later, he returns to New Essex to terrorize Sam and his family, and the entire siege is a direct consequence of Sam's decision to intervene in that Melbourne alley. Sam's wife Carol remembers the story only vaguely, recalling that Sam got off the ship and got mixed up in something and had to be a witness, and that he never caught up with the footlocker they had packed with such loving care. Sam's own memory of the night is vivid and specific, a special half-drunken flavor that would never leave his memory. He remembers humming "Roll Out the Barrel" as he walked, the sound of his heels echoing coin sounds from the empty walls. The city itself, with its wide, deserted streets and few burning lights, is fixed in his mind as the place where his life took a turn he could not have anticipated. The novel's entire plot, the moral crisis Sam faces, the breakdown of his wife, and the eventual killing of Cady, all trace back to this single night in Melbourne.

The City as a Moral Benchmark

Melbourne also serves as a benchmark for Sam's moral identity. In the alley, he acted on instinct and anger, intervening to stop a rape without hesitation. This act of moral clarity stands in stark contrast to the moral confusion he experiences years later when Cady returns. As a sedentary, forty-year-old office worker with a mortgage, a family, and an insurance program, Sam feels unsuited to the new aroma of violence and menace that Cady brings to his life. He describes himself as feeling like a white mouse in a snake pit, a triteness to say that life makes curious and unexpected demands on him. The Melbourne incident represents a time when his values were clear and his action was unambiguous. In the present of the novel, he is forced to consider actions that revolt him, including hiring thugs to beat Cady with bicycle chains and planning to commit murder. The memory of Melbourne, and the man he was then, haunts his deliberations about what he is willing to become. The city thus stands as a moral benchmark against which Sam's later compromises are measured, the place where he was a clean non-combat lieutenant who acted rightly, before the world became complicated and his own values were tested to their breaking point.