Читать книгу Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch - Brian Penton - Страница 8

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Perhaps I ought to make it clear that very little of this story is imaginative. Until a few years ago there were quite a number of old people in our district who had been with Cabell in the early days. They were all good storytellers, and it needed very little to set them going. There was one old fellow named Sambo who could remember back as far as 1840. How old Sambo was nobody could guess, but time had begun to rub his features away, as weather wears away the nose of a stone statue. He was terribly scornful of the days into which he had arrived, and if any of us youngsters tried to defend ourselves he would immediately produce a story that threw over our pretentious bravado the gigantic and belittling shadow of the past.

Then, of course, there are the memoirs and reminiscences of the early settlers, of which at this time the best of Australian literature is composed, the gossip handed down in the old families of our district, the letters that have been preserved, including Cabell's own letters to his sister Harriet in Dorset. These begin with Cabell's arrival in Sydney in 1842 and end with a remarkable document which marks the end of an epoch in his life and the opening up of the country.

I think I could have reconstructed nearly the whole of Cabell's life in Australia from these letters and the things I heard people tell about him. But I doubt whether I would have had the impulse to do so if I had not known Cabell himself--as a very old and lonely man. A large part of this book came from his own lips.

Every evening as the sun was sinking he would come out on to the veranda and seat himself in the rocking-chair which no one else dared to touch. For me it was almost a fantastic thing, that battered old relic out of the past which the storytellers had made as horrifying as a nightmare to my young imagination. For the old man it was the past made tangible. As his long, thin arms rubbed slowly up and down the scored and twisted arms he began to talk to himself, a habit all bushmen get through living alone. Sometimes he would talk out quite loud in a curious, sad tone, as though renouncing something precious. But most frequently he would begin to whisper to himself, covertly, suspiciously. The whisper would grow into a mutter. I would be hiding behind the flowerpot-stand or under the veranda, where glaring toadstools grew on the house stumps and lizards watched me with open mouths. I would be as motionless as they, listening, longing to run away from the things he was remembering, yet frozen by the fascination of my horror.

Growing up in a period when Australians had begun to feel in themselves the germ of a new people and to fumble for words to express themselves, I often wondered what roots that new psyche was coming from. Then it struck me that the answer was somewhere in the life of this old man and his generation. If I could piece together the picture of that epoch as I had inherited it from him--the savage deeds, the crude life, the hatred between men and men and men and country, the homesickness, the loneliness, the despair of inescapable exile in the bush; the strange forms of madness and cruelty; the brooding, inturned characters; and, joined with this, an almost fanatic idealism which repudiated the past and the tyranny of the past and looked to the future in a new country for a new heaven and earth, a new justice; on the one hand the social outcasts, men broken by degradation and suffering, on the other the adventurers: blackest pessimism balancing the most radiant optimism--if I could only see all this, then I would understand.

Nowadays it is very difficult to see as they saw. Our eyes have grown used to the grey trees with their thin metallic foliage, the forests of a prehistoric time that stood, just as they are now, long, long before men began to crawl about the earth. The vast emptiness of the western plains, scarred by drought and flood and bush-fire, today as desolate as the Sahara, tomorrow as lush as an English meadow, the dry gullies, forty feet deep, that became torrential rivers overnight, the sad silence of the bush, and the subhuman people who inhabit it--these things are commonplace to us, even beautiful; but a hundred years ago, to eyes fresh from the soft countryside of England, that is like a full-bodied woman holding her children tenderly to her breast, the new continent was fantastically alien.

Settling it was quite a different matter from settling Africa and America. The story is not at all the same. There was nothing spectacular in the country to break the dead monotony and loneliness of the life--no tigers, as Peppiott put it. A man just had to learn to wait--or go mad. Really all these early settlers were just slightly off the hinges: not, as one generally conceives them, simple people, simple honest backwoodsmen. Loneliness, ennui and impatience took strange psychological shape in them. And they were not ordinary men. The time and the circumstances bred enormous hatreds, enormous greeds, and their struggles with the incredible land, even allowing that the romantic mists of time magnify all things, were saga-like.

Three questions have puzzled me for a long time. Why, I have often wondered, did men like Cabell, hating the country so much, keeping themselves going with the hope that every wretched day brought them nearer to England, which their nostalgic fancy had turned into a promised land--Paradise itself--why did they never go back? Was it possible that, although they talked of it continually and always seemed to be scheming for it, men really did not want happiness, but even ran away from it as from a plague? Could it be true what Cabell said in the last letter he wrote to his sister, that "a man might want to go back where he had been happy, but it would stop at that. Where he'd had his hard times--that was where he would stay"?

A second question occurred to me quite recently, when I visited Dorset and saw the house where he was born. It stands just outside the village of Owerbury. There are still only ten white cottages in the place, with mossy green thatched roofs like seabirds resting with folded wings in the shelter of the downs. It has changed very little since the morning Cabell saw it for the last time. It is a lovely place. The house is very old--Elizabethan, I imagine--built of red irregular bricks with weatherworn chimneys. Mosses have filled up a deep crack across one of the walls. A gorsebush was glowing in the corner of the garden, just as Cabell often described it, and there were the same flowers and herbs and shaven English lawns, which seem as though they must be swept up every day. The village begins at the fretted iron gates, and at the bottom of the village street is the sea, lazily eating away the chalk cliff on one side and piling up shingle on the other.

At the house I saw a daguerrotype of Cabell which he had had taken when he arrived in Sydney in 1842, a little over two years before this story begins. It shows him in his colonial clothes--a pair of Wellingtons, loose trousers, light coat and open shirt, with a broad-rimmed hat in his hand. He is standing beside a man about ten years older--he was just twenty then--and the difference between them is striking. The man was withered by sun and worry, so one sees Cabell's young English face against the background of the country, as it were.

There is the full, sensual lower lip that was a family characteristic, the plump, olive cheeks, thrown up vividly by the blackness of the hair and the thick eyebrows. In the Byronic fashion of the period the hair falls into a curling side-lever on each cheek. There is something dandified about this that seems out of place in the businesslike clothes and side by side with the ragged beard and roughly shorn hair of his companion; deliberately, defiantly dandified. It does look, too, as though he were ashamed of the clothes and for that reason is thrusting himself more aggressively into the picture. His whole strained pose seems to be saying "Yes, look at me. Laugh. Glory in it. I stink of the jailyard. But I'm safely buried twelve thousand miles under your feet. So you needn't worry." At the same time, his eyes are saying something absolutely different. They are turned slightly away, and though at first sight they, too, seem to express defiance, recklessness and self-assurance, one realizes after a while that they have only that instant glanced out of the picture, involuntarily, anxiously, as though expecting some harm. The effect is disturbing. It suggests all sorts of unpleasant things lurking about just outside the range of the camera.

What surprised me most at first was the contrast between this youthful face and the face of old man Cabell as I knew him. In sixty-five years life seemed to have changed even the bones under the flesh. The nose, which in old Cabell was predatory, hooked, with splayed, enormous hairy nostrils--a cruel beak--in the young man was straight, with a sensitive bridge and a delicate, womanish septum. The youth had a chin more rounded than otherwise, neither weak nor particularly strong, whereas the old man's jaw looked like three pieces of roughly cast iron clamped together and hinged under his ears on a huge bulge of muscle that swelled and relaxed continually as he sat thinking. The sensual lower lip, so prominent in the youth as to mark, one would have thought, a fundamental trait, had disappeared in the old man, whose tightly repressed mouth seemed to have no lips at all, giving him an air of Calvanistic severity. The only likeness between them was apparently this little trick of glancing anxiously and suspiciously sideways, so that you expected the door to open upon some horrible thing.

The contrast became even more marked when I compared the daguerrotype with the portraits of his father and four brothers which are to be found in the same album. The pictures show Clement and John together, Clement in clerical dress, John in the full-dress uniform of some stylish regiment, Victor with their father among the Daylesbury hounds, and David posed foppishly against the back of an Empire chair in a grotesque get-up that must have been dashing at the time. While I could not for the life of me see anything to connect the old hawk Cabell with these feeble-looking folk, there was no doubt at all that the lad in the colonial breeches was their son and brother. The same high-bridged nose and heavy underlip. In the father the mouth was soft and weak and overindulged. In David the features had just that extra touch of refinement needed to give them an effeminate clarity and handsomeness. In Victor the same features were coarsened, bovine. What might be described as a robust kind of homosexuality, common to a certain type of priest and soldier, marked the broad, simple but somehow frustrated faces of the twins Clement and John.

At this point, remembering the different man Cabell had been, almost a different type physically, as I saw him, the second question occurred to me: "Was it given to him also to become like these? What was it that changed him? Was the impulse in himself or did life do it blindly?"

Questions perhaps unanswerable.

I must not forget to mention that he differed from his father and brothers in one peculiarity. They were all definitely blonde with ruddy John Bull complexions, but Cabell had jet-black hair and dark-brown eyes--almost like a Spaniard. A picture of his mother and sister, on another page, explains this. The mother was a fine-looking woman, not remotely like Cabell except that she had inky-black hair and eyes, and in those eyes a vague but haunting look of doubt and disquiet. Harriet, the sister, who was ten years older than Cabell, took after her mother as closely as the sons resembled their father.

When Cabell's mother died soon after his tenth birthday it was this sister who tried to replace the older woman's passionate devotion. There was twenty years between Cabell and his eldest brother. He was delicate in childhood, it appears, and literally spent his first years in cotton-wool, much to the contempt of the squire, who was disgusted with him from birth and reckoned "he'd turn himself out to grass and not stand any more if the old woman can't drop anything better than that".

His mother was Irish, came from County Clare--a mystic and visionary sort of woman apparently, given to communings with the air. A strange mate for the matter-of-fact squire, one would imagine, but he was not so matter-of-fact. All the Cabells were gamblers and had the gambler's awe of signs and portents. From the two of them Cabell inherited a disposition to start at shadows and moon over a twilight landscape.

The squire had brought up his sons to be dependent on him, and the household was a nest of warring parasites, for the brothers never stayed away very long. They fought each other bitterly but joined in a solid bloc against their youngest brother when their mother died and left him the remains of her trust money--two thousand pounds or so.

The youngest child's usual fear of being overlooked, "left out", cheated, was in Cabell magnified and complicated by many good reasons for it. He was continually being pushed aside in scenes of greedy conflict when the brothers fought over horses, rights of precedence, even the cut from the joint. At this time the family fortune was mortgaged up to the hilt, but the squire had expectations in a sister who had married well and was now a widow without heirs.

When Cabell was nineteen this sister, his Aunt Julie, then in her early middle age, arrived suddenly to live at Owerbury House. Immediately the Nordic bloc reformed against the quiet and sullen Celt, to whom they attributed an evil disposition for cunning and trickery. Cunning he certainly was. They had compelled him to be. Observing in Aunt Julie's cynical eye a twinkle of delight for the caustic anger with which he defended himself and remembering their mother's money, they held a family council and decided that Derek should accept the invitation of their cousin Francis, in Australia, to teach any member of the family how to make a fortune out of sheepfarming if a little capital was forthcoming. Harriet's protests were wasted. The squire raked up the two thousand pounds willed to Cabell and told him to take himself off to the Colonies as soon as he liked. Cabell did not argue. He went about the house in silence, with his eyes on the ground. Suddenly he would stop and remain motionless for ten or fifteen minutes, thinking. A prelude to an outburst of anger, two white fans would spread out from the corners of his eyes. He would rush from the house, and Harriet, following, would find him in some corner of the garden sobbing his heart out. But she was too wise to let him know what she had seen.

Aunt Julie, coming upon him thus one afternoon, said in her harsh, contemptuous voice, "So you still weep, at your age?"

He looked at her resentfully.

"Well," she mocked him, "I've heard Cabells swear a lot and kick their wives and dogs, but I never seen one weep before. I wonder what your father would say if I told him."

"Tell him," he spat at her. "I don't care."

"Perhaps I will," she said. "I see you're frightened out of your wits about going to Australia. Do you think the cannibals will eat you?"

"I'm not," he retorted defiantly, adding more defiantly still, "I want to go."

"Now," she said, "that is indeed surprising. Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said, sullen, obstinate.

"Fool!" she sneered at him. "The spit of your mother. She would swallow any dirt and say that she liked it rather than let them think they'd got under her hide at last. Oh, a fool of a woman!"

He scowled, but said nothing.

"Good-bye, then, my voluntary jailbird," she laughed. "I hear your father is going to take you over to Dorchester for the night coach tomorrow."

"I'm going in the morning," he said furiously. "By myself."

He went by himself. The sun was just breaking through the mist over Owerbury when he crossed the downs. He could hear farmer Northover's boy Jake driving the cows up the valley. He could see a fisherman from the village, old Sam with the wooden leg, who had been a powder-monkey at Trafalgar, spreading out his nets on the shingle. He could hear Lucy Potter at the Owerbury Arms, singing to herself as she fed the chickens in the backyard. Enormous shadows moved across the mist in the village street. It was like a dream. So he remembered it.

The cousin lived near Limestone, which is now Ipswich, in Queensland. He was a scoundrel and kept the kind of station that is known outback as a Dotheboy's Hall. He sold Cabell four thousand scabby culls as first-class merinos, and most of them died at their first lambing. Just when Cabell had learnt enough to know that he had been taken in his cousin died. Cabell took a job as an overseer on a station called Murrumburra, about forty miles north of Moreton Bay, sank the remains of his capital in a thousand really good ewes, and vowed to himself, "I'll be rich in ten years."

Aunt Julia wrote: "By now I suppose you've had enough of it to come back and eat humble pie with your brothers. They eat it very nicely, in big mouthfuls, without a bit sticking in their throats. I am sending you a draft to pay your fare home."

Cabell replied: "I do not wish to return. It was true what I said: I wanted to come here."

He thought he was telling a lie, but, who knows, perhaps he was telling the truth. It is the question in which all other questions about Cabell end.