Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 10

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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 leant 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 seeing 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 high-stepping, 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 bear-greased 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.

James spent a month taking in wisdom from him.

"Lead with your left and cross with your right. Good." Shaftoe took a couple of hits on the belt and returned to his gin-bottle. "Pity there isn't somebody here your own weight. I'd lay an even dollar with Geoff--if he had a dollar." He raised his glass. "Well, here's to the day when he has!"

James returned to school, rebelliously but with an experimental interest. As he drove across the bridge beside Sambo they met Larry riding in. The sadness of leaving home for another adventure in the unfriendly world made James remember the happy times they had spent together--long, long ago it seemed to him, looking back with a child's exaggerated sense of his scurrying days and pleasures and his present unmitigable pains. Now he was sorry for the way he had behaved about the chestnut. He leant out to say good-bye, but Larry rode past with his head down. "Stuck-up little swipes the pair of them," Larry was thinking of his brothers. "The way they talk--like that limejuicer Shaftoe."

He hated Shaftoe, whose easy flow of words made him uncomfortable. He thought Shaftoe was trying to take a rise out of him, and so he usually was.

At the store of an evening the stockmen and boundary-riders forgathered to goggle at Shaftoe's card tricks. He offered a card and a pencil. "Now our gifted colleague, Mr Larry Cabell, will oblige the company by inscribing his name. Mr Cabell!"

Larry hung back outside the pool of lamplight which gapped with unfathomable darkness their upturned mouths, like fledgelings at Shaftoe's feet.

Monaghan shoved him forward. "Go on, Larry. He wants you to write down your monniker."

"Go to hell."

"My ultimate colonial experience without a doubt," Shaftoe chuckled, "but not to-night, Josephine."

"What's he say?" Monaghan asked.

"Aw, clean your ears."

Larry seized the pencil, wet the point with his tongue, and laboriously, agonizingly, wrote his name, LARY CABELL.

Shaftoe took the card and examined it, screwing up one eye, then the other, holding the card at arm's length, rubbing it on his trousers, grimacing. "Mercy sakes," he cried out at last. "What's this? 'I'm a Scandinavian cockatoo.'" He blinked at Larry. "Dear me."

Sambo and Monaghan rocked on the tea cases, Geoffrey's squeaky voice rising above the others.

Larry reddened. "That's not there. My name's there."

"Gentlemen!" Shaftoe held up his hand. "I put the case to you. I ask the young gent to write his name on a ten of hearts. You see him do so. And the words you see him write, as you can read for yourself, are 'I'm a Scandinavian cockatoo,' and now he has the face, gentlemen, to deny it. Is that a ten of hearts and is that the gent's handwriting?" He handed the card around.

Monaghan, with his tongue hanging out at the corner of his mouth and one eye closed, pretended to read. Larry snatched the card from him and slowly spelt out "I'm a Scandinavian cockatoo," written in his own handwriting. He threw the card on the counter.

"Don't trouble to beg pardon," Shaftoe said mockingly.

Monaghan's raucous laughter hooted up into the rafters while Larry, confused and maddened by such inexplicable tricks, slunk back to his corner and pulled his hat over his face.

"I don't believe Larry wrote that," Geoffrey piped up, "because he doesn't know how to spell long words. He doesn't even know how to spell his name. He never went to school."

"Sad," Shaftoe said. "I daresay he spent his youth running after those blackgins."

"Haw! Haw!" Monaghan roared. "Now I know where all them crossbreds down Pyke's Crossin' come from, Larry. Haw! Haw!"

Larry slunk out. In the darkness he stumbled over a bucket and kicked it across the yard. "Bastard," he muttered. "Could he ride a brumby or chuck a steer? Skite." He repudiated the whole brood of them with their superior, easy, educated voices and manners. Here was a world different from his, where the things most valued were not the things he did best. He had been used to hearing men applaud him for the way he broke a horse or handled a mob of cattle or sheared a sheep, but Shaftoe and Miss Montaulk and Geoffrey, and now James, seemed to look down on him, and his father, with every word, made it plain that from this mysterious other world to which his brothers and sister belonged he was shut out, that Sambo and Monaghan, not James and Geoffrey, were his proper mates.

"Who the hell cares about them piano tunes," he jeered to Sambo as they hung over the fence one afternoon listening to Harriet practise her pieces.

"Aw," Sambo protested. "It's real pretty. Like cow-bells a long way off."

Larry nodded to the shearers' hut, whence came the wheezy chug-chug of a concertina. "That's the kind of music I like."