Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 7

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A month later the girl was born. She had brown eyes and a round chin and a short, straight nose--unlike the others, her mother, or Cabell except in the colour of her eyes. But hers were darker than his. Stopping at Emma's door to take a casual look at the newly-born--the last, he guessed, from Emma's drained lips and jaw gone loose after a night's struggle--he was swept out of the room, where the heat-and-rain-buckled timbers of the walls were like trees still writhing from the brutal axe scars on them, back into a room with damask curtains climbing to the sky-lofty ceiling of a childhood memory. Between himself and the direful immensity of the room hung brown eyes and the reassuring smell of something known and trusted.

"I'll be jiggered. My mother had eyes like that." He picked the child up awkwardly and held it at arm's length. "And a nose and chin like that too. No, that's Harriet's chin."

The child began to cry.

"Harriet, that's what we'll call you, little one," he said. "And when you grow up we'll send you Home to kiss the Queen's hand and marry the handsomest man in England."

He had a vision of a young man dressed in the Cossack trousers and Byronic cravat of the thirties, wooing a girl in the green gloom of a lilac bower. In this vivid picture he could see the medallion holding the low neck of the girl's dress, the dark up-curling side-levers on the young man's cheek, could hear the birds, smell the lilac. Not far away the sea shuffled the pebbles on the beach in a long, slow, heavy surge like the pounding of his own heart. Why, yes, it was himself--that afternoon. . . . Or had such a thing ever really happened? He shook his head--as if the confusion of dream and reality could be so easily dissolved.

It was Emma's eyes looking up at him which turned the scent of lilac into the smell of mud steaming under the floorboards, the soft rush of the sea into the sound of the rain thrashing the iron roof and making the river hiss and splutter as though each drop was a globule of melted lead. She looked at him through eyes smoky with pain, like eyes of glass that had been breathed on, and closed them again, leaving him in a muddle of angry emotion--exasperation at the sight of her thin body persisting through yet another ordeal, revulsion from the thought that here was just one more of "her brats," resentment when he remembered the sacrifices which permitted her to look at him in that reproachful way, as though to wish for anything apart from her wishes would be to rob her of her just dues. Ach, she was thinking of that sulky brute out there! And his face hardened as he stared at Larry for a moment before leaning over the bed to say, "So we will, by God."

But his life did not change. He was content to dandle the child and think, watching the valley and its sheep fulfil their yearly cycle of breeding and wool-growing through seasons invariably fair, "Oh, well, there'll be enough for her. And I'll make my own will, confound them." The pleasurable malice of that thought, as he saw Larry toughening into manhood and authority under the eager watchfulness of Emma, reconciled him to the futility of the too splendid hopes into which he had been betrayed the morning Harriet was born. But sometimes, in a pang of previsioned pain as he felt these same hopes stirring again out of some inextinguishable core of folly in his heart, he would not look at the child for days. Or was it that he did not put them away, that he had never put them away, that hopefully he was trying not to hope, afraid to arouse, by the merest whisper, the merest gesture of desire, the diablerie of bad luck always impending. . . .

But something was astir in the country now. He heard no more of bankrupt squatters and mobs rioting for food. The road that wound in from the south, across the valley, and out to the north-east and the Never-Never between Black Mountain and its sister at the end of the valley forty miles away, was busy again with the coming and going of wool drays, travelling cattle, people in search of land and work, drovers, swagmen, and "lone lean bushmen on lean horses with lean dogs trotting in their shadows."

A swaggie came to the kitchen to beg. "I been walkin' round a long time, missus. Could ye spare me that much beef and tea ye wouldn't miss it in the fine place ye've got here, bless ye!"

Emma went to get the things and he unloaded his bluey and sooted billy and sat down on the doorstep. The children gaped shyly from their mother's skirt at his face like an old boot withered round the two, still bright, brassy sprigs of his eyes, his cabbage-tree hat with corks dangling from the brim to keep the flies off, his clothes held together with bits of fencing-wire.

"Fine kids ye've got there, missus. And I've got an eye for fine kids. Wasn't it me, Pat Doolan, cured a deaf and dumb kid they had up Mulberry Creek on the Downs there that they never thought would speak a Christian word. 'Git along wid ye,' says I, 'that's no bewitch'un that. It hasn't got the dead face of one on it. 'Tis nothing more,' I says, 'than a kid ye've never spoke baby lingo to. That and nothing more,' I says. For the da and ma was Scotch folks, missus, that never spoke a word to each other because of the terrible loneliness that was over the place they was in and nothing new happening from one shearing to the next."

Emma gave him his meat and tea.

"Bless ye, missus. Thanks, now. And would ye have a bit of snout knockin' around the boss didn't have no use for?"

James ran across to the store to get some tobacco. "But it ain't the same up there no longer," the swaggie told Emma as he stowed the meat away in his sack. "With them putting down the track for the steam horse, it's like being in the centre of town if you live on the Downs. Not like in days gone by. With fences and suchlike, and gentlemen jackeroos dressed up to the nines and smoking the best Manilas after tea, and telegraph poles, and new houses, and them bringing in new-chums fast enough to empty the Old Country. And money to burn, missus."

"Is that the way it is?"

"That's the way it is. I've been humping my drum up along the Darling and Balonne and Condamine these ten years and never seen such things." James brought the tobacco. "Thank ye, missus. Thank ye now. I'd be ashamed to nip ye for one thing more if it wasn't for matches."

Emma gave him matches. "You didn't hear tell of railways coming out this way, did you?"

"Didn't I too? Why, ain't they bringing a line in to Pyke's Crossing. There won't be enough Irish navvies to knock them hills flat at fifteen bob a day. Millions to chuck away, missus. Millions. . . ."

Larry lounging behind the flame-tree in shyness of a stranger, Cabell pottering about his rose-trees in the garden, listened to the wheedling blarney of the swaggie, who went on for a long time pouring into Emma's ears the tales of great new roads, great new cities, of a great wave of prosperity looming, which fed her dream of Larry's great future wherein her heart found recompense for its old pain. He talked of the gold pouring out of Gympie, the new buildings in Brisbane, the toffs at the Melbourne Cup, the steamships which came through the Suez Canal to Australia in a third of the time the old Indiamen took. He told them of houses the rich squatters had built, "as big as an Englishman's castle in Ireland," of land selling at a hundred pounds a foot in Brisbane, of civilization spreading everywhere across the Continent, "even to the banks of the Barcoo, even to the verge of the Nullarbor Plain."

And when he had shouldered his bluey and departed, plod-plod-plodding, with the terrific persistence of a fly in a bottle, towards a blue horizon always unfolding on a blue horizon, Cabell and Larry stared down the road till he was no longer visible in dust and distance. The image he had evoked, of a teeming, fruitful life lapping round the hills that shut them in, stirred both of them and left them both frustrated--the one because he was young and afraid, the other because he was no longer young and therefore more afraid.

But more swaggies came, and bullock-drivers, the much-travelled men of the bush, and the strange nomads who worked a while and wandered on, stockman to-day, miner to-morrow, navvy, cook, or well-sinker the day after, and they were all excited at the things they had seen--steam trams in Sydney, telegraphs, railways. They were germ carriers, men on whom something like a fever was working--the fever of a boom.

The landtakers, like Cabell, for whom the country would always be alien, grey, inimical against the sharp image of England's loveliness, were dying out and with them the weariness of those who had had to fight too much. The old hands like Gursey were going too and with them the despair of those who had had to suffer too much. There was a new generation, and for the young life is always full of promise, and death is a mirage, and wisdom, disillusion, and despair have to be won afresh by every son.

After the dark years of the sixties the price of wool was shooting up again. They had at last discovered how to send meat to England. People were clamouring for land. "More land." Investors were clamouring for borrowers. "Take our money."

"Oh, I've seen it all before," Cabell muttered to himself and it was like a prayer to some fiend not to tempt and torment him any more. "Wasn't it the same in Fifty-one when they discovered gold? In Sixty when they made a new State? Didn't I let them pull the wool over my eyes? Bah, it never changes."

But it changed as he watched. Merchants were opening up big stores in the very street of Brisbane where, thirty years before, he had seen convicts march to a flogging. The telegraph had conquered the Dead Heart of Australia. Politicians were talking about filling the empty spaces with a hundred million people. Squatters were borrowing easy money, fencing, cutting down costs, growing richer than he could believe. "No more droughts," everybody said.

"Why not let Larry boss the board at the next shearing?" Emma said.

"Larry?"

"He's old enough."

"And old enough to sign my cheques and pay the undertaker, I expect."

"We won't live for ever."

"I'll live long enough to see that brat doesn't grab everything!"

Harriet was four years old now. Her eyes were bigger and browner, with a faint iridescence in the core of the iris--the spit of his mother, he thought. She was already frightened of him, his big, black beard and the way his one eye, with the blood spot in the white, like a second pupil, stared into hers. He went down to the offal dump and got some knucklebones and polished them and taught her to play. He took her out walking on his shoulder. But whenever she could she wriggled out of his hands and hid in Emma's skirts.

"Governess, refined widow. Newly arrived in Colony, seeks country employment," he read. "Best English references. Mrs Alice Todd, G.P.O., Brisbane."

He rode to Brisbane with the wool and found Mrs Todd extremely refined and not too young--forty or so. While she was packing to join him at the coach for Pyke's Crossing he wandered round the sprawling, busy town, lost his way in its streets crowded with women in styles grotesque and unexpected, men in white ducks and straw hats with pugarees. On the top floor of the Town Hall he found his old lawyer Samuelson, face still yellow and damp with beads of viscous sweat as though he had just been sprayed with oil.

"Could a man borrow ten thousand?" Cabell asked. "Don't say I want it, but could he?"

Samuelson rubbed his hands. "Get you twenty thousand on your security. When you want it, eh?"

"I don't want it. And I've got to catch the coach now. Good day."

Mrs Todd, jolting among her trunks and wicker baskets in the back seat of the chuck-me-out, which was all he could hire in Pyke's Crossing where the coach stopped, babbled her protests about the heat, the dust, the flies, and the barbaric roughness of colonial roads into a deaf ear. He was looking ahead where the sun was setting low down on the earth in a transparent haze of golden bars and red dust rising from the mobs of cattle, the drays, and the horsemen pressing north. In this alchemy of light even the gums and the muddy waterholes were transmuted to gold, even the flesh on his hands.