Читать книгу The Sands of Windee - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 13

Father Ryan Leaves Town

Without knocking, Dash opened the door of room No. 2 and entered, closed the door, and, going to the bed, stood silently looking down on the occupant. The bed lay lengthwise beneath the wide-open window, through which the intermittent breeze came to belly the lace curtains over the recumbent figure, still dressed in trousers and shirt.

Jeffrey Stanton, junior, was a young man of twenty-two. His robust frame made him bigger than his father, but it lacked the leanness and the wiry muscles still characteristic of the owner of Windee. There was in the face of this young man, whilst he lay breathing strenuously, pride and obstinacy, but no trace of the moral weakness to be expected in one in his condition. His forehead was low and broad as that of his sire, and in regarding the chin and slightly open mouth Dash was reminded of Marion Stanton. Seating himself in a chair at the head of the bed, he put down the tumbler of Mr Bumpus’s “reviver” on the washstand and said, in his soft grandiloquent manner:

“The hour is nine o’clock, my very debauched friend. Arise and suffer your ablutions before we break our fast.”

No alteration in the sleeper’s breathing indicated that he heard. Dash removed his wide-brimmed hat with one hand and ran the fingers of the other through his hair, thereby revealing the sunburn of his features and the rim of white, hat-protected skin at the summit of his forehead. His mouth then was like a spring rat-trap, but when he spoke again the even white teeth softened its grim outlines.

“Your appearance reminds me of a particularly dear old sow on the pater’s home farm,” he said loudly.

This time the sleeper stirred and, as the porcine mentioned by Dash, grunted.

“I would really like to smoke a cigarette, but I fear, should I strike a match, that your breath would cause an explosion,” the tall man observed in yet louder tones.

The response this time was a groan combined with a grunt. Dash sighed, and when the sigh was concluded his mouth was again hinting at a rat-trap. Slowly he turned his body away from the bed, and, stretching out a long arm, took from the washstand an enamelled ewer. It was a large ewer and full of water, but it required no effort for Dash to move it in a circular motion, his arm still outstretched, until it hovered over the sleeper’s face. Then from its lip there fell a gentle stream.

Young Jeff moved aside his face as though a fly walked his nose. The stream of water followed. Quite suddenly he opened his eyes. The water fell into them. He opened his mouth and the water filled it. The stream was endless, apparently inexhaustible. The young man guggled and writhed, clawed at the saturated pillows, finally sat up with wildly glaring eyes and waving hands. On the crown of his head fell the stream of water. It splashed as a jet from a garden-hose, washed his hair into his eyes, and streamed down his back and chest, saturating an expensive tussore-silk shirt. And then suddenly the stream subsided to a trickle, from a trickle languished to single drops. The empty ewer was replaced on the washstand, and Dash turned back to find himself regarded with bloodshot grey eyes and a passion-distorted face.

“You—you—you!” he cried, rage making him inarticulate.

“Softly, softly, my dear Jeff!” Dash admonished unsmilingly. He reached for the glass, this time keeping his eyes on the young man. Young Jeff saw a light in the hazel orbs, and from a raging lion became a sulky pup. It was then that Dash smiled and offered him Mr Bumpus’s concoction, which he took without thanks and drank. The whisky constituent made him shudder violently, and when the glass had been as violently thrown against the wall he threw himself back again on the pillow.

“I had an uncle,” remarked Dash, “who during the two closing years of his life was carried up to bed by two footmen every night at eleven o’clock. My uncle was a gentleman and a man. He drank beer all day long, and eighteen sixty-two port after dinner, yet he arose at six o’clock in the morning and spent an hour galloping round the park.”

“Oh—shut up!” cried young Jeff, flinging one wet arm across his eyes to banish the light.

“The trouble, I believe, is that your reading is wrong,” continued Dash. “You have been studying the lives of the strong silent men portrayed by romantic ladies, who (the men, not the ladies) invariably order their valets to bring them whiskies-and-sodas. In real life the strong silent man who doesn’t say much—myself, for instance—always shuns whiskies-and-sodas and sticks to beer, otherwise he would not be a strong silent man.”

“Damn you, Dash! Will you shut up?” demanded young Jeff, jerking up to a sitting posture and throwing his legs over the bedside.

“Gladly,” assented Dash, but he added a qualification: “if you will dress and come to breakfast.”

“Don’t talk to me of breakfast,” came the snarl.

“I must, my dear Jeff. A thin slice of unbuttered toast and a cup of strong coffee will make you fit for the drive home. Dot and I have come to town this morning especially to buy a shirt and take you home. If, after breakfast, you still feel unwell, we will then remove the distilled spirit remaining in your—er—inside by driving the truck up and down the main street of this beautifully paved town at five miles an hour.”

“I’m not leaving the hotel to-day,” Jeff decided, with out-thrust chin. “And you remember that I am the boss’s son, and that you are one of the boss’s servants.”

“I remember only that your father is my friend,” Dash said with remarkably altered voice. The indolence, the ambiguity, of his speech was but a mask after all, as was the gently smiling amused expression, replaced now by a brittle hardness. “If you are not off that bed in ten seconds, I’ll run you out and kick you round Bumpus’s backyard. Spring to it!”

The look and the tone of command utterly astonished young Jeff. It was as though he discovered a complete stranger in a man he had known ever since his return from college. Dash got up and moved his chair to the farther wall, and when he again seated himself and fell to rolling a cigarette young Jeff was stripping off his wet underclothes with shaking hands. The tall man’s features relaxed into their habitual lines, and his voice, when he spoke again, was pitched to its usual mildness.

“Of course you must go home, old boy,” he said, blowing smoke towards the curtains. “We are giving the Fosters a tin-kettling to-night. The boss and Miss Stanton are going. All hands are going. Dot and Dash are going. You are going. Before we left this morning Miss Stanton asked me to remind you of it.”

“Damn the tin-kettling! The silly——”

“The police are lookin’ for you, Dash,” announced Dot from the suddenly opened door. “An’ breakfuss is ready.”

“I will submit to be interviewed by the police,” agreed Dash, rising elegantly from the rather rickety chair. But before he left he said to young Jeff: “Hurry up and dress, old lad, and we will have a beer before coffee. I really think that beer before coffee is preferable to a liqueur after coffee. But as for getting drunk,” he added significantly, “it must not occur again. Your position to-day will not allow of it. Please understand that thoroughly.”

“Day, Dash!” snapped Sergeant Morris when he and the tall man met in the passage. “Got a ’phone message just now from Mr Stanton saying that the car is giving trouble. It was to come in for Father Ryan and me. We’re headed for Fosters’ tin-kettling. Mr Stanton suggested that you would give us a lift.”

“Delighted, my dear sir, delighted,” Dash murmured without enthusiasm. “I wish to purchase a shirt, and Dot, I believe, desires to don a new pair of gabardine trousers. We’ll be ready to start in an hour.”

“Good! I’ll hunt up Father Ryan. Young Jeff going out?”

“Oh yes! He is dressing now.”

The sergeant’s eyes narrowed. “Fat head, I suppose?” he growled.

“A gentleman never has a fat head,” replied Dash, in a mildly reproving tone.

“Humph!” And Sergeant Morris was gone.

Five minutes later Dot and Dash and young Jeff sat down to breakfast, of which young Jeff consumed two pieces of toast and two cups of coffee. At the hour of departure Dot and Dash, who had purchased their goods from a storekeeper who made no bones about serving them that day, stood beside the truck awaiting their passengers, one of whom was then settling a stiff liquor-bill with Mr Bumpus.

Father Ryan, who lodged with the sergeant and his wife, toddled along when young Jeff made his appearance, and smiled broadly at each of them in turn. To young Jeff he said, in his faint Irish brogue: “You’re fined five pounds, young feller.”

“You fined me that amount last time I was in,” the young man objected seriously.

“Of course I did, me bhoy. You were drunk last time you came to town. You were drunk last night, for when I looked into the parlour you were trying to play the piano with your feet. The next time it will be ten pounds. I shall expect your cheque,” and his reverence dug the young man playfully in the ribs.

Father Ryan was the only representative of God left in Mount Lion. He was known and revered by bushmen as far away as Marble Bar in Western Australia as the greatest little man within the continent. No matter what denomination a man professed, if any, he went to Father Ryan with his income-tax forms or difficult letters that required answering, or to defend him in the police-court—for Father Ryan was a very able advocate when Sergeant Morris prosecuted on the d. and d. charge; whilst the women took to him their babies when they were sick, and their male relatives when they had the toothache.

When a man from Windee or one of the smaller neighbouring stations went into Mount Lion to spend there a week or a fortnight, during which he was nearly always drunk, for there was no other form of amusement, he was known as a “cheque-man”. Some there were who spent their money recklessly and cut out their cheques in a state bordering on delirium tremens; others, a minority, were more conservative, more sober, and less helpless when the day came for them to return to the semi-desolation of the bush for a further twelve months.

In the bigness of his heart Father Ryan loved all these lonely men, many of whom were without family or family ties. He knew the stagnancy of their existence and the mental depression with which the bush afflicts them, and he forgave them their lapses into very occasional drunkenness as did his Master. He placed them all in one of two classes, which he called “Gentlemen” and “Drunks”.

When a “Gentleman” cheque-man came to town Father Ryan demanded half a sovereign for his benevolent fund, and got it. On the arrival of a “Drunk” cheque-man he bailed him up and demanded three, four, or five pounds for his benevolent fund, according to the degree of doctoring it would require to send the man back to his job or find him another. And the “Drunk” invariably paid up.

When, therefore, a bushman was no longer a cheque-man, when, likely enough, he was a pitiful, palsied wretch, turned out of the hotel “broke”, faced with the multi-coloured demons because the booze supply was stopped, Father Ryan was prepared to pick him up, take him to his lodgings in defiance of Sergeant Morris, and, aided and abetted by Mrs Morris, wean him gently from John Barleycorn, build up the food-starved body, finally take him to one of the stores and rig him out with new ready-made clothes and despatch him, per mail-car, back to his job.

No one ever had observed Father Ryan to frown. His face was beaming, as it invariably was, when he fined young Jeff, and it was still beaming when, later in the day, the opportunity occurred to reprove the young man for his folly in a manner wholly distinct from that of the ranting “wowser”. Young Jeff found himself addressed and advised by a worldly-wise man, a true sportsman, and a pal.

On the way back to Windee, Dash drove the truck with Father Ryan beside him and the sergeant at the farther end of the seat, whilst young Jeff and Dot sat behind on the floor.

“An’ how’s the ’roos coming in, Dash?” inquired Father Ryan conversationally.

“Just now, they’re a failure, your reverence,” the tall man told him. “You will understand, of course, that the kangaroos no longer have their winter coats, and that it’s not yet sufficiently warm to get them in paying numbers at the watering-places.”

“Ah yes, that is so,” admitted the little priest. “What a pity it is that the poor things have to be shot!”

“I agree. Sometimes I regard myself as a murderer. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was any sport in getting them, any equality between them and the hunter.”

“Sport!” ejaculated Dot from the rear. “There is no real sport in any kinda huntin’. There’s gents go a-huntin’ elephants with big-bore rifles wot represents hundreds of thousands of dollars in experimenting and plant to make ’em; and there’s huntin’ in England where thousands of pounds are spent on hossflesh and dorgs to chase a poor little mangy fox. An’ they calls theirselves sportsmen! The feller I calculate is a sportsman is like a cousin of mine. ’Im and some of his pals were sitting over a camp fire one night in ole Arizonee, when a mountain lion shoves ’is head out of a clos’t-by bush, and my cousin, ’e says, calm like: ‘Hey, Ted, here’s a lion. Lend us yer tobacco-knife.’ ”

Dot raised chuckles all round. The sergeant was interested enough to inquire what happened next.

“Waal, my cousin ’e up and orf after thet lion full of beans; but the lion seed him a-comin’, and was so surprised at takin’ a bird’s-eye view at a human without a gun that ’e skedaddled into Wyoming.”

“Your cousin must have been a character,” young Jeff laughed. He was recovering rapidly from his liver complaint.

“He was thet, you bet!” Dot admitted, vainly trying to roll a cigarette. “A bit casual like in his ways, though. Killed four fellers in various arguments, and ended by committing suicide.”

“Oh! How did he do that?” inquired Father Ryan.

“Waal, yer reverence, it was like this ’ere,” Dot explained without blinking an eyelid. “As I said, me cousin was terrible casual. It come on slow like, his casualness. An’ then one day ’e was too casual on the draw. He sure was. He was thet casual and thet full of holes thet ’e never even said, ‘So long!’ ”