Читать книгу Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch - Brian Penton - Страница 24

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Well, nothing was decided next day or the next. Cabell waited and had hardly any sleep at all. Under the noise of the river and the sound of the rain on the roof he could hear footsteps, voices. A dozen times each night he slipped out of his bunk to hide himself behind the flour barrel and watch. But no one came.

By now the river was over the flats and half a mile wide in places. It roared down, crashing together the trees it had torn from the scrub. McGovern rubbed his hands and sympathized with Cabell at the prospect of a prolonged flood. Between the homestead and the hills Cabell had explored there was a boiling torrent now. Meanwhile, he waited, too.

He was in exceedingly good spirits, seemed, contrary to Cabell's idea, to thrive on the suspense. If Cabell had examined himself closely in a mirror he would have understood why. Overnight his plump cheeks had caved in, his eyes had dark bags under them, and tight lines had come out round his mouth. He said nothing and answered nothing, started to gobble his food greedily and pushed his plate away after a mouthful, shouted at old Mark Scuggan for no reason at all and immediately again smuggled a pannikin of rum to him, rushed from the humpy as though it were stifling him and rushed back at once and looked round anxiously as though he feared or hoped that some important event had taken place while he was away. Throughout the rest of the day nothing could budge him. For a while he sat bolt upright on his bunk, pretending to read, but glancing every moment at window or door, listening. Then suddenly his eyes went dull and his spine seemed turned to jelly. The flies devoured him unmolested.

Towards evening he threw his book aside, went resolutely to the harness shed with a bundle bulging under his coat and saddled his horse. When McGovern looked out half an hour later the mare was in the paddock again and Cabell was sitting on the anvil, a picture of misery. McGovern observed all this and was no fool. He knew that he would not have long to wait now.

In Cabell a new being laboured to be born. He feared, even loathed it--a crude and unscrupulous whisperer of perilous designs. Oh, the hesitations and misgivings, the doubts and regrets and longings!

What touches the heart of the lonely one more sadly than the sound of rain on the roof at night? It at once shuts him in more closely with his own thoughts and sharpens the inhospitality of the world outside, fills it with gloomy and mysterious questions. It reminds him of different rain on a different roof, for each rain and roof has its own music. The soft Irish rain falling on peat, the thin London ooze dribbling over the slates, the gale-driven showers of the West Country hissing in the thatch, the rain in our district that comes down in leaden drops on the galvanized iron, with great, passionate surges of wind. . . . Cabell sweated in his bunk, for it was the height of midsummer, and thought of winter nights at Owerbury, with the clean, white, chill, scented sheets pulled over his head, the gale whining in the chimneys, the sea rattling the shingle, the firelight leaping and dying on the walls. Oh, how he longed for that life again, the security, the accustomed face of it! The smoke of the dung fire and the stench of the dogs sheltering in the humpy choked him. Lice and fleas crawled over his body, which was covered with red lumps from their bites. And all the time a dark shadow was hovering over the borderland of his thoughts.

Yes, he would have given ten years of his life to be quit of Australia then.

But morning came at last, and with it McGovern, swaggering, spitting, blowing his nose through his fingers, and thrusting his frowsy beard in Cabell's face to say "Seems like your offsiders have let you down, limejuicer, eh?" He shouldered Cabell aside and stood in the doorway looking at the sodden bush.

Cabell stared at his neck--red and squat, with thick veins and sinews and loose, coarse skin like leather. A red hair stuck out of a mole behind his right ear. Vast and gnarled, the ears lay flat against his head. The wrinkles of the neck were grained with dirt and the band of the shirt stiff with it.

Cabell did not think of Owerbury just then. He thought of Gursey, sympathetically, perhaps a trifle impatiently, and even looked at the jack-knife on the table. The strength and insolent confidence of that neck. How often it had been bared to hoot laughter at him, thrust out as though daring him to choke it, so damnably sure of itself! For by this time Cabell had forgotten what he had surmised a few nights before, and McGovern had become once more a superhuman, indestructible monster for him.

He found himself glowering into McGovern's eyes.

"Feel like killing something, do you?" McGovern asked him softly.

Cabell licked his lips.

"There's some black duck out," McGovern said with a smile. "You can take my old rat-trap." He gazed up at Cabell's face for a moment, then went into his room. In a minute or two he came out with an old fowling-piece, the barrel pressed into his stomach and the butt towards Cabell. Cabell automatically slipped his finger over the trigger and held the gun in the same position, staring down in a dazed way at the hammer, on which his thumb rested.

McGovern met his eyes with a faint smile. "Yes," he said. "It is loaded."

Cabell wrenched the gun away and half-ran out of the humpy as though escaping.

In the harness shed he threw the fowling-piece down and glared at it resentfully. Suddenly he went hot and trembled all over. The fit was so violent that he had to lean against the wall for a while. But it passed. Gloomy thoughts pulled down the corners of his mouth. He beat them away with a gesture of exasperation, and began to root under a heap of saddlery in the corner. He recovered the bundle he had hidden there the evening before--a few letters, a shirt or two, his razors in a chamois-leather roll, and a pair of pistols--wound the shirts round his body, put the letters in his boot and the razors and pistols in the pockets of his coat, as an afterthought picked up the fowling-piece, and went out with his bridle jingling on his shoulder to catch his horse.

McGovern was still at the door, an interested look in his eye, as though he had been watching Cabell's transactions through the bark walls.

Cabell turned guiltily to see that the pistols were out of sight, but at the same time asserted to himself, by way of reassurance to his rapidly beating heart, that he had nothing to be ashamed of, anyway, if he did leave Murrumburra and never came back.

McGovern looked very pleased and satisfied when he rode past the humpy. "If you run into them conspirators up the river," he called, "give them my love and say I still sleep sound." His laughter died away in the hills.

So he was running away from Murrumburra after all. At least, that was what he thought. He would go to Flanagan's, five miles away across the river, and ask for a job till the floods went down. At the same time he speculated on the character of that sly fellow. Certainly no one was to be trusted. A man ought to protect himself. Now, that roan stallion was a fine horse, worth a lot of money. Say Flanagan refused to keep his bargain. . . .

Curious how those two impulses continually at war with each other in a man--the desire to get away from the stress and the struggle, the desire to master it--will often mask themselves in each other. For why was he hurrying to Winjee Creek now if he only wanted to cross the river? There were places no worse much nearer the homestead, and all of them death-traps just now as far as that went. And if he had chosen just that place because at the back of his woolly thoughts was the idea of getting those five hundred Durhams and three thousand sheep out of the hills he had explored three days before, then must he not also have known that he would never dare it while McGovern was free to chase him, that, anyway, he would be unable to do it alone? Yes, there were many evasions and obscurities in this part of the old man's story, much that he would not admit because, perhaps, of the terrible fruit he gathered years afterwards from that night's work. In telling the story he slurred over this part of it by slipping in a long discourse on the awful weather it was, how the bush was full all of a sudden with toadstools like gold plates, till he came to the place where, arriving at the open downs about four o'clock in the afternoon (Why, what the devil could he have been doing since ten in the morning if not idling in the scrub on purpose?), an extraordinary irregularity attracted his attention to the humpy by the river. Though it was a good two hours from sunset, the sheep were penned up, and penned up so near the rising waters that it was plain they had not been taken out that day at all. They were bleating mournfully and the dogs were trotting round them in amazement at untoward events. A spiral of smoke came from the humpy but no sounds to break the silence, the brooding tragic silence of a wide landscape pressing round a tiny habitation of men.

A fact which he had noted at the time became suddenly significant. The day before, the hut-keepers from all the out-stations had come in for their weekly rations, but Robins, the hut-keeper at Winjee Creek, had not come. An equally significant fact which he did not recall was that he had said nothing about this to McGovern, having forgotten it, maybe.

He rode back into the scrub and sat down on a rock for two hours without moving. In the end he thought it highly likely that Gursey and Red would have quartered themselves here. The humpy was isolated, the country round it open, and the means of a desperate retreat near in the river, and had not Flanagan said that McGovern's accomplices--which the shepherds of Winjee Creek undoubtedly were--would have enough rum and tobacco to ration an army? Still, he thought, he should make sure, reconnoitre. What would McGovern say if he came all this way and merely found the hands sick or drunk?

Oh, he was sure, of course. Why did he start up suddenly and sniff the air as though he had smelt a familiar smell--as though he thought he was being followed?

He went down then and took a good look at the river, marking the dangerous places in his mind. It would be worse tomorrow, he decided, and worse still the day after.

When he got back to his horse the birds were settling among the dark foliage with disconsolate twitterings. From the depths of the scrub a mopoke cried harshly, a lonely, unanswered cry. The rain had dropped, but the clouds lay sullenly on the hills, as black as pitch. He stood and peered into the scrub for a long time, queerly affected by the feverish little noises fretting the fall of night. He felt that something was coming. The air was heavy with foreboding of it. The black clouds hid it in their wombs, ready to fall upon the desolate wilderness.

He grabbed the horse and dragged it out into the open. The damp heat stifled him, so he took off his coat, heavy from the pistols in the pockets, and laid it across the pommel. When it was quite dark he began to walk with the reins over his arm towards the humpy.

A light wavered and the rectangle of doorway stood out against the ebony plaque of darkness. A spasm of lightning left him with an image of the humpy, its lean-to roof, a cabbage-tree palm behind, the glinting waters of the uproarious river. Shadows moved on the wall, distorted heads, elongated arms. The lightning came again, and immediately after a dog barked. . . .

The five men inside the hut turned their heads to the door. Pete jumped off the bench and retreated to the wall.

Gursey snatched the lamp off the table and put it on the floor, rose, took a step towards the door, hesitated, and drew back into the shadows near the window. He gazed anxiously down at Red, with the hypnotically intense stare of one watching the crisis of a fateful experiment.

Red's eyes lighted up. He took an axe from the wall, went to the door and quietened the dog. They heard him plod round the humpy, return.

"What's there?" Pete demanded.

Red gave another look at the night. "Nothin'."

Gursey replaced the lamp on the table and brushed the tumble of white hair out of his eyes. The light shone up into their bearded faces, reversing the shadows, so that they seemed painted like savages.

Red sat down and resumed his sullen thoughts, a pannikin gripped in his two fists. Gursey kept an eye on the bottle between them, manoeuvring the quantity of liquor in his pannikin so that he remained hot and excited but not quite drunk--a nasty mood. His eyes were bloodshot. From time to time he broke into a fit of growling and cursing, came to and stared sulkily at Robins, the hut-keeper.

Robins broke a heavy silence. "I 'ad a good crib 'ere. And now you done the guy on me. The nubblin' chit for us all, that's 'ow it'll end." His fat face shone from the effort of a long and vain dispute.

Nobody answered him.

Davy, the shepherd, talked to himself in his bunk. "Hanged, is it? So they will. Ha, ha! All hanged up in a row, blast ye!"

Pete pulled his jacket up close to his neck, and the old man laughed. "Hang ye up in a row. Ay, that they will. Ha, ha!" He made a motion of passing a rope round his throat and strangling. His head jerked, his eyes popped, his yellow tongue hung out. "Ha, ha, ha!"

Pete rose, stared round the room, sat down again.

Robins appealed to Gursey. "But the Cove'll come."

Gursey frowned and licked his lips, made one or two false starts, then burst out impatiently "Let him come."

"Lobsters'll come."

"McGovern won't bring no lobsters here," Gursey said, "and you know why."

Robins sighed. "Well, I 'ad a good crib 'ere," he said mournfully and dropped his hands on his plump thighs.

Red closed one eye and looked at them. "Ye'd burn well," he said thoughtfully.

"That's the caper," chuckled old Davy. "Stick him up the chimbley. 'Ear him frizzle." A villainous-looking old brute this, with a chin like a trowel and a mouth turned in over bare gums.

He reduced Pete to a fit of the shivers.

"Scared like, eh?" Red demanded, giving the boy a rough shake.

"No, no, Red. Not that scared. . . ."

Red picked up the axe and laid it on the table. "Hmn," he said.

Pete drew away.

"Ain't we three sworn brothers like?"

"Yes, Red. Yes."

"All in together like?"

"Yes, yes. Only . . . he'll do us in!" Pete cried. "He's got pistols'n everything."

Gursey put a finger through a hole in the boy's jacket and ran it over the still-unhealed weals. "If McGovern lays hands on that--you know, don't you?"

Pete lowered his head.

The dog began to bark and strain at its leash. Gursey nudged Red, who ran to the door with the axe again; Pete and Robins jumped up and watched him. The dog's barking ceased and all was quiet. Pete sank back stiffly on to the bench, but Robins continued to gaze at the door with a terrified and hopeful expectancy. Gursey stood up under the window and did not move.

"It'll only be them dingoes," Robins said persuasively.

They ignored him.

A flash of lightning lifted a patch of downland from the pit of darkness. Red bent down and released the dog, which bounded away yapping. They heard a shout. Pete stumbled behind the table. The shout was repeated, just audible above the noise of the river.

"The slut's a-top of him!" Red shouted and ran outside. Gursey hesitated a moment, then went cautiously to the door. Cabell was standing with one foot in the stirrup of a plunging horse. The dog had him by the leg and he was trying to beat it off with his coat. Red was running towards him, waving the axe and roaring at the top of his voice. The darkness snapped over them. Then a stab of flame, the report of a gun. The dog let out a whine and the two noises raced across the downs and died in the wash of the river. Another flash showed Red, the axe raised, looking round for the horseman, who was swinging into the saddle only a few paces away. Red gave a terrible yell, rushed at him, and buried the axe in the haunches of the horse. It lashed out with its hind feet, then was gone, galloping across the downs. Its hoof-beats died away in the darkness.

Gursey returned slowly to his bunk and sat down.

Robins opened his mouth twice to speak, but no sounds came from it. A little snuffling nose that was running all the time completed his look of abject misery. "Did they get him?" he choked out at last.

"Cabell shot the dog."

Red came splashing back. The dog had snatched something from Cabell--his coat. He threw it on the table and began to look for what gave it weight. The pistols of course. He performed a heavy dance in the middle of the floor. Robins was aghast.

Red thrust the barrels against his head. "I got a mind to try one pill on ye just to see the powder ain't wet."

Robins's knees gave way and lowered him quivering on to the bench. "Don't, Red, for the love of God! I'm in with the boys up to the neck."

Red looked disappointed. "Well . . . right y'are, then," he grumbled, putting the pistols down grudgingly.

Gursey snatched them up, examined them, and flung them on to the table.

They stared at him.

"Ay," he said bitterly. "I doubt it's not the first time his kind has got somebody to do their dirty work." His fidgety eyes burned against the whitewash pallor of his face as he gazed at the pistols in the same resentful way Cabell had gazed at the fowling-piece. "Dropped them. Huh! And hasn't he been tailing me up for this the last three months?" He limped to the door and looked out. "'Very well,' he says, damn him," Gursey muttered. "Well, I'll give the bastard 'Very well'."

Robins gaped at him. "Is that as much to say you've changed your mind?" he asked hopefully.

Gursey turned back to the bush. There was a reckless look in his eyes. He picked up the pistols, cocked them, and laid them down with the butts towards him.

"No!" he snapped. "I've just made it up."