Brian Penton Page 6

  “Never know when it might come in useful,” he grumbled. He pared shavings off the men's rations, and instead of giving them flour worked out a combination of bran, pollard, and a third flour. “Headstones,” the men called the heavy black damper this made, and threatened to strike, but Sambo laughed them out of it. “What's the matter with it. It stays. This fancy bread—you wouldn't know you'd eaten it.”

  “He's cheating you,” Larry said.

  Sambo was indignant. “Never been a better boss'n Rusty, and any bloke calls him names gets a head put on him.”

  That year Cabell cut five pounds off Sambo's wages. Yet Sambo's faith was unshaken.

  But the most significant development at the Reach was the wing he built on to the rambling, low-roofed homestead. Here Harriet lived under the jailer's face of Miss Montaulk. The room was walled with rough slabs and overfurnished. There was a grand piano, a Turkey carpet, a pair of big, blue vases with sticks of pampas, gilded mirrors, screens, a sofa, a suite of near-Sheraton, and lace curtains. All this display around a little girl with startled eyes and pasty face seemed crazy, slightly evil; perhaps because the magenta hills and sky pressing against the window and the omnipresence of half-wild animals and men caked in mud and dust revealed, through the room's lavish incongruity, a mind lost in a fixed idea; perhaps because of the personality of Miss Montaulk, as inevitably a part of its furnishings as the lock in the door between the little girl and the life outside at which she was always peering through the curtains.

  “Bête! Imbécile!” Miss Montaulk scolded her. “Leave prying and do your lessons or God will make your wicked back smoke with his branding-iron like those cattle down there.”

  She had a jagged, dull voice. She spoke little, but always irritably in a hissing accent, slightly foreign. Crapulous, untidy, and precise in niggling details, just like a jailer, she was utterly unlovable. Her hair, which hung in rat's tails over her ears, had been dyed some time ago and since had grown three or four inches, so that the top of her head seemed to be covered with a dirty-white, inadequate skull-cap. Her upper lip had a black moustache, bristling and tough from treatment with depilatories, and black hairs grew out of the moles on her neck. She had a nose like a pug dog's, with the nostrils turned out, and strong buck teeth. She was not old, thirty or so, but it was impossible to imagine that she had ever been young, smelt young, or looked out with any but repellant eyes, which peered fixedly at people with quick appraisal, the eyes of an old bawd Cabell would have recognized if he'd been a bit less innocent. She was a French woman and a Protestant, she said, and had good references. But most important, she was repulsive—no child could grow to like her—and she was capable, she assured Cabell, of protecting a charge against disagreeable family influences.

  “I want her to be fit to take the place that belongs to her when she goes home in a few years' time,” Cabell said. “I want her to play the piano, to converse—you know, all the fandangles.”

  Miss Montaulk understood. “And you want her protected.” (She said “brodected” and it had an ominous sound even to Cabell.) “A girl needs careful protection in this place. The men!” She shivered. “So bold! So animal looking!”

  “She's only a child yet.”

  “But she will grow up. And young ladies! I've had experience.”

  He felt shy before her intense, questioning gaze. “Ugly bitch,” he thought. “Like a hungry snake. Well, that's all to the good.” He was thinking of Emma and Mrs Todd.

  Now the silence of the house, buried in its grove of orange, plum and peach-trees, was complete. Emma lived in the kitchen (she refused to have maids in the house), Larry with the men, Cabell among the cattle and sheep. Lost between these monomaniac, closed worlds Geoffrey wandered aimlessly. “I don't want to go to school,” he had kept blubbering. “I'll do my lessons. I won't bother Miss Montaulk.”

  “All right. All right,” Cabell said testily. He reflected once or twice that Geoffrey was getting to look like one of his brothers, John who used to ride with the Barminster and always stuck around his father like a leech. The same incessant whine and fat face. “He'll come to nothing,” Cabell thought and dismissed him from the list of his potential enemies in the family and indulged him off-hand.

  But James went to school.

  “I'll break the chestnut gelding in for you while you're away,” Larry said.

  “Oh, Sambo reckoned you wouldn't give that up for anything.”

  “I'll break it in before you come back Christmas.”

  James was overcome.

  Chapter Seven: James Makes a Discovery

  James came back from school early in December. Cabell forgot to send any one to meet him at Pyke's Crossing so he borrowed a horse from Danny O'Connor, proprietor of the Travellers' Rest, and rode the two hundred miles alone. He arrived at midnight on the fourth day and went to his room without waking anybody. Geoffrey overslept himself as usual next morning, so James was unexpected when he walked into the dining-room at breakfast-time.

  Cabell looked up. “You! Of course, your holidays.”

  “Why, how did you get here?” Emma asked.

  “I borrowed a horse.”

  Emma looked at Cabell. “You even forgot the boy was due home!”

  “I've been busy,” he said. “Anyway, that bit of a ride won't do him any harm.” But a fugitive pang of remorse, as he noticed the boy's slender, fine hands lying on the table, made him add, “Grown a bit, haven't you? Must've liked it down there?”

  James's heavy lower lip pushed out. “I didn't. I hated it.”

  Cabell laughed. “Tanned you, eh? I bet you deserved it.”

  “I won't go back,” James mumbled. “I want to go to a new school.”

  “What's wrong with the school? It's the best school, isn't it? Ought to be at the price.”

  “I don't want to go to any school in Brisbane. I want to go to Sydney.”

  “Nonsense,” Cabell said. “What's the matter with you?”

  “Didn't they give you enough to eat?” Emma asked.

  James glanced resentfully from face to face, repudiating them all, even Larry. “I won't go back. I don't care what you do to me.”

  Cabell pushed aside the stock-market summary which he was trying to read. “Damn it, boy, if they didn't thrash you and they didn't starve you—they must have done something. Did they give you a report?”

  James brought it out.

  Cabell read and frowned. “There now, that sounds pretty. 'Impudent, aggressive, rebellious, and has several times been punished for rough and overbearing conduct towards his comrades.' So you've been kicking over the traces, you young guttersnipe. . .”

  “It's a lie,” James burst out. “They started first. They called me a. . .” But the enormity of the insult and the hopelessness of rousing sympathy in his father's stony face choked him. He turned his head down.

  “Seems I should've paid a bit more attention to your manners before sending you among decent folk,” Cabell growled and picked up the stock-market summary again. When he rose from the table he left the report crumpled beside his plate, forgotten.

  Larry rose too. “See you later, Jimmy. I broke in that chestnut all right.”

  James wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and said nothing, buried in incommunicable sorrows.

  When they were alone Emma learnt over the table and asked, “Called you names, did they? Who?”

  James turned his face away. “Doug Peppiott.”

  “Peppiott.” Emma nodded. “What did he call you?”

  James scowled. A flush of shame and anger wiped out the freckles round his nose.

  “Well what?”

  But he would not answer.

  “Anyway,” Emma said, “you KNOW now. As for the Peppiotts, they've no call to put on side.”

  In the yard he found Larry waiting for him with the chestnut and a brand new saddle and bridle. “Get your whip and I'll take you over the river and see the new Hereford bulls. They're bonzas.” He was excited seei
ng James again, and waited anxiously to hear what the boy would say about the chestnut and the new saddle and bridle.

  James ran his hand over the shining hot coat of the chestnut, then turned away. “I don't want to.”

  “Don't want to ride the chestnut!”

  In the last nine months hardly a day had passed when James had not fortified himself against the brutality and snobbery of boys towards a stranger with the thought of this horse and his whip and the life, so familiar, secluded, in the valley. And now suddenly he was sick with disappointment. The horse was only a bony, grass-fed hack after all, not the horse he had imagined. Think of the horses he had seen in the carriages that brought the day boys to school—sleek and fat and highstepping, in silver plated harness with a coachman, in livery and a shining top-hat, on the box. Doug Peppiott's for example. What would Doug say to this?

  He felt unspeakably thankful that Doug Peppiott would never be able to see it and say, “What, this the hunk of dog's meat you were skiting about?” But he flushed again, remembering what Peppiott had said: “Got a prize blood horse, have you? Well so you ought to. Your old man pinched enough. He nearly got into jail for it, like your old woman.”

  He had retaliated furiously with his fists and more and more outrageous proud lies. “My father's the richest squatter in the north. He's got ten thousand cattle and a hundred thousand sheep.”

  “Go on, young Cabell, you're thinking of the number of stripes on your old woman's back.”

  He had fought and lied heroically to the end. And now he could no longer lie. With the horse before him his dreams of it evaporated. He hated it now. An undisguisable brumby, it symbolized all the hollow pretences he had indulged in during the past year. He was ashamed of it, as he was ashamed of his father, ugly and rough, compared with the men he had seen in Brisbane—Doug Peppiott's father who wore a big, gold ring on his finger and had white hands; the schoolmasters who talked in precise, soft voices. As he was ashamed of Larry, who talked and looked like an ordinary stockman, who sucked his tea out of his saucer and picked up bones from his plate with his fingers, who slouched along on slightly bow legs and had never been to school. As he was ashamed of the homestead with its rough walls and battered furniture, when he thought of the homes other boys had—big mansions with men working in the gardens and servants and stables and coachmen. As finally he was ashamed, humiliatingly, cringingly ashamed of his mother, her difference from the women who came to see their sons at school and left behind, wherever they went, the scent of their perfumes; her hands, with the broken nails, and the grime bitten into the coarse lines of her fingers; her wrinkled face; her old-fashioned dress of faded blue; and, worse than all, unforgivably worse, the things they said about her. All this the horse brought home to him again, as he looked at it with the eyes of Doug Peppiott, the magically endowed and fortunate Doug Peppiott who had a beautiful mother, a handsome, rich, and kindly father, and a birthright to look down on the rest of the world.

  The freckles came out big and burning against the sudden pallor of his face. “No,” he answered Larry. “I don't want to ride it.”

  “Aw,” Larry said, “you must be dog-tired, eh? Ride it tomorrow.”

  “I don't want to ride it at all,” James said, and hurried away.

  Larry opened his mouth, then closed it tight. Simple fellow, he was dumbstruck at first, then broken-hearted, then angry. He thought that James was going out of the way to avoid him, but James was avoiding everybody. Oppressed by gigantic problems, he hung moodily about the house, bereft of books and companions. Each morning he counted another day off the six weeks that were racing him towards the moment when he would again be in that big, echoing hall with the hard and scornful eyes of other boys looking him up and down. In his rebellious misery he was forced at last to make conversation with Harriet, sitting at her window.

  “What're you always sitting up there for?” James asked her. “Why don't you come down here and have a game?”

  “Because I'm not allowed, that's why.”

  “What's stopping you?”

  “The same thing that makes you go to school in Brisbane.”

  “Papa? I'm not scared of him. I won't go to school.”

  She looked at him gravely. “What will you do?”

  James kicked a cloud of dust out of the dry earth. “I'll run away.”

  She gazed over his head at the scrub. Where ringbarkers had been at work the trees were shedding their leaves. The bark hung in long tatters from the trunks, like the hide of a bullock bogged in a waterhole during a drought and picked over by hawks and dingoes and crows. Underneath the white bones were beginning to show through. The trees writhed up into the sky, knotting their black branches in death pain and clawing at the brass vault of the heavens. The birds were gone, all except the crows, cawing invisible among the dying timber like the trees talking sadly together. The Chinamen, like vindictive underground creatures come out of their darkness to destroy the earth, went about the scrub in wide pantaloons swinging their axes and fleeing with frenzied gabble from the earth-shaking fall of a big tree. Their thin, naked backs, shining sweatless in the sun, were yellow, like the grass that grew under the house. Their moaning cries frightened her. The dying trees frightened her. It was like the landscape of some ghastly fairy-tale.

  “Aren't you afraid of Chinamen?” she asked.

  “Of course not. I'm not frightened of anything,” James boasted. “What can they do?”

  “They take you away and hide you. Then they burn the bottom of your feet in a fire so you can't run away. Then they take you to China and sell you to an old Chinaman, Miss Montaulk says.” Her precocious eyes glittered against her hollow face with its high cheekbones and wide mouth. “I wish they'd take HER and BURN HER FEET RIGHT OFF!” she said passionately.

  James was shocked. While he gaped at her a hand wrenched her away and the window slammed.

  “For that,” Miss Montaulk said, rapping her knuckles with a pencil, “you shall not leave this room for three days.”

  Harriet snatched her hand away, grabbed the pencil, and stabbed it into Miss Montaulk's arm.

  Miss Montaulk exhibited her blood-stained sleeve to Cabell. “A wicked child,” she said. There was a joyful glint in her eyes. They looked slightly crooked, like drunken eyes. “You must allow me to be more severe or one day she will do something. . . And as for that evil boy. . .”

  So James found himself under the care of Mr Shaftoe, who looked after the station books, and kept the store, and filled in his spare hours providing Geoffrey with the elements of a gentlemanly education. He was bald, with a fringe of red hair over his temple like a thin scurf of rust, which was beginning to pit his bald forehead with little rusty red freckles. He had a fleshy pale face, like soft wax, a pair of watery blue eyes, half a dozen red hairs on his eyelids, and a brick-red, swollen nose. His duck suit was dirty, the trousers concertinaed up his thin legs. He rarely changed his shirt or laced his boots, but he kept half a dozen strands of bear-greased hair punctiliously brushed across his crown and was always fingering them delicately and uttering a deep “ah” afterwards, as though from this vestige of better times he extracted the moral strength to go on living in a hard world. His fate—barring a miracle—was to drift farther and farther west to smaller towns and simpler people as civilization improved the standard of cardsharpers and confidence men in the east. Once every three months he got a remittance from England and went to Pyke's Crossing to blow it. From Cabell he got no wages—they all went in gin, of which he kept a bottle always uncorked on the table beside him as he discoursed, in an urbane but slightly Cockney voice, of bare-knuckle champions, Derby winners, cock-fights, and wealthy, noble relations, to Geoffrey dozing over the table.

  “Wake up,” he would say, knocking Geoffrey's elbow off the table and slapping his fat thighs with delight as the boy fell out of the chair, “or you'll miss something. Never want to sleep in a land of opportunity. Here, I'll deal you a hand.”

  He shuffled a
pack of greasy cards and dealt five of them to Geoffrey and five to himself. Geoffrey picked up his cards.

  “And now,” Shaftoe said complacently, “I'll tell you what's in both hands. In yours—four jacks and a ten of sparklers. What? And mine—a brace of spades and four one and onlys. Ah.” He turned his cards up. “See, smart boy Albert Shaftoe. But you wouldn't want to play that one too many times.” He drained his glass and yawned, gazing through the window at the yard littered with old cart-wheels, horseshoes, and clinkers from the forge. “What a dickens of a life for Albert Brighthurst Shaftoe, fifth son of Brighthurst Shaftoe, Bart., the old so-and-so.” He swaggered a bit, then collapsed into his soft pointed belly and gulped another gin. 'Pity you weren't a bit older, son. I'd play you a game.“

  “I'll play,” Geoffrey offered, reaching for the match box. Shaftoe frowned. “I mean a real game. For real shekels. What d'you think? I don't suppose the old man would give you any. No,” he sighed, “he wouldn't—the tight-wad. Just like mine—the methodistical old—” He pushed the cards wearily away and poured himself another drink. “Mind you, where there's a will there's a way, and yours truly didn't go unprovided for, not by a long chalk. Oh, no.”

  Geoffrey watched him admiringly. His friendly patter, his mysterious tricks with cards and dice, his thrilling stories of racehorses and fighters, his nods and winks and assumption of dark knowledge stirred Geoffrey's lethargic imagination with the dim picture of a world where nobody was lonely and everybody was rich who knew how to be. Assiduously he copied Shaftoe's English voice, his winks and sighs, his contemptuous way of talking about Larry and the hands—“Mere hinds, boy, and badly paid ones at that. Not worth boning”—even beargreased his hair. And occasionally he got a chance to see Shaftoe putting his attractive theories into action, as when he condescended to fill in a dull evening winning tobacco or Epsom-salt from Sambo, or when some traveller called at the store and risked his spare change on a game of euchre. Then Shaftoe would jingle his pockets and give Geoffrey a few shillings—and win them back.