Читать книгу Told by Peter - Mary Grant Bruce - Страница 4

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I THOUGHT when I began that I could jump straight into my story. But it isn’t quite as simple as that. Because of having the title, I think. I mean, when you find a title ready waiting for you, all trimmed up with aeroplanes and skulls and oddments, you just can’t wade into the thing as if it was a diary and write “Jan. 8th: Went to ...” wherever it was I might have gone. A title seems like a sort of challenge, and you feel you’ve got to live up to it. This may be the way real authors feel, for all I know, and if they do I’m sorry for them.

So I shall begin, anyhow, by telling something about ourselves, as if I was meaning to write a proper book, but I’m not going in for descriptions and stuff like that, no matter how many skulls Miss Tarrant drew. Binkie is the only person who will ever have a chance to see it, and I expect she might be awfully offended if I tried to describe her. In real books girls’ hair and eyes always get a lot of description; and though I know Binkie’s hair is a sort of dark bay and curly and generally untidy, I haven’t the foggiest notion what colour her eyes are.

Therefore, all long descriptions will be skipped. But now that I have a title I shan’t mind letting myself go over interesting details, if any; and if occasionally some of the flowery phrases I mugged up in Macaulay for my essay drip by accident off my pencil, I shall let them drip. By this means I may be able to discover whether there is anything really authorious about me or not. I think, too, it may be as well if I try to imagine that I have a reader, and not merely Binkie, because that will keep me up to the mark better than Binkie has any hope of doing. And he will have to be a patient reader.

The worst of the Macaulay business was that when I won that prize, and told them how, it started Miss Tarrant on to reading Macaulay with Binkie. They must have read him very hard, for they are now absolutely soaked with him. Not to improve Binkie’s mind; she has the sort of mind that doesn’t improve that way. They did it simply to be able to hurl bits of him at me if they wanted to annoy me. So if the patient reader meets either of them saying something to me that couldn’t by any possibility be original, he will know that it is a remark of Macaulay’s. It may not make any sense whatever, but that never troubles Miss Tarrant or Binkie.

Well, there are five of us at Weeroona: Dad, Mother, Binkie, Miss Tarrant and me. The reader may wonder why I put Miss Tarrant among the family, since I revealed in Chapter I that she is Binkie’s governess, and governesses are usually endured with difficulty during term, and fade away in the holidays, regretted by none.

But Miss Tarrant is not like that. She hasn’t any people except a married brother whose wife has innumerable young, and when she goes to stay with them they welcome her with open arms and give her all the children to take care of and all their clothes to mend. Thus, when she has a nice holiday at her brother’s she comes back to Weeroona looking like nothing on earth. So Dad and Mother found out that she would far rather have her hols here, and as we all like her awfully we just keep her.

Mother says she feels a bit guilty over it, because Miss Tarrant does heaps to help her all the time, but Miss Tarrant only laughs and says that nobody could want a better holiday than merely ceasing to teach Binkie. I need not describe Miss Tarrant further except to say that she makes no secret of being pretty old, nearly twenty-four, and that my cousin Gerald, who comes here sometimes, says she is an eyeful.

Dad should really have been introduced first, I suppose. He is six foot four, and he was Captain of the First Eleven when he was at my school. He does not mind ragging with us, but if he says a thing in a certain tone of voice you jump to it. Mother is quite impossible to describe, I find, but if the patient reader perseveres with this book he will no doubt find out for himself what she is like.

Binkie was christened Barbara, but Mother called her Binkie because she was so afraid that otherwise she would be called Babs. Dad says that this was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire, but Mother does not agree. Anyhow, Binkie doesn’t mind, and when we are in a hurry we call her Binks. She is a year younger than me, and we did everything together until I went to school, which of course makes a difference, especially in the first two or three days after I come home. After that it becomes very hard to impress Binkie with anything about school, which just shows you how narrow-minded people get who always stay at home in the country.

I went to school because Dad did, and Binkie has a governess at home because Mother did. I mean, Mother went to school, and she was awfully brainy and passed a whacking lot of exams; and she says much good Latin and maths did her when she got married when she was twenty and had to run a house in the country. I mean, of course, it can’t help you much to know Latin when a bullock is killed for beef and you’ve got to understand all about joints and oddments, and look pretty lively, too, in case any of it goes bad. Mother had some ghastly times when she was learning about really important things like that. So she made a vow that if she had a daughter she would make sure that the daughter knew how to run a place with one hand tied behind her, if necessary, and a sub-vow that the daughter must learn to speak French, even if she couldn’t write it, so that she wouldn’t feel a lost soul if she ever went to France. Mother reckons that those are the only things that really matter for a girl. So of course Binkie was for it when she arrived, and I will admit that she can cook. I’m not so sure about her French. She and Miss Tarrant jabber it much too fast to be natural. Dad says how about Mother’s theories of education if Binkie had wanted to be really a swot and go to the University; and Mother looks at him, and then at Binkie, and says there was no danger.

Well, that is all the family. Except the men about the place, of course, but they live in the men’s hut. Some of them are awfully good sorts, but the patient reader will meet them later. Sometimes we have a cook and a housemaid, and sometimes we have not, because cooks and housemaids in Australia are what Dad calls a fleeting population. They come and go; and often there is a long interval between the going and the coming.

If it wasn’t that Mother and Miss Tarrant and Binkie have to work too hard, Dad and I like it better when there isn’t a cook, because cooks are always tempermental, and you have to be jolly careful in the kitchen, and often the cooking is tempermental too. But just now we are lucky, for when the last cook suddenly said she was fed up to the teeth with being out of reach of a picture-theatre, and packed her box and went to find one, Eva the housemaid revealed the fact that she could cook, and took on the job. Mother says she would like to think that it was because she loves us, but she fancies that Joe, one of the stockmen, had something to say to it, because he takes Eva out riding every Sunday. Otherwise she might have fled to find a picture-theatre, too.

Weeroona is a cattle-station, and Dad has the best lot of pedigree Herefords in the district and takes lots of prizes at shows. I could write heaps about Herefords, but I am afraid no reader would be patient enough to stand it, so I will merely say that there is no breed to touch them, and when I leave school I am going to run the station with Dad until I get a station of my own. Binkie says she is going to run it too, and of course I laugh at her, and she gets annoyed. She is terribly disappointed because she isn’t a boy, and she tries to get over the fact of being a girl by wearing riding-breeches or shorts practically all the time, unless Mother puts her foot down. If you want to see how furious Binkie can get, you have only to say, “Be lady-like, Barbara!”—and then the feathers fly.

It must be much easier to write a book that isn’t about one’s own people. I mean, there are lots of things I could say about Binkie, but she will see what I write, and it would be rather giving myself away. Anyhow, you can’t put down some things in cold blood, and Binkie would hoot if I did. So I will restrict myself to saying that when I go to other fellows’ houses in term-time and meet their sisters I generally come away wondering how on earth the other fellows can stick them, because they do not seem to have any sense at all; and Binks really has a bit. In fact, in quite a lot of ways she is nearly as good as a boy. I may decide that it is prudent to take out this bit later, but at present I will let it stand, because it is helping out this chapter. I am working up deep sympathy for authors now, because, until I tried, I never realized how hard it is to write all the dull stuff at the beginning before you come to the real story. It has to be done, of course, but if you ask me, patient reader, it is quite a job of work.

Oh, I forgot the horses. Even if you couldn’t be expected to want to hear all I could say about Hereford cattle, you will have to bear hearing about the horses, because they come into the story, if I ever get so far. We have a lot, of course, like most stations, and none of them are bad, for Dad can’t bear the sight of scrubbers. His own special ones are beauties; it takes something out of the ordinary to carry anyone his size. Binkie and I naturally think our ponies are hard to beat. They are pretty big and nearly thoroughbred. Mine is a black mare called Roona, and Binkie’s Hurricane is dark bay with black points; and both of them can jump like stags. Nobody but ourselves is ever allowed to ride them, so when I am at school Binks has to use them in turns, or else it would take half the holidays to reduce Roona to order. Mother does not ride much now: she says the car is more fitting for old ladies. That, of course, is nonsense, because no one in their senses would ever dream of calling Mother old. In many ways she is just about the age of Binks and me.

I don’t know how many dogs we have. Between the working ones and the house ones and oddments belonging to the men there is quite a mob. Binkie has a Sealyham she thinks the world of, and I think the same of my red setter Bran. That dog knows as much as a human being. For instance, he always knows when I am coming home. They don’t tell him, but a day or two before I come he begins to get what Binks calls his “feelings,” and he wanders in and out of my room and almost talks to them about me. Then, when the real day comes he gets so excited that he’s never still; and when Dad gets the car out he jumps on the running-board and nothing will shift him. He rides on it perfectly safely, and it’s funny to see him leaning in or out when the car goes round corners, never losing his balance for a moment. When they pull up at the station he’s off like a shot; he tears down the platform to watch for the smoke of the engine coming over the hill, and when the train slows down old Bran is always the first thing I see, racing along beside the carriage and barking his head off. But unless I am at home he will never get into the car at other times.

Well, that is all about Weeroona and its population, but there are two other people I must tell you about. They are Clem Hardy and his father, and Clem is my best friend. Mr. Hardy is an Englishman. His wife died when Clem was a little chap, and they have a rather doddering old housekeeper, Mrs. Sarah Green, who looks after their house—more or less. Mother says it’s less. They have a little place just beyond Weeroona, not far from the sea: hardly any land, because Mr. Hardy isn’t strong enough to manage farming or anything, so he lives on his income, and it is a very small income. Often Mother is worried about them, because she knows how hard up they are, and Mr. Hardy has attacks of some illness that lay him out for a week at a time, and sometimes more. We reckon he ought to go and see a specialist in Sydney, but he hasn’t enough money for specialists, and he’s far too proud to let Dad help him, as Dad would love to do.

Clem has to work pretty hard, though he is only a few months older than me. He gets up very early and milks their cows and feeds the pigs and fowls and does all the odd jobs. Then he has five miles to ride to school, and it isn’t much of a school, and he hates it. Clem has got brains, and it’s a rotten shame that he can’t go to a school like mine; it doesn’t seem fair that I can, when everybody knows I have no brains to speak of, except about cattle and horses. Dad and Mother have always wanted to help about school for Clem, but Mr. Hardy has a sort of fierce pride, and it was no use trying. But he couldn’t stop Dad giving Clem a decent pony on his last birthday. It is a great pony, and Clem loves it nearly best of anything in the world.

They’re lonely people, the Hardys. We are their only neighbours, and they don’t seem to have anyone belonging to them. Clem told me once that his mother had been utterly cast off by her people because she went and married Mr. Hardy against their wishes. They hadn’t any decent reason; it was just because they thought he wasn’t good enough for their family, or some high-and-mighty excuse like that. Anyhow, Clem said they only amounted to his old grandmother and an aunt somewhere in England, and from what his father said he reckoned they were both Tartars, so he didn’t waste any trouble over them. But he wished his father had had some Hardy relations, instead of being an only son and an orphan at that. I knew Clem worried a bit about what might happen if his father got worse, or even died. Clem feels awfully responsible for his father.

I could have told him he needn’t worry too much, because if anything like that came to pass Dad and Mother would simply adopt him. There’s heaps of room on Weeroona for another boy, and they like Clem as much as Binkie and I do. But as that meant that his father would have to die first I thought it mightn’t be a very comforting thing to say after all, so I held my tongue.

And now I have told the patient reader all he needs to know, and I can get on with the real story. I hope he is at least half as glad as I am.

.....

Binkie slipped in when I had got this far and dropped a little parcel on my bed. She didn’t wait for me to open it.

That was as well, because what came out of it was a little pocket dictionary. Simply an insult, because the only thing I can ever beat my form at is spelling. Not that it’s any credit to me, of course; it’s just that some people are born able to spell, and some aren’t. And of course the form isn’t any too brilliant.

So I would have made ready to buzz the dictionary at Binks when she came back, only I found another thing in the parcel—a slab of that new chocolate that’s all full of little bits of fig. So I forgot my wrath and ate it.

*****

Note by Author: Chocolate is a great aid to literature.