Читать книгу Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch - Brian Penton - Страница 20

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He was not so sure when he came out again in the morning. The crystal dawn revealed to him the immensity, crudity and indifference of the world in which he proposed to act. Rising to the west on abrupt escarpments cut through by gullies still gloomy and moonstruck, falling to the east in wave after wave of untinted greyness, the bush was a gigantic fist in which the homestead lay like a grain of sand, a thing of such oceanic antiquity that his little time-bound heart might well falter at thoughts of conquest here.

Through McGovern's window came the sound of lusty breathing. Cabell paused in the act of pouring a bucket of water over his body and considered his slender arms and legs. A conviction of inadequacy completed itself.

His thoughts veered back to the conversation of the night before, but he dismissed them irritably, not wishing to probe too deeply into McGovern's designs in case, perhaps, he should see his own. In telling the story to us as an old man Cabell used to picture himself, and most sincerely, as a bewildered youth who never knew what he was going to do next. For example, he had not the slightest idea how he was going to make good his threats to Pete. The idea of handing him over to McGovern--Oh, that was too repulsive! But he dismissed thought on this matter, too, deciding to "wait and see what would turn up".

Shaved, dressed in moleskins, topboots and a red flannel shirt, he emerged from the humpy with a deep furrow between his eyebrows. On his way to the lags' hut he grew a shade paler, passing tell-tale footmarks in the dust. He stamped them out and went on with a little more determination.

Coyle was already up and searching about the edge of the scrub for dry gum-leaves to put in his pipe.

The fuzz from the crowded hut stopped Cabell in the doorway. Black hordes of flies immediately plated his back. The soot from the slush lamp had settled on the faces of the sleeping men. Pete lay on his stomach, his face towards the door. A trickle of blood had dried over his left eye. Red's head hung backward; his mouth was open and his purple tongue was curled up in the back of his throat, as though his devils had done for him in the night.

Cabell kicked the wall. "Wakey!" he shouted. "Sun's burning your eyes out!"

They began to scramble up from the floor, scratched their flea-bitten bodies, then one by one went out into the yard, nibbling at corn-cobs already much chewed over.

Pete opened an eye and closed it at once without moving.

When all the lags had gone Cabell stirred the lad with his foot. "It's time you were getting back to Burradeen, Pete," he said, adding in a low voice, "if you're going."

But still he did not move.

Joe Gursey hung about the door.

"Wake up, confound you!" Cabell said, irritable all at once.

"The lad's queer," Gursey told him.

"What's supposed to be wrong with him?"

"It's the rough handling he's had."

Cabell looked at Gursey sternly. "He'll have worse before the day's out."

Gursey walked away.

Cabell considered the boy, then bent down and touched him gently. "But it's no good to try and gammon me, Pete," he said, as though arguing with a child. "I'm not as soft as I look."

The boy buried his face in the straw and began to weep.

"I'll leave you till we've counted out, then," Cabell said softly. "I couldn't leave you any longer. You know that." With immense relief he escaped from the sight of the boy's thin shoulders shaken by sobs.

The convicts had started work. The dogs were in the pens driving the sheep out. Red, Feeny and Nigger Jack held the gates so that only four or five sheep could crush through at a time, while Joe Gursey, Flash Harry and Mark Scuggan stood by and counted. There were eight thousand sheep in the pens, eight flocks. As soon as a flock was complete one of the shepherds whistled up his dogs and went off with it towards the river, a thin copper wire coiled among the now sunlit trees.

The sheep in the pens leapt and crowded towards the gates. The din of bleating, barking, men shouting filled the air with birds like flakes of light. Clouds of dust rose like a flight of scarlet and gold motes in the slanting beams of the sun. The men holding the gates against the sheep sweated themselves wet, and the falling dust covered their faces with stiff, ferruginous masks.

The last flock had gone when McGovern appeared yawning in the doorway. He spat, scratched himself, then rubbed his hands briskly, and his eyes fell first on Gursey. "Hey, you, Joe, cutthroat; come and strap these boots!" he shouted.

Gursey came back and began to do as he was told.

"What're you scowling about?" McGovern demanded. "Don't like it, eh?"

"Yes," Gursey said humbly.

"Lucky for you, or I'd tell you to lick them. You would, wouldn't you? Damn your eyes, you've snapped a strap," McGovern chuckled. "What're you shivering for?"

"It's a touch of the fever."

"All the tucker you gutsed last night, you mean."

"I didn't have any tucker."

"Is there a beak from here to Hobart'd believe that, Joe?"

"I slept all night," Gursey said quickly.

"Get along with you!" McGovern laughed and pushed him over into the dust, then strolled out into the yard, where Cabell was stoking the fire under the kettle, the nearest job to hand when McGovern had come out suddenly and caught him going to the lags' hut.

"Now, you ----," McGovern said with a sarcastic twinkle, "I bet you didn't hear a thing, either?"

"Was there anything to hear?"

Standing over him in characteristic attitude, his legs wide apart, his hands in the top of his trousers, McGovern half closed his eyes and nodded. "You're fly. You're an artful dodger. But"--he shook his head--"you'll take that trip just the same, my bonny."

Whistling gaily, he went on again and came at last to the cart, relieving a painful suspense among the men in the yard. He pulled the tarpaulin off, rolled up his sleeves and began to overhaul the load. Twice he counted the bags of corn, tested the rum cask, then scratched his head and frowned. "I'll be double-damned!" he muttered in an aggrieved tone. "What sort of a snivelling mob is this?"

The men grinned at a miracle from heaven.

Cabell put a handful of tea in the boiling billy. The water frothed and coloured and sizzled over on to the flames. He returned to the humpy with it and sat down to eat.

McGovern was exploring the yard. He stopped once or twice to examine the ground, but went on and vaulted the fence.

As he watched McGovern approach the lags' hut Cabell began to be afraid. Once McGovern laid hands on Pete he would have nothing to offer the boy, he thought. In fact, things did not turn out exactly as he feared, when, a few yards from the door of the hut, McGovern signified by a shout that he had made a discovery.

It consisted of half a dozen cobs of corn with green leaves which marked them indisputably as part of the load in the dray. They were concealed under the rubbish heap near the fence, in such a way as to be visible only to a quick eye which came from the humpy with the thought of finding them thereabouts.

"Aha," he shouted, holding them up, "rot me if there isn't some guts in you still, my bullies!"

The men glanced at each other, and those who had work elsewhere hastened to it.

Cabell came to the door. Gursey, hammering an axe-head into a new handle in the smithy, paused to listen, and a strange look flashed between them, of entreaty and hatred on the one side, of pity giving away to a kind of supercilious pitilessness on the other.

McGovern threw the cobs into the yard and went into the hut, expecting to find more hidden there perhaps. He reappeared in a minute dragging Pete by the collar. "Here's a damn caper!" he roared.

"He's sick," Cabell said.

"Sick, eh?" McGovern threw the boy down at the door of the humpy. "I'll sicken him. He's just the very one to tell me who cracked that load last night."

Cabell went back into the humpy and poured himself a pannikin of tea with unsteady hands.

McGovern was stroking the boy's arm affectionately when he came out again. "Cough it up, Pete," he wheedled. "Wasn't it those swines Gursey and Red did it?"

More like a white mouse than ever, the boy trembled. He did not look at McGovern though, but over McGovern's shoulder at Gursey, who was swinging the new axe to test it. As he buried the head in the stump near the door of the smithy he glanced at Pete. Pete turned his eyes away quickly and on the other side of the yard saw Red clench his fists round a phantom neck and wring it.

"That's all right, Pete," McGovern told him. "One word and they're as good as in the rumbler."

Pete had only one other place to turn his eyes, and there he found himself face to face with Cabell. He burst into tears.

McGovern lost his patience. "Say it, curse you," he shouted, "or I'll drop you dead!"

Pete sagged against the wall.

McGovern ripped off his belt and whistled it down on the boy's shoulders. Pete fell to his knees in the dust without a sound.

Cabell waved his pannikin agitatedly between them. "Don't!" he cried hoarsely. "Don't flog him, McGovern!"

"Ay, I'll flog the sod," McGovern shouted, bringing the belt down again.

"But you're only knocking him senseless," Cabell protested with a curious exasperation. "He'll have a fit and be no--no use at all."

McGovern looked at him, impressed, wiped his forehead, grunted, and went into the humpy. He came out with a pair of handcuffs, locked one of the boy's wrists, and dragged him across the yard into the harness shed. He threw the loose end of the handcuffs over a beam and fastened Pete's free wrist with it, so that the boy stood with his arms raised and his feet just touching the ground. In half an hour or less the backs of his legs would begin to turn and his wrists and shoulders would feel as though they were being torn from their joints.

"Remember anything yet, honey?" McGovern asked, his good temper quickly returning as usual.

But Pete only blubbered.

"There's a long day ahead," McGovern said cheerfully, took his bridle and saddle and went out. Three minutes later he rode away into the hills; Cabell returned to his breakfast, Gursey finished trying his axe out, and the bush stillness settled over them again.

During the next thirty minutes Cabell looked at his watch at least a dozen times, and slapped more and more savagely at the flies. Once or twice he even blushed and muttered to himself in an ashamed kind of way. But he let half an hour go by before he rose from the table.

In the harness shed he found Pete breathing hard. His hands were red. Where his jacket had pulled up his white belly was bare, with purple marks of the lash across it. Flies crawled over his face and back.

Cabell pushed a box under his feet. Then he began waxing a thread to sew up a rent in the pad of his saddle.

Pete gave hard little gasps as the muscles of his back relaxed.

After ten minutes Cabell said, in a soft voice, as though afraid to start the conversation: "Pete, did you find out--you know, about my sheep?"

The hunted look in Pete's eyes resisted his smile of entreaty. He answered nothing.

Another five minutes went by. It was scorching hot outside. The waves of heat struck up into their faces. Cabell's dogs lay crushed against the wall of the humpy, snapping at the flies. The huts cracked as though they were on fire, and the gum-trees in the scrub made a tearing noise as they slipped off slivers of bark. From the roofs of the buildings and from the dust silver shimmers of heat arose.

"I'll get you out of this," Cabell said. "I'll protect you. I'll get you double rations."

Pete licked his lips. "I don't know nothing about your sheep," he grumbed.

"But you must know--you must!"

"I don't know nothing."

"But last night, Pete. . . . You said they'd--murder you. So you must know. Don't you remember?"

Gursey began to hammer on the anvil. The vicious blows startled a flight of cockatoos, which circled, cackling hysterically, over the homestead.

"I don't--I don't--I don't!" Pete cried, as though trying to mimic them.

Cabell glanced at his watch, frowned, and went to the door to look down the track.

Pete's eyes were wide when he turned. "Oh, crack a whid for me, master," he besought. "You seen it. Tell him, for Jesus's sake."

Cabell ran to him. "I will, Pete. Indeed I will. Only help me, Pete. I--I. . . . Afterwards when you're free I'll give you money. I'll be your friend. I promise. I swear."

He became solicitous all at once, began brushing the flies off Pete's back. "Do you want a drink? I'll bring you one." He dashed out of the shed and returned with a pannikin of rum, which he held up to Pete's lips. "Are you better now? Can you speak? Hurry. He's coming back in a minute. Can't you understand? You can be on the way to Burradeen with a sack of food before he comes. Only tell me, quick." He stopped babbling suddenly and bent his head close to the boy's, so that they breathed heavily into each other's face.

Pete tugged at his handcuffs. "I dursn't, master."

"You can't!" Cabell bent the rim of the pannikin against his thumb.

"I can't. I can't."

The blood rushed into Cabell's face. He threw the pannikin on the ground. "Damn you," he said. "Look what you're doing. You're making me into a--a beast like him." He pointed to the door, then in redoubled fury kicked the box from under Pete and left him jerking about on the beam like a dead carcass.

The sound of a horse splashing through the river startled them. Cabell went outside and looked around, then strode sulkily into the smithy, where Gursey was sharpening the axe at the grindstone.

"Did you rivet that leather I told you to?" he snapped.

Gursey took no notice for a while, then said, with a malicious smile, "So you didn't, did you?"

Cabell stamped like a child. "But I will. I will."

They glared at each other.

McGovern rode up and went into the harness shed. They moved apart and listened. They heard his low voice, the sound of blows, a cry, and he came out again.

"I'm going down the creek. See that sod doesn't get no water till I come in," he called to Cabell as he rode past the smithy.

Gursey started the grindstone again. "And if you do?" he asked. "What then?"

Cabell turned his head away.

"Oh, I know that," Gursey said impatiently. "I mean after. When you've found the sheep."

Cabell beat away a disagreeable question. "I don't know."

"You'll go away. You'll get a place of your own. You'll get Old Hands to work it for you. You'll be like him--like him!" Gursey shouted to make himself heard above the noise of the grindstone, but he seemed to be shouting in absolutely fiendish glee.

Cabell did not answer.

"Oh, ay," Gursey went on, half mocking, half fierce. "As like as not you'll be a big bug in a few years. Rich. With a woman in your bed every night."

"Why not?" Cabell fired. "It won't be for want of making men like you work."

Gursey grinned triumphantly. "But I just told you so. I said you'd be like him. But you'll be worse. He's a bastard and nothing's bad enough for him, but you--you'd do anything, anything." He stopped the grindstone and came nearer as he spoke, waving the axe excitedly over his head. "He's one of us, anyway. He doesn't look down on us, whatever he does. But you think we're dirt, don't you? I can see through your aristocratic mug. You think that anything you do to us is right."

They looked at each other--Cabell, tall, boyish, pale, gazing down with an expression of cold and supercilious anger; Gursey, wrought up by uncontrollable excitement, his face twitching and scarlet. Gursey turned away abruptly and stumped back to the grindstone.

This was a curious friendship. Cabell was lonely if he could not find some excuse to visit the smithy two or three times a day, yet the moment he saw Gursey his arrogance became ungovernable. All the pity he felt when he was away from the man dried up in him and he felt, as Gursey said, that nothing could hinder him--nothing. Gursey waited for him eagerly, but as soon as Cabell showed up an insolent anger got the better of him. "The aristocratic mug," as he summed up Cabell's supercilious gestures, whipped him out of fits of dejection and freshened the longing to be even some day for all he had suffered.

But deeper than this conflict which attracted them there was perhaps an understanding, a bond of brotherhood between them, for what distinguished them in a world of dispirited characters was that each of them believed, in his own way, that he would eventually pull himself out of the muck, had a firm faith in the power of his will.

"Aye," Gursey said after a long silence. "But suppose they didn't work? Suppose they found out they'd only got to stick together? Where'd you be then and your woman?"

"It won't be in my day," Cabell said.

"Maybe it will and maybe it won't. But tomorrow it might be." Gursey came back to the door.

"There'll be no lags in Australia much longer."

"Not new lags, you mean. But there'll be the old hands and their brats and their brats' brats. They'll hate, and hatred never dies. Never. Never!" He spat in the dust at Cabell's feet. "What say they took it into their heads to have no more coves here, no more soldiers and masters? That'd put the kybosh on you, wouldn't it?"

"That's what every--beaten dog like you hopes for."

"Yes, that's true," Gursey said eagerly. "But whose country is this, d'you think? It's a beaten dog's country. That's what it is. It's full of beaten dogs, what with us lags and all the rest that come because they had to."

"To be masters and floggers on their own account."

"That's true, too. But those that do, get rich and go away. What's left behind is the double-flogged, the poor mongrels that've been kicked about till they've gone mad and won't stop at nothing." He pushed his face up close to Cabell's. It was excited.

Cabell, too, was excited. They seemed to have reached a crisis of some sort.

A cry from the harness shed startled them. The flimsy walls shook, then all was silent again.

"There," Cabell said contemptuously. "You talk and talk, but you never do anything. You wouldn't lift a finger to save Pete. Why?"

Gursey's eyes became shifty. He leant against the doorpost and took the end of his beard between his teeth. "It's because I can't stand another flogging without going mad," he said apologetically in a low tone. "I'd murder the first swine I saw when I got off the triangle. Then they'd stretch me--and it'd be all over." The vitality ebbed out of him suddenly.

"You could escape," Cabell said anxiously.

"I don't want to escape," Gursey fired up. "I want to be free."

Cabell laughed, but in a forced, mechanical way. "Ach," he said quickly to change the subject. "What kind of a new nation could you make, anyway, with nothing but convicts in chains?"

"It's only convicts in chains could make a new nation," Gursey said slowly, sadly. "It's only them who want one."

Cabell laughed again.

"Laugh," Gursey told him bitterly. "You might laugh on the other side of your black face one day. It's a long way from your merry old England out here, and it's a very funny sort of place, where nothing happens like it should. Christmas comes in the middle of summer. The north wind's hot and the south wind's cold. Trees drop their bark and keep their leaves. The flowers don't smell and the birds don't sing. The swans are black and the eagles white. You burn cedar to boil your hominy and build your fences out of mahogany. Aye," he sneered, "it's not the same as the Old Country at all."

Cabell rose and went to the door of the harness shed. He stopped and listened to Pete trying to reach the box.

"Your Honour," Gursey called, beckoning him back. "Just one word before you go in there."

Cabell returned slowly to the smithy.

Gursey seized him by the arm and shook it. "I never made you any promise. Never. Never."

"I didn't say you had."

"But you let him think so, don't you? Always sneaking round here. And the way you stop talking all of a sudden when he goes past." Gursey nodded. "I'm on to your lay."

"I've got no lay," Cabell said quietly, freeing his arm. "I asked you once and you wouldn't tell me. Very well." He turned to go.

"I wouldn't tell you if I was free today," Gursey cried. "No, by God, I wouldn't!" He ran in front of Cabell and barred his way to the harness shed, waving his bony hands.

Cabell watched him with a forced and deprecating smile. The sun beat through his hat, like a weight resting on the top of his skull, and turned the shirt against his back to a thin sheet of hot metal. "What d'you want?" he snapped, after another unsuccessful attempt to get into the shed.

Gursey prodded his chest with a black forefinger. "He's dead keen to send me and Red down, isn't he? Me and Red, mind you. Why?"

"How can I tell?"

"Not so he can lift sheep off you this time."

Cabell looked at his feet, prized a stone out of the dust with the toe of his boot.

"I'll tell you. He thinks we'll come back to do for him."

Cabell kicked the stone across the yard, and his eyes followed it.

Gursey lowered his voice. "But he knows--he knows we'd do for you first."

Cabell opened his mouth to speak, but a voice began calling him with a desperate urgency. "Master, master!" it shouted. "Quick! I'll tell yer."