Brian Penton Read online

  “I'll be jiggered. My mother had eyes like that.” He picked the child up awkwardly and held it at arm's length. “And a nose and chin like that too. No, that's Harriet's chin.”

  The child began to cry.

  “Harriet, that's what we'll call you, little one,” he said. “And when you grow up we'll send you Home to kiss the Queen's hand and marry the handsomest man in England.”

  He had a vision of a young man dressed in the Cossack trousers and Byronic cravat of the thirties, wooing a girl in the green gloom of a lilac bower. In this vivid picture he could see the medallion holding the low neck of the girl's dress, the dark up-curling side-levers on the young man's cheek, could hear the birds, smell the lilac. Not far away the sea shuffled the pebbles on the beach in a long, slow, heavy surge like the pounding of his own heart. Why, yes, it was himself—that afternoon. . . Or had such a thing ever really happened? He shook his head—as if the confusion of dream and reality could be so easily dissolved.

  It was Emma's eyes looking up at him which turned the scent of lilac into the smell of mud steaming under the floorboards, the soft rush of the sea into the sound of the rain thrashing the iron roof and making the river hiss and splutter as though each drop was a globule of melted lead. She looked at him through eyes smoky with pain, like eyes of glass that had been breathed on, and closed them again, leaving him in a muddle of angry emotion—exasperation at the sight of her thin body persisting through yet another ordeal, revulsion from the thought that here was just one more of “HER brats,” resentment when he remembered the sacrifices which permitted her to look at him in that reproachful way, as though to wish for anything apart from her wishes would be to rob her of her just dues. Ach, she was thinking of that sulky brute out there! And his face hardened as he stared at Larry for a moment before leaning over the bed to say, “So we will, by God.”

  But his life did not change. He was content to dandle the child and think, watching the valley and its sheep fulfil their yearly cycle of breeding and wool-growing through seasons invariably fair, “Oh, well, there'll be enough for her. And I'll make my own will, confound them.” The pleasurable malice of that thought, as he saw Larry toughening into manhood and authority under the eager watchfulness of Emma, reconciled him to the futility of the too splendid hopes into which he had been betrayed the morning Harriet was born. But sometimes, in a pang of previsioned pain as he felt these same hopes stirring again out of some inextinguishable core of folly in his heart, he would not look at the child for days. Or was it that he did not put them away, that he had never put them away, that hopefully he was trying not to hope, afraid to arouse, by the merest whisper, the merest gesture of desire, the diablerie of bad luck always impending. . .

  But something was astir in the country now. He heard no more of bankrupt squatters and mobs rioting for food. The road that wound in from the south, across the valley, and out to the north-east and the Never-Never between Black Mountain and its sister at the end of the valley forty miles away, was busy again with the coming and going of wool drays, travelling cattle, people in search of land and work, drovers, swagmen, and “lone lean bushmen on lean horses with lean dogs trotting in their shadows.”

  A swaggie came to the kitchen to beg. “I been walkin' round a long time, missus. Could ye spare me that much beef and tea ye wouldn't miss it in the fine place ye've got here, bless ye!”

  Emma went to get the things and he unloaded his bluey and sooted billy and sat down on the doorstep. The children gaped shyly from their mother's skirt at his face like an old boot withered round the two, still bright, brassy sprigs of his eyes, his cabbage-tree hat with corks dangling from the brim to keep the flies off, his clothes held together with bits of fencing-wire.

  “Fine kids ye've got there, missus. And I've got an eye for fine kids. Wasn't it me, Pat Doolan, cured a deaf and dumb kid they had up Mulberry Creek on the Downs there that they never thought would speak a Christian word. 'Git along wid ye,' says I, 'that's no bewitch'un that. It hasn't got the dead face of one on it. 'Tis nothing more,' I says, 'than a kid ye've never spoke baby lingo to. That and nothing more,' I says. For the da and ma was Scotch folks, missus, that never spoke a word to each other because of the terrible loneliness that was over the place they was in and nothing new happening from one shearing to the next.”

  Emma gave him his meat and tea.

  “Bless ye, missus. Thanks, now. And would ye have a bit of snout knockin' around the boss didn't have no use for?”

  James ran across to the store to get some tobacco. “But it ain't the same up there no longer,” the swaggie told Emma as he stowed the meat away in his sack. “With them putting down the track for the steam horse, it's like being in the centre of town if you live on the Downs. Not like in days gone by. With fences and suchlike, and gentlemen jackeroos dressed up to the nines and smoking the best Manilas after tea, and telegraph poles, and new houses, and them bringing in new-chums fast enough to empty the Old Country. And money to burn, missus.”

  “Is that the way it is?”

  “That's the way it is. I've been humping my drum up along the Darling and Balonne and Condamine these ten years and never seen such things.” James brought the tobacco. “Thank ye, missus. Thank ye now. I'd be ashamed to nip ye for one thing more if it wasn't for matches.” Emma gave him matches. “You didn't hear tell of railways coming out this way, did you?”

  “Didn't I too? Why, ain't they bringing a line in to Pyke's Crossing. There won't be enough Irish navvies to knock them hills flat at fifteen bob a day. Millions to chuck away, missus. Millions. . .”

  Larry lounging behind the flame-tree in shyness of a stranger, Cabell pottering about his rose-trees in the garden, listened to the wheedling blarney of the swaggie, who went on for a long time pouring into Emma's ears the tales of great new roads, great new cities, of a great wave of prosperity looming, which fed her dream of Larry's great future wherein her heart found recompense for its old pain. He talked of the gold pouring out of Gympie, the new buildings in Brisbane, the toffs at the Melbourne Cup, the steamships which came through the Suez Canal to Australia in a third of the time the old Indiamen took. He told them of houses the rich squatters had built, “as big as an Englishman's castle in Ireland,” of land selling at a hundred pounds a foot in Brisbane, of civilization spreading everywhere across the Continent, “even to the banks of the Barcoo, even to the verge of the Nullarbor Plain.” And when he had shouldered his bluey and departed, plodplodplodding, with the terrific persistence of a fly in a bottle, towards a blue horizon always unfolding on a blue horizon, Cabell and Larry stared down the road till he was no longer visible in dust and distance. The image he had evoked, of a teeming, fruitful life lapping round the hills that shut them in, stirred both of them and left them both frustrated—the one because he was young and afraid, the other because he was no longer young and therefore more afraid.

  But more swaggies came, and bullock-drivers, the much-travelled men of the bush, and the strange nomads who worked a while and wandered on, stockman to-day, miner to-morrow, navvy, cook, or well-sinker the day after, and they were all excited at the things they had seen—steam trams in Sydney, telegraphs, railways. They were germ carriers, men on whom something like a fever was working—the fever of a boom.

  The landtakers, like Cabell, for whom the country would always be alien, grey, inimical against the sharp image of England's loveliness, were dying out and with them the weariness of those who had had to fight too much. The old hands like Gursey were going too and with them the despair of those who had had to suffer too much. There was a new generation, and for the young life is always full of promise, and death is a mirage, and wisdom, disillusion, and despair have to be won afresh by every son.

  After the dark years of the sixties the price of wool was shooting up again. They had at last discovered how to send meat to England. People were clamouring for land. “More land.” Investors were clamouring for borrowers. “Take our money.”

  “Oh, I'
ve seen it all before,” Cabell muttered to himself and it was like a prayer to some fiend not to tempt and torment him any more. “Wasn't it the same in Fifty-one when they discovered gold? In Sixty when they made a new State? Didn't I let them pull the wool over my eyes? Bah, it never changes.”

  But it changed as he watched. Merchants were opening up big stores in the very street of Brisbane where, thirty years before, he had seen convicts march to a flogging. The telegraph had conquered the Dead Heart of Australia. Politicians were talking about filling the empty spaces with a hundred million people. Squatters were borrowing easy money, fencing, cutting down costs, growing richer than he could believe. “No more droughts,” everybody said.

  “Why not let Larry boss the board at the next shearing?” Emma said.

  “Larry?”

  “He's old enough.”

  “And old enough to sign my cheques and pay the undertaker, I expect.” “We won't live for ever.”

  “I'll live long enough to see that brat doesn't grab everything!”

  Harriet was four years old now. Her eyes were bigger and browner, with a faint iridescence in the core of the iris—the spit of his mother, he thought. She was already frightened of him, his big, black beard and the way his one eye, with the blood spot in the white, like a second pupil, stared into hers. He went down to the offal dump and got some knucklebones and polished them and taught her to play. He took her out walking on his shoulder. But whenever she could she wriggled out of his hands and hid in Emma's skirts.

  “Governess, refined widow. Newly arrived in Colony, seeks country employment,” he read. “Best English references. Mrs Alice Todd, G.P.O., Brisbane.”

  He rode to Brisbane with the wool and found Mrs Todd extremely refined and not too young—forty or so. While she was packing to join him at the coach for Pyke's Crossing he wandered round the sprawling, busy town, lost his way in its streets crowded with women in styles grotesque and unexpected, men in white ducks and straw hats with pugarees. On the top floor of the Town Hall he found his old lawyer Samuelson, face still yellow and damp with beads of viscous sweat as though he had just been sprayed with oil.

  “Could a man borrow ten thousand?” Cabell asked. “Don't say I want it, but could he?”

  Samuelson rubbed his hands. “Get you twenty thousand on your security. When you want it, eh?”

  “I don't want it. And I've got to catch the coach now. Good day.”

  Mrs Todd, jolting among her trunks and wicker baskets in the back seat of the chuck-me-out, which was all he could hire in Pyke's Crossing where the coach stopped, babbled her protests about the heat, the dust, the flies, and the barbaric roughness of colonial roads into a deaf ear. He was looking ahead where the sun was setting low down on the earth in a transparent haze of golden bars and red dust rising from the mobs of cattle, the drays, and the horsemen pressing north. In this alchemy of light even the gums and the muddy waterholes were transmuted to gold, even the flesh on his hands.

  Chapter Five: Vain Challenges

  Cabell confided an idea to Mrs Todd. “In two or three years' time I'll send you home to England with the girl. I've got a sister down in Dorset. This is no place for a girl to grow up in.”

  So Mrs Todd lived in hope. She endured her yearly dose of blight, like grains of hot sand in the eyes, her yearly dose of the shakes, the appalling fecundity of little black ants, rats, flies, and snakes. More difficult to bear was the malice of Emma.

  “That's nice lace you've got on your dress there,” Emma said, pointing down, and Mrs Todd looked and saw a band of fleas, two inches wide, round the hem of her tarlatan skirt.

  But she endured the fleas, consoling her loneliness in this outlandish place with rambling stories of the way she had walked in the fields around Hampstead when she was a girl, picking buttercups in May. In England it was always May.

  Harriet clung to her. Then she clung to Harriet, when five years had passed and Cabell, sooty from a bushfire, stinking of foot-rotting sheep, of the sweat of horses, stopped at the door of the schoolroom to watch Harriet's little hands struggling up and down the keyboard of the piano and say, “In two years' time I reckon you ought to be about ready to go home to your Aunt Harriet with Mrs Todd here.”

  Harriet sat on the high piano stool with her red-stockinged legs dangling and looked down at her hands in her lap. She had her mother's trick of submission behind a dead face. But Cabell saw only her brown eyes and straight nose like his mother's—her difference from the rest. Two years. Twenty-four months more. He picked her up and kissed her on the lax mouth. “In ten years it won't be me kissing you but some flash young new-chum, eh?”

  When he was gone Mrs Todd burst into tears. “He promised—he promised. . .” She did not change perceptibly, but by the end of the year no longer worried the boys about holding their forks too far down and the way they said “school,” and “girl,” about the fleas on her skirt and the rats nesting in her boxes. She gave up laundering her stiff tarlatan and her innumerable white petticoats, and, as though only the starch in them had supported her, collapsed into a shape, like a cottage loaf, of three super-imposed spheres of skirt, bust, and damp face.

  She drank a lot of tea.

  “You drink too much tea,” Cabell told her. “That's what's the matter with you. Look in the pot and you'll see what your insides are like.” “It isn't all tea, Papa,” Geoffrey said, ingratiating Cabell's indifference towards his sons. “There's a lot of Hollands in it too.”

  “What's that?”

  “Mummy gives it to her. I saw.”

  Mrs Todd cowered. “A lady needs something to sustain her.”

  “Even a LADY,” Emma said, “that's been brought in to teach the children their mother eats like a bullocky.” And a rare smile moved her lips, silky and dry like the skin on an old scar.

  So Mrs Todd departed next morning, protesting feebly the deceit and injustice of Cabell. Finally he lost his patience, picked her up, bundled her head first into the buggy beside Sambo, then lashed the horses across the rump and sent them careering down the hill. The buggy skidded, lurched, rattled over the bridge, and carried Mrs Todd, ludicrously clutching her hat in one hand, Sambo with the other, out of sight in the scrub.

  Harriet went away from the window quickly and sat down in the corner of the schoolroom pretending to sew her sampler. But she watched the door out of the corner of her eyes and her hands shook. When her father came in, still angry, slamming the door, she started to cry, with a detached, uncontrollable passion. It was not for Mrs Todd that she cried. It was the sound of Mrs Todd's dress ripping from waist to hem in the scuffle, the thud of Cabell's whip-handle on the horses' ribs, and the wild scamper of hoofs across the bridge which filled her with a sick fear. That image of her father abandoned in violence would never be wiped out.

  “Harriet, little Harriet! What's the matter?” He bent over to pick her up, but her body stiffened in his arms, her teeth clicked together, and she vomited.

  Emma nursed her for a fortnight. When Cabell came near the bed she edged towards her mother. “Go away,” Emma said, “you frighten the child.”

  “By Christ,” he said, “don't you try to turn that child against me.”

  “Don't be a fool. Go away. You only make her worse.”

  He dashed off to Brisbane to get another governess, and the air in the house seemed suddenly easier to breathe.

  James ran wild. He was ten years old, with a high-boned face, freckled and gay, the Cabell nose and jaw, and the mischievous, head-erect stare of a young wild bull. Sitting at the window of the schoolroom through the dusty afternoons he used to see Larry riding about the valley. He wanted to be like Larry, who could stick any buckjumper, shoot a kangaroo from the saddle, or jerk a steer off its feet with one gigantic throw.

  He had soon become sick and tired of Mrs Todd's maunderings and the futile labour of copying out her pothooks and hangers. The smells in the valley excited him, the smell of the grass burning, the smell of cattle. When the rain,
breaking the long dry season, had departed, the sky was a hazy saffron-blue, like a soft plush cushion in which the whitewashed, red-roofed buildings of the station had embedded themselves. The shallow water lay about in sheets of broken mirror with the grass growing out of it and a strange, reversed world inhabited by dim birds. In the midday heat a musky smell came up from the flocks of glossy ibises standing motionless in the water. From relief after the long months of dust and heat and the weeks of rain and mud he wanted to rush out and throw himself on the ground, alive with new grass—feathery wild parsnip, sweet marjoram, that scented his hands, pigweed with sappy, red stalks. His voice was hysterical. He wanted to chatter to his father, press himself close to his mother. But the self-absorbed lives of an adult world excluded him. The personality of his father looming grimly over their uneasy meals, of his mother remote and busy among clattering pans, brooms, and torrid ovens, of Mrs Todd dankly obsessed by her hard fate, kept him in rebellious submission.

  A day would come when the black shadows in the scrub and the lace of sunlight on the lagoon at the Three Mile were irresistible. Mrs Todd would look everywhere, silently for fear of letting Cabell know that he was wagging it, and not find him. He was wandering about in the bush looking for honey, or cat-fishing with Sambo, listening to Sambo's stories of horses and dogs and blacks.

  “Oughta see them myalls down the coast fishin'. Got two first fingers off. Tie a bit of hair round them till they rot, then put their dook in a bull-ants' nest and let the ants eat the flesh. Better to hold the lines with they reckon.” Sambo spat in the yellow water. “Aw, but they ain't proper myalls. Oughta seen them me 'n' yer old man shot. Burned 'em after—and the grease run out like butter. . .”

  “My father must've been—fierce,” James said.

  “Fierce? By gum, if he went in a paddock with a sapling in his hand all the horses'd jump the fence. That's how fierce he was. Just oughta see him stoush a bloke!”