Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 17

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The partnership began with an innocent transaction in beef, mutton, flour, tea, molasses, and tobacco.

"To-morrow," Cash said, "nobody will be thinking about gold except to spend whatever they've got of it or expect to get on tucker. By breakfast they'll be ready to sell their grandmother to a Chow for a handful of bird-seed."

So, with the aid of Cash, Cabell sold meat at eightpence a pound, flour for two shillings a pint, and tea by the spoonful before Tim O'Connor could bring a load of steer beef from Narrow Gut and the packhorses arrived at sunset next day. He rode home with two pounds' weight of gold in his boot and his confidence in Cash was much deeper.

Cash inspired confidence. The miners liked him. After a bit, when the gold began to flow, the Cabell Valley Goldbuying Agency and General Store opened its doors on Larsen Street with Cash as the amiable and hard-fisted manager. The place was always full with a roaring crowd--men for the most part in cord trousers, red shirts, and long California hats, the regular miners from Gympie, the Palmer, and Charters Towers, from Ballarat and Bendigo, even from New Zealand--wild spenders and simple fellows, simple as children, craving bright gewgaws, eyeglasses, and drinks in silver-topped bottles.

"True scales and rum pretty well all rum, that's what fetches 'em," Cash told Cabell.

"That fellow Kyle doesn't trouble himself much about whether his scales are true or not," Cabell grumbled. "I bet he makes a couple of pennyweights on every ounce."

"One night they'll kick Kyle down Larsen Street into the lagoon," Cash said. "Then you'll admit it was a lucky day you met me."

"What d'you mean?"

Cash only laughed. Cabell's rampagings didn't worry him. "Patience, man. Who's raking it in as fast as you?" He ran his fingers through a pile of gold-dust which he was weighing and packing into little chamois-leather bags for Cabell to take in the night coach to the bank at Pyke's Crossing. "Ten bob on every ounce you buy, 200 per cent on everything you sell."

"Yes, yes." Cabell walked to the door and looked out. The ferns, palms, and maidenhair were gone. The trees were gone, cut down for firewood or timber or bark. Everything green was gone, and the earth lay bare and mauled, wasting in an arid miasma of dust. There was a kind of gratuitous evil in the hasty ugliness of the scene--the holes, abandoned and half-filled with water by a shower of rain, the muddy piles of sludge at the edge of the ochreous lagoon, the clumsy mia-mias of bark and calico sprawling across the slopes of the gully, more like kennels than human habitations, the sardine tins and broken bottles at their doors, and the stench they breathed of human sweat and human garbage--as though the place had been mutilated, not by men strong and brave and steady in a decent cause, but by terrified ravishers, clutching and demented. The beastly mark of this fear was on everything and everybody, on the miners digging in the earth, afraid that they would not find gold, afraid that the gold they found would peter out; on the faces of men hearing about a new find up the gully, afraid to leave what they had, afraid of missing something good. It was as though a jocular and infantile god of Chance had been given this square mile of earth and the two thousand men on it to play with. Under his paw there could be no certainty, peace, or contentment.

The fear had bitten fatally deep into Cabell's susceptible heart. Here was a store of riches momently dwindling, slipping through his fingers--such wealth as he had never imagined within his reach. So easily to be come by, so easily to be lost. Henceforth he would be inescapably chained to this adventitious stone, plagued by the thought that under the slow grass of his pastures gold might lie waiting to enrich someone else, lacerated by regrets and a sense of colossal injustice.

"Patience! Damn it all, Cash, I've been walking round this stuff for the best part of my life, drudging a few miserly quid off the backs of sheep when I might have been . . ." A vision of fields ploughed into straight furrows rising peacefully to the skyline of an English evening confronted him out of the broken earth.

"Might've been!" Cash said. "What's the use thinking of might've beens."

"I might've been a different kind of man, that's what I mean. A lot of things wouldn't have happened." He gestured towards the miners scurrying up and down the gully. "I feel as if they've robbed me of everything I wanted--confound them."

Cash stroked his beard. A dribble of smoke seeped through it like a rich, blue liquor he was wringing from the hair. "Trouble with you, Cabell, is you're . . ." A word eluded him and he continued to stare at Cabell's back and ponder. "Blokes say you're hard as nails--think of nothing but money. But it might be better if you did think of money just as money, I mean. But you don't. It's not just money in your brain."

"No, no, it's not the money."

"You put me in mind of a bloke," Cash hitched his chair around. "He was pretty tough too--had that reputation. Men were civil to him where men aren't usually civil, but behind his back they reckoned he was mean. Mean and inhuman. No more feeling than jerked beef's got juice. A blackbirder out of the Mary River--that was his line. Chuck a cargo of coons in chains overboard as soon as spit in the sea. And all the time that bloke was in love with a shielagh about half his age down in Sydney. He hadn't even spoken to her and she didn't know he existed. Saw her in a theatre one night and fell in love. Only once, mind you, and he used to go and stand outside her house for hours in the hopes of seeing her again. He was a bank clerk on thirty bob a week, and she was Sir Somebody Something's daughter. So he chucked his job and went north to make enough money to marry her. Reckoned he had eight years. He had a crazy old ketch you nearly went through the deck of when you walked about, leaked like a sieve. I don't know how he bought it, probably robbed the bank for a start. Anyway he made money--hand over fist. I went one trip with him. Nobody else would. And he told me about the tart in Sydney. Tears come in his eyes. This bloke they called Bill the Body-Snatcher. Imagine that. The day before I saw him go and shoot up a chief who wouldn't trade any boys, and here he was blubbering about her 'beautiful raven locks,' or something of the sort."

Cabell turned away impatiently. He was getting used to Cash pulling his leg.

"No, but wait a bit," Cash said. "He went back to Sydney. Sold his boat and bought a new pair of flash duds and washed the smell of coons off his hands. And what'd he find? Of course the shielagh had married. She had a right to, but he didn't think so. He got into the house and beat up her husband and called her every kind of bitch under the sun. He would've done her in too, had hold of her by the throat when they came in and rescued her. She didn't know who he was from Adam and nobody knew what he meant by saying that she was responsible for him killing and enslaving decent coons, so they put him in a rathouse. But he wasn't mad. He wasn't sorry for what he'd done to her either, only wished he'd done worse. You couldn't get it into his head. He was . . . ah yes, infatuated. That's it, infatuated. That's what you put me in mind of--an infatuated bloke." He nudged Cabell gently. "It's not that tart over your place, is it?"

"What tart?"

"The one with whiskers. I saw her the other day. She looked at me as if I made her mouth water."

"Ah," Cabell said brightening, "then you saw my little girl too, did you?"

"That funny looking kid dressed up like . . ." He checked himself. "Yes, I saw her in the jinker. Pretty."

"Too pretty for this hole," Cabell said. "I'm sending her home to England. That's what I need money for now, if you want to know. Not for myself--for her."

"Some bloke'll be lucky," Cash said, packing the last bag of gold into a sweat-stained valise and snapping the lock on it.

"Yes," Cabell said, "some lucky young devil," and sighed. Again the grimy chaos of dirt and toiling men faded and left him staring at the ever more vivid picture of a girl and a boy clinging to each other under a canopy of lilac blossoms.

"That reminds me," Cash was saying, "you ought to keep an eye on that other kid of yours."

"What other kid?"

"The little fat one. He was down at the races with Shaftoe last Saturday. I don't like that kind of crook."

"I know. I know," Cabell said. Then his eye lighted on the bag and he picked it up. "How much?"

"About nine hundred quids' worth. Buying's been good."

"Ah!" He balanced the weight of it in his two hands, slightly huddled, turning his predatory beak and staring eye from Cash to the open door and back to the bag like an old jealous hawk. "Ah!"

By the middle of February there were three thousand men on the field. Larsen's Bakehouse was a town now. Twenty miles off across the valley you could tell where it lay from the clouds of dust always whorling redly up under Black Mountain. In Larsen Street there were ten grog shanties, four general stores, a bank, butchers' shops, embowered in rusty leaves, one for each station in the valley, and a post office where a wild-eyed postmaster received the mailbags from the coach, dumped the contents into a heap on the floor, and rushed back to his claim yelling, "Mail's in. Help yourself."

Burrowing, indomitable, destructive, like a plague of insects that would soon eat the place out and depart, the men swarmed in the gullies, along the vanishing, viscous creek, and about their tentative homes and resorts. Day and night the creak of drays, caulked up lest a handful of their load escape, carrying dirt to the creek; the crack of whips urging wagons and packhorses up and down the stony road to the valley; the shouts of men; the agglomerate mad roar in the pubs; the clang of blacksmiths' hammers sharpening picks; the melancholy wails of drunken blacks enriched by selling bark and firewood; the hysterical gabble of Chinese, working over deserted tailings, since they were forbidden to take up claims of their own, with the multitudinous and incomprehensibly nourishing industry of white ants in a dry log; fights; celebrations around a bucketful of champagne; and above everything the rustle, like a quiet sea, of gravel in the cradles at the creek-side.

These were the lawless days. A fight on St Patrick's Day, which began through Kyle strolling into the Miners' Arms, calling for Scotch whisky, and whistling "Boyne Water" reflectively on his way out, ended with everybody going down to set fire to Chinatown. Next morning Sergeant Flaherty arrested Kyle on a charge of feloniously wounding. The Sergeant had lost the top joint of his right-hand forefinger, and he gave evidence that Kyle had bitten it off and swallowed it. The O'Connors had to use their influence again.

Two miners had an argument about a shovel and fought a duel around a shed with shot-guns. The fight went on all day until one of them threw a jam tin with a plug of dynamite in it. When they were both recovered with brandy, the owner of the shed took them down and threw them in the lagoon.

A miner came in and spread a rumour that he had found gold in a gully about two days' journey away. At once there was a rush to the new prospect. The miner looked over the deserted claims and jumped the best. Legally he was entitled to it, but a week later the man who had left it returned with his friends, and the claim-jumper would have been lynched only he took refuge in Cabell's store. Cabell recognized the man who had given him a cup of tea when he was riding up from Pyke's Crossing. Cash soothed the mob. The claim-jumper's name was Custard, a north countryman with a mean, pinched face and a cunning eye. He knew a lot about mining fields. He told Cabell that hundreds of pounds' worth of gold was being stolen from Larsen's claim and sold to the Chinese. Cabell gave him a job. Soon Cabell was buying the stolen gold.

It was midsummer now. The ragged shard of sky over their heads was the colour of sand. At midnight the rocks were still warm. The miners awoke and looked out and saw the stars. Reassured they dropped off to sleep again. In the day a distant rumble paralysed them, and they stood, faces uplifted, their uproar hushed with an uncanny, insect-like spontaneity. From across the ridges to which they had driven it flowed the waiting silence of the bush, where birds and cicadas were hushed like themselves in expectation of something hovering behind the hills to the north-east. And then, more clamorous than ever, more fiercely burrowing, indomitable, and destructive, they returned to work. In the afternoon a black cloud thrust an edge over the valley and withdrew behind Black Mountain to make the stars shudder with the St Vitus's twitch of its lightnings.

But at last, inevitably, the rain came--the cloud-burst of the wet season that lifted rivers twenty feet in a night and turned the bone-dry valley to an islanded lagoon. Just before dawn the creek broke through their dam and rushed down Larsen's Bakehouse like a fury bent on cleaning the valley of their pollution. At sunrise the sky was cloudless, and the only assurance that they had not heard it all in a bad dream was the broad ribbon of creek flowing with a soft purr of satiated anger. The piles of dirt that might have made them rich men were gone, with a blacksmith's forge, the road to the valley, and a few Chinamen. Their sluices and cradles had disappeared too and their shafts were flooded. The rain seemed to have washed a thick fur of rust off the sky but it had only cleaned the air.

The grog shanties did good business that day.

The storm that night was longer and more savage. It razed bark humpies, pounded the roof off the Ningpo station's butcher shop and left sides of beef buried in the mud a quarter of a mile away, scoured the earth from the treeless gully as a knife cuts butter, washed a side out of Cabell's slaughter-yard and stampeded fifty prime stores into the hills, then settled down into its well-known perpendicular drizzle, which eased off of an afternoon to let the sun steam the marrow out of every living bone in Larsen's Bakehouse. The green bark walls of the humpies buckled like paper in a fire and the town fell to pieces about its soaked and dejected inhabitants. Flour caked in its bags, tools rusted, the creek crept farther across the gully, whirling more and more of the precious unbound earth away, and finally an epidemic of fever began. The carpenter turned from making cradles to making coffins and David Kyle from taking the miners down with crooked scales to tramping the flooded gully night and day with physic for the sick, a top-hat on his head and a Bible under his arm, to give a "decent Chreestian burial" wherever it might be needed by the way. "Earning merit," Cash said, against the time when there would be more gold to buy.

Cabell earned merit too. He got a drayload of beef through bog and torrent and landslide, and half-starved miners and miners' wives poured from the hovels and mobbed him, women in gunny-sacks for skirts, children, men shaking with fever whom a few weeks before he had seen in his store with nuggets and gold-dust, overbearing with success. The sight of them now scared him. Not because he was afraid they would rush his dray and rob the beef he expected to get high prices for, but because of their abject lack of spirit to do more than stumble along beside the dray and beg. So potent was the ever-imminent malice of Chance. He trembled for his own fortunes. To placate evil powers he distributed twenty pounds' worth of beef.

They cheered him. "A thousand blessings go with ye," an old woman called.

"Go to blazes," Cabell muttered, and drove on, calculating how much more he would have to wring out of his customers to get back that twenty pounds.