Читать книгу Inheritors - Brian Penton - Страница 9

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Geoffrey was no comfort to his loneliness among these self-engrossed adults. He hated Geoffrey--his plump, clean face and piggy eyes; hated him for the way he curried favour with Mrs Todd by copying twice as many pothooks and hangers as James, for his sneaking tittle-tattle, and for running unasked to fetch his father's cigars and boots, so that Cabell had begun to expect it and to repay him with a grunt from time to time.

He wanted to be like Larry--gruff and independent and unafraid.

The shearers had knocked off for the day. "Who told them to?" Cabell demanded.

"I did," Larry said. "I told them."

"What for?"

"The wool's wet."

"What if it is?"

"Men can't work wet wool."

"Men can't work my----. See here, you get those men back to work!"

"Men can't work wet wool."

"Men can work what I pay them to work. When you pay them it'll be time for you to say when they can't work."

Larry did not answer. His face was swollen and heavy with stubbornness.

"You get those men back to work. D'you hear?"

He did not answer.

"D'you hear?"

James's teeth chattered.

Larry got up and went out. They watched him ride up the valley past the shearers' hut without stopping. The shearers sitting at the door listening to a man play his accordion waved as he passed.

Cabell grabbed his hat, rushed down to the shed, flung the accordion away, and in ten minutes the men were back at work.

"From now on you're a paid hand here," Cabell told Larry. "I give all the orders here."

"Men ain't dogs," Larry insisted. "They can't work wet wool."

James tried to make friends with Larry, but it was not easy. Larry was sullen and knew about two hundred words, which flowed only when he was talking to his father. Knowing Geoffrey, he was suspicious when James hung round the door of the stockmen's hut in wet weather watching him and the men padding their saddles, mending shoes, frying pancakes, and playing "flip the sixpence." They had a chalked circle in the middle of the floor with a sixpence in it. The game was to turn the sixpence over inside the circle with a stock-whip. James crawled about on the ant-bed floor recovering the sixpence from corners. Once he got too close and Larry's whip took a sliver of skin off his cheek. From his idea of his brothers and their relation to Cabell, Larry expected James to run wailing to his father. He was surprised to see Emma shake James for five minutes without finding how he came by the wound on his cheek. Cabell did not even notice it.

"Want a whip?" Larry offered the next time he met James in the yard. "Might make you one some time."

James hung back.

"When I get time," Larry grumbled, retreating into his sulky shell at once.

But the ice was broken. He made the whip and let James help him, showed him how to stretch the bullock-hide on a wheel and cut out a circle, round and round, till there was one long thong which they pulled out and straightened; how to make the sixteen strands, thick in the middle, tapering at the end, so as to get a good belly; how to scrape off the hair and pare the greenhide into beautiful, thin, flat strings as pliable as a kid glove. When the whip was finished and greased, with a strip of red silk handkerchief in the end for a cracker, Larry said, "Better not let him see it. He'll take it off you."

James glanced at the house where his father sat in the rocking-chair with Harriet on his knee. He was tempted to tell Larry what he had heard, to share with him the burdensome knowledge that some awful disaster overhung their lives. But shame at revealing, even to Larry, that these demi-gods were capable of quarrelling and cursing each other made him blush. From some budding sense of social prudence he turned away and mumbled, "Who, Papa? Oh, he wouldn't."

Larry was quick to feel the boy's evasion. He turned away. "Don't suppose you'll ever have any use for it, anyway," he said, "learning lessons from that old crow. You and Geoffrey'll be like them Jardines out Narrow Gut that live in Sydney and never come near the place in case they get their hands dirty."

He stalked off, and James ran after him. "I don't want to learn from books," he said. "I want to be a stockman like . . ." He stammered, blushed again, "like Sambo."

Larry glanced at him doubtfully, shyly.

So when Cabell was away getting another governess James ran wild in the valley, and this incoherent friendship deepened--eager and admiring on James's side, heavy, sullen, monosyllabic on Larry's. They went shooting quail together in the dry thistles, went out at night after scrubbers, laid baits for dingoes, hunted kangaroos. Larry showed him how to tan a kangaroo pelt and make a knife-sheath out of it afterwards. On Sundays, when the stockmen prepared themselves to appear in dandified glory on Monday morning, James helped Larry polish his four-and-a-half-inch silver spurs and concertina his Canton moles to remove every speck from them, and on Monday morning at daybreak he would be down at the hut to see Larry put on his new elastic-sided boots, greasing his feet with tallow first because boots had to be a size too small so as to fit like a glove. The vitality of James's mind, wanting to know everything--why cattle stampeded at the smell of blood, how to break a horse in, how to make a cabbage-tree hat, why the sheep would not eat the clover till it dried off--stirred Larry's gloomy, inturned thoughts, and replaced, with a pride in knowledge he had not been conscious of, a resentment against the kind of learning Mrs Todd had been brought to drive into his brothers and sister--a learning that was drawing them farther and farther from his mother and himself. Already James's accent was clipped and slightly domineering, strange among the slurred, lazy voices of the men. Geoffrey's was more so. But it seemed less important to Larry when he saw James trying to copy the way he rode or cracked a whip.

They were sitting down to dinner one day when the chuck-me-out creaked wearily up the slope. Cabell handed out a stocky, rawboned woman in a gaberdine dust-coat.

The new governess. "Miss Montaulk," he introduced her.

Her eyes looked fixedly just over Emma's head and her face, like a jailer's, repudiated the stare, disparaging and hostile, which Emma returned. She discarded her coat, washed her hands, and ate her meal without a glance at Emma.

As he was taking her to her room after dinner Cabell stopped at the door and told James and Geoffrey, "You two had better get ready. I'm taking you down to school in Brisbane to-morrow. Miss Montaulk can't be bothered with you."

When he returned Geoffrey bawled, "I don't want to go. Don't make me."

Cabell did not notice. He was absorbed. He seemed anxious, and paced up and down the veranda looking out at the valley. Emma grew restless too, and snapped Geoffrey into silence. She recognized symptoms she had not seen for years. Instead of lying down after dinner with a paper and cigar, as he usually did nowadays, Cabell went to the stable and saddled a horse. Emma followed him.

"Where're you going?"

"Up the river. Where d'you think?"

"What for?"

He climbed into the saddle and turned the horse towards her, but she stood her ground.

"Well, if you want to know I'm going to look at some country I bought."

"What country?"

"The scrub."

She stared. "Going in for selling firewood?" But she could not hold her anger back. "So you're going to start it again!"

He spurred his horse and pushed her aside.

"Where did you get the money?" she yelled after him.

"Picked it up on the road."

"Thief!" she screamed. "That's what you are. Robbing your children."

"I can look after my children," he yelled back, and rode out of the yard.

Now there was a revolution at Cabell's Reach. Fencers and well-sinkers were busy over the run. A gang of Chinese came to ringbark and burn off ten thousand acres of scrub, which carried the Reach back to the boundary of Black Rock on the south. Cabell brought in new rams and culled over his flocks and shot the scrubbers. Where the delicate native grasses had been eaten out he planted rich English grass. His appearance changed. He got a set of false teeth, had his beard clipped, and began to wear the starched shirt, low stiff collar, narrow black tie pinned with a golden horseshoe and frock-coat which he wore to the end of his days, long after such clothes were out of fashion. He stopped thinking about the past and its lessons, and the peace of a will resigned to death departed from him. If he sat down for five minutes he would start to fidget. "Wonder if those cattle are all right on that grass?" He would send for Sambo. "Think we better move those cattle? Can't you smell a fire?" His superstitions returned. Thirteen sheep in a pen or a ladder put up where he couldn't help walking under it made him storm. He dressed in a ritualistic order: tie, collar and shirt first, then trousers, then waistcoat and coat, then socks and shoes, and if anything compelled him to change the order went round all day expecting the skies to fall. His meanness returned too. His room at the end of the veranda was soon full of scraps of iron, bits of leather, rusty nails, boards, sheep-skins, and old clothes.

"Never know when it might come in useful," he grumbled. He pared shavings off the men's rations, and instead of giving them flour worked out a combination of bran, pollard, and a third flour. "Headstones," the men called the heavy black damper this made, and threatened to strike, but Sambo laughed them out of it. "What's the matter with it. It stays. This fancy bread--you wouldn't know you'd eaten it."

"He's cheating you," Larry said.

Sambo was indignant. "Never been a better boss'n Rusty, and any bloke calls him names gets a head put on him."

That year Cabell cut five pounds off Sambo's wages. Yet Sambo's faith was unshaken.

But the most significant development at the Reach was the wing he built on to the rambling, low-roofed homestead. Here Harriet lived under the jailer's face of Miss Montaulk. The room was walled with rough slabs and overfurnished. There was a grand piano, a Turkey carpet, a pair of big, blue vases with sticks of pampas, gilded mirrors, screens, a sofa, a suite of near-Sheraton, and lace curtains. All this display around a little girl with startled eyes and pasty face seemed crazy, slightly evil; perhaps because the magenta hills and sky pressing against the window and the omnipresence of half-wild animals and men caked in mud and dust revealed, through the room's lavish incongruity, a mind lost in a fixed idea; perhaps because of the personality of Miss Montaulk, as inevitably a part of its furnishings as the lock in the door between the little girl and the life outside at which she was always peering through the curtains.

"Bête! Imbécile!" Miss Montaulk scolded her. "Leave prying and do your lessons or God will make your wicked back smoke with his branding-iron like those cattle down there."

She had a jagged, dull voice. She spoke little, but always irritably in a hissing accent, slightly foreign. Crapulous, untidy, and precise in niggling details, just like a jailer, she was utterly unlovable. Her hair, which hung in rat's tails over her ears, had been dyed some time ago and since had grown three or four inches, so that the top of her head seemed to be covered with a dirty-white, inadequate skull-cap. Her upper lip had a black moustache, bristling and tough from treatment with depilatories, and black hairs grew out of the moles on her neck. She had a nose like a pug dog's, with the nostrils turned out, and strong buck teeth. She was not old, thirty or so, but it was impossible to imagine that she had ever been young, smelt young, or looked out with any but repellant eyes, which peered fixedly at people with quick appraisal, the eyes of an old bawd Cabell would have recognized if he'd been a bit less innocent.

She was a French woman and a Protestant, she said, and had good references. But most important, she was repulsive--no child could grow to like her--and she was capable, she assured Cabell, of protecting a charge against disagreeable family influences.

"I want her to be fit to take the place that belongs to her when she goes home in a few years' time," Cabell said. "I want her to play the piano, to converse--you know, all the fandangles."

Miss Montaulk understood. "And you want her protected." (She said "brodected" and it had an ominous sound even to Cabell.) "A girl needs careful protection in this place. The men!" She shivered. "So bold! So animal looking!"

"She's only a child yet."

"But she will grow up. And young ladies! I've had experience."

He felt shy before her intense, questioning gaze. "Ugly bitch," he thought. "Like a hungry snake. Well, that's all to the good." He was thinking of Emma and Mrs Todd.

Now the silence of the house, buried in its grove of orange, plum and peach-trees, was complete. Emma lived in the kitchen (she refused to have maids in the house), Larry with the men, Cabell among the cattle and sheep. Lost between these monomaniac, closed worlds Geoffrey wandered aimlessly. "I don't want to go to school," he had kept blubbering. "I'll do my lessons. I won't bother Miss Montaulk."

"All right. All right," Cabell said testily. He reflected once or twice that Geoffrey was getting to look like one of his brothers, John who used to ride with the Barminster and always stuck around his father like a leech. The same incessant whine and fat face. "He'll come to nothing," Cabell thought and dismissed him from the list of his potential enemies in the family and indulged him off-hand.

But James went to school.

"I'll break the chestnut gelding in for you while you're away," Larry said.

"Oh, Sambo reckoned you wouldn't give that up for anything."

"I'll break it in before you come back Christmas."

James was overcome.