Читать книгу Anderson's Jo - Mary Grant Bruce - Страница 3
ОглавлениеTHE HOUSE OF HARRAP
“Dad! Da——ad!”
The long, shrill cry floated across the paddock. Jim Harrap, cutting bracken fern in a corner by the creek, straightened his aching back, leaned on his long fern-hook, and shaded his eyes to look in the direction of the call.
Two small boys came into view, running among the scattered stumps of trees across the rough ground. They ran with haste and determination, shouting as they came. A frown creased the man’s forehead as he watched them.
“Wonder what’s up now?” he muttered. “Something’s always up.” He gave a long cooee, to make his whereabouts known, saw the seekers change their direction and come towards him, and then returned to his cutting. Whatever had happened, he would know about it soon enough without going to meet it: and meanwhile, there were plenty of ferns. There was never any lack of ferns to cut in South Gippsland: as soon as you had cut to one end of a paddock the new crop of little green croziers, straight and strong and merciless, was springing up at the other end. They kept a man busy—kept him poor—kept him irritable. The ferns—and other things. Life was no easy matter for a man on a hill selection, with rough, steep country from which to hew a living for a sickly wife and five children. Not so hard until the youngsters had to go to school; they did not cost so much while they ran about barefoot, clad in any old bits of things. But when school-days came—Lord, how they wore out boots! His forehead creased again as the hook swung backwards and forwards through the ferns. Something was wrong again, he knew. Billy and Dick never came out to find him in the paddocks without reason—too afraid he’d have some job for them.
They came up, panting: boys of nine and ten, heavily built, their faces showing the curious exultation that comes to some people when they are bearers of unpleasant tidings.
“Mum wants you to come ’ome,” said Billy.
“What’s her hurry? I got an hour’s work yet in this corner.”
“Says she wants you right away. That woman’s sick.”
“Well, she was sick this morning. An hour won’t make her much worse.” The busy fern-hook had not ceased cutting.
“Too right, she’s worse,” said Dick. “Mum’s only been waiting for us to get back from school to fetch you. She says something’s got to be done.”
“Blessed if I know what,” said his father. “All right, I s’pose I’d better come. An’ I’d reckoned nothing ’ud stop me gettin’ this corner cut out to-night. Oh, well, it’s no good reckonin’ on anything but trouble on this place.” He thrust the fern-hook under a log, picked up his coat and the blackened tin billy that had held his dinner, and they set out towards the little homestead tucked into a fold of the hills half a mile away.
It was only half a mile as the crow flies, but to walk it took over half an hour. There were patches of boggy ground and tea-tree scrub to be circled round; great dead trees lay here and there, too big to be scrambled over—they followed the little sheep-pad that wound in and out among them. Now and then they dipped into a deep gully, where to walk down one side was almost as laborious as to climb up the other. All the ground showed the stumps of cut ferns, brown and stiff, but between them the little deadly green heads, stiffly curled, were already showing—the new crop that would so soon uncurl, to cover the ground with a mass of dense fern-fronds, choking the grass on which the sheep depended for their lives. If only grass and lucerne would grow as easily, as furiously, as the evil bracken! Jim Harrap scowled at it as he led the way, the boys jog-trotting at his heels.
At the last fence, near the house, he turned to them.
“You two better go an’ bring up the cows,” he said.
“Aw, it ain’t cow-time yet, Dad,” protested Billy. “Mum said we could have a piece when we fetched you ’ome.”
It was characteristic of Jim Harrap that he rarely enforced an order.
“Well, hurry up an’ get it,” he said. “Only, don’t you slip out on me an’ forget all about the cows, or you’ll get what-for.” The boys grinned at each other, following him. Dad was always promising them “what-for”—a promise that was never kept, no matter how richly they might have merited the mysterious penalty.
The cottage in the fold of the hills was bare and unpainted, except that the soft woodwork of the doors and window-frames had been roughly blued—apparently with the domestic blue-bag. The colouring was peeling away in ragged flakes. In front, a few sickly flowers struggled for existence among a mass of docks; at the rear a more serious attempt had been made to grow vegetables, of which the main crop was a stretch of fly-infested cabbage. A few dusty tree-lucernes shaded the dreary back-yard: a clothes-line, stretched between them, carried some dingy garments that flapped heavily in the rising breeze. Two little children quarrelling over a broken toy in a dust-hole, raised grubby faces to greet their father.
“Dad! Make Benny le’ go of my engine. You make him, Dad!”
Harrap growled an inaudible reply, slouching across the yard to the open door of the kitchen. His wife came out to meet him, a year-old child in her arms. She was a meagre woman, thin and sallow, with a strained, anxious face that might once have been cheaply pretty, before years and cares and shiftlessness had done their work upon it. Now it expressed a perennial grievance against the world—mingled, at the moment, with something more definite.
“Well, what’s wrong now, Loo?”
“It’s that woman,” she said. “She’s worse, Jim.”
“Worse, is she?” He looked at her in a heavy, puzzled way. “Well, I can’t do anything for her, can I? Ain’t she took the med’cine?”
“Oh, she took it, all right. But she’s worse, all the same. She won’t touch any food, an’ she just lies an’ looks at me. She don’t seem able to say what’s wrong. An’ I don’t know what to do with her.”
“Oh, well, just leave her be,” said Harrap. “Ten to one she’ll be all right to-morrow, after a good sleep. I wouldn’t get in a fuss if I was you, Loo. You’ve done all you could for her.”
“She won’t be all right to-morrow—nor next week neither,” said his wife, sharply. “That woman’s real ill, you take it from me, Jim. She wasn’t right when she come here. Jolly shame, I call it, taking a situation an’ landing herself on decent people to be looked after. An’ how do we know what’s the matter with her? Something catching, as like as not—an’ the next thing’ll be all our kids’ll have it. An’ then what are we going to do?”
“But—” He looked at her stupidly. “You don’t want me to go in for the doctor, Loo? Ten mile, an’ I’m up to me eyes in work as it is, let alone the milkin’ to be done.”
“Doctor, indeed!” She gave an angry sniff. “What good ’ud that do? You’d get him out, an’ he’d order med’cine, an’ you’d have to go in again for that, an’ he’d say she had to have special food an’ goodness knows what all—an’ how am I to do the nursing, with the house an’ children, let alone the chance of its bein’ catching? I just can’t do it, Jim, an’ that’s all about it.” She began to cry, weakly, and the child in her arms broke into a loud, frightened roar.
“Give ’im to me,” said Harrap. He took the baby and tried to hush him awkwardly, his face a study of bewildered anxiety. “Aw, get hold of yourself, Loo; it’s no use cryin’ about it. What do you want me to do?”
His wife dried her eyes with the corner of a very dirty apron.
“We got to get her away,” she said, speaking under her breath. “It’s my belief she’s goin’ to die, Jim; an’ next thing you know we’ll be landed in all the expense, an’ everything else. We got to get her to the hospital in the Flat before she gets any worse. I’ll be thankful when I see her off the place, an’ the kid, too.”
“But I can’t take her,” he said, knitting his brows. “You know I told you this morning that old Jess is dead lame; and she’s the only horse I can drive. What’s your idea, Loo?”
Mrs. Harrap had her plan already formulated.
“You ride over an’ get John Anderson,” she said, quickly. “He’s good-natured enough, an’ he’s got a Ford truck—he’d never refuse to take her in to the Flat.”
“No, I s’pose he wouldn’t,” Harrap said. “But I don’t quite like it, Loo. Seems a bit rough, sendin’ the poor soul off like that. Why don’t you wait until to-morrow, an’ see how she is then?”
“To-morrow might be too late,” she answered. “Say she’s worse, or that it turns out to be catching—how do we know what sort of illness she’s brought down from Melbourne? There might be no moving her to-morrow, or for weeks. An’ if she dies on our hands? I don’t see we owe anything to a strange woman that’s let us down pretty badly already. She never had no right to come here at all—we’ve only had two days’ work out of her, an’ she’s been in bed for nearly a week. I’m not game to take the responsibility of the kids catching it, if you are. Say I get it too—are you goin’ to do the nursin’ of us all?”
“Lor!” said Harrap, with a look of dismay that was almost ludicrous, at the same time pushing back his hat. “You do think of things, don’t you? But is she fit to travel?”
“She’s fit enough,” said his wife, setting her lips in a thin line. “I’ll fix her up comfortable enough; she can lie on a mattress in the truck.”
“An’ the kid?”
“The kid’ll have to go too. I expect they’ll keep her at the hospital: if not, she’ll have to go to the police. I ain’t goin’ to have them here. Soon as I get them away I’ll shut up the room an’ burn sulphur in it to kill the germs. It’s the only thing to do, Jim. You hurry up over to Anderson’s, an’ I’ll get their things packed.”
“Right-oh,” he said, gloomily. He turned and made his slow way to the gate, and then stopped. “I don’t half like it, Loo,” he began. But his wife had disappeared; and after a moment’s hesitation he hunched his shoulders and slouched across to the shed.
