Читать книгу From Billabong to London - Mary Grant Bruce - Страница 4

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IF you came to the homestead of Billabong by the front entrance, you approached a great double gate of wrought iron, which opened stiffly, with protesting creaks, and creaked almost as much at being closed. Then you found yourself in a long, winding avenue, lined with tall pine-trees, beyond which you could catch glimpses, between the trunks, of a kind of wilderness-garden, where climbing roses and flowering shrubs and gum-trees and bush plants, and a host of pleasant, friendly, common flowers grew all together in a very delightful fashion. Seeing, however, that you were a visitor by the front entrance, you could not answer the beckonings of the wilderness-garden, but must follow the windings of the avenue, on and on, until the wild growth on either side gave place to spreading lawns and trim flower-beds, the pine-trees ended, and you came round a kind of corner formed by an immense bush of scarlet bougainvillea, and so found the house smiling a welcome.

Very rarely were any doors or windows shut at Billabong. The kindly Australian climate makes the sunlit winter air a delight; and if in summer it is sometimes necessary to shut out heat, and possibly intrusive snakes, as soon as the sun goes down everything is flung wide open to admit the cool evening breeze that comes blowing across the paddocks. Billabong always looked as if it were open to welcome the newcomer.

It was a red house of two storeys, looking lower than it was because of its width and the great trees that grew all round it, as well as because of its broad balconies and verandahs. From either side the garden stretched away until hedges of roses blocked the entrance to orchard and vegetable patches. The house stood on a gentle rise, and in front the trees had been thinned so that across the smooth lawn you looked over stretching paddocks, dotted with gum-trees, and broken by the silver gleam of a reed-fringed lagoon. There was no other house visible—only the wide, peaceful paddocks. The nearest road was two miles away, and it was seventeen miles to the nearest town. Perhaps, seen from the front, Billabong might have seemed a little lonely.

But, in fact, no one ever dreamed of coming to Billabong by the front. There had, of course, been a few exceptions to the rule; as in the case of a new Governor-General, who had been brought in state to see it as a typical Australian station, and had greatly annoyed the inmates by bringing his dogs in to luncheon and feeding them with bones on the dining-room carpet, which happened to be a Persian rug of value. The Billabong folk looked back to that visit with considerable disgust. Sometimes other strangers found their way to the great iron gates, and up the avenue; but not often. Occasional callers did not come to Billabong, since the owner and his motherless children were not ceremonious people, and in any case, no one drives seventeen miles in the Australian bush to pay a call of ceremony. Those who came were prepared to stay, and were more immediately concerned with the disposal of their horses than with any other consideration; so that it followed that the chief entrance to Billabong was known as “the back way.”

The tracks alone would have told you that. As you came up from the outer paddocks, the gravel of the drive was smooth and untouched save for the gardener’s rake; but the other tracks, deep and well trodden, swept round beside the garden and turned in to the courtyard of the stables—big, red-brick buildings, looking almost as large as the house itself. It was always cheerful and exciting at the stables, for all the dogs took charge of you directly you arrived, and made vigorous remarks about you, until they were quite sure whether you were a person to be trusted. “Swagmen”—the bush tramps of Australia—loathed the Billabong dogs very exceedingly; and the dogs returned the feeling in a lively fashion, so that the progress of a swagman from the outer gate to the security of the back yard was apt to be fraught with incident and marked by haste. But if your respectability were evident, the dogs became merely enthusiastic, inspecting visitor and horses with well-bred curiosity, and finally accompanying you to the gate with demonstrations of friendliness, and parting from you with regret.

Within the gate you had, as Murty O’Toole, the head stockman, put it, “your choice thing of tracks.” One led across the gravelled yard to the kitchen and its long row of out-buildings; another took you in the shade of a row of pepper-trees to Mr. Linton’s office, where interviews with the men were held, and all the business of a big station went forward. Another—Jim and Norah Linton liked this one—went directly to the orchard, where, on hot days, might be found cherries and apricots, peaches, nectarines, great red Japanese plums, guavas, and long beds of strawberries and raspberries. But the most worn track of all led through a porch that opened in a creeper-hung fence, on the other side of which you found yourself in the garden, and presently on the side verandah, a pleasant place, half closed in by passion fruit vines and clematis, and made very homely and comfortable with long basket-chairs and tables where books and magazines lay. There were rugs on the tiled floor, and, here and there, tall palms in oaken tubs. Nearly all the year round, the Billabong folk were to be found on the side verandah.

It was vacant just now, save for one inmate, a big man in riding dress, asleep on a rush lounge. His whip and broad felt hat were tossed on the table beside him, and a collie, also asleep, lay in a patch of sunlight near. It was mid-winter, yet the sun shone warmly across the sheltered space; a good corner to bask in, after the keen wind sweeping across the paddocks. Everything was very quiet. The glass doors leading into a room close by were open, but no sound came from the house, and the big man slept like a child. Presently, however, a chorus of barking came from the stables, and the sleeper stirred and opened his eyes.

“Billy, I expect,” he said, yawning. “Believe I’ve been asleep.” He glanced at his watch. “Half-past three!—it’s high time that black rascal was here.”

He got up, stretching himself, and went to the edge of the verandah—a mighty figure of a man, well over six feet, with broad shoulders and a loosely hung frame indicative of great strength. His hair and close-cropped beard were turning grey; but the whole face held an indefinable boyishness, due perhaps to the twinkle that was never far from the deep-set eyes. As he watched, the chorus of barking drew nearer, the gate in the porch swung open, and a native boy came through, his black face a startling contrast to his white shirt and spotless moleskin breeches. He grinned broadly as he neared the verandah.

“You’re late, Billy,” David Linton said.

“Plenty that pfeller mare lazy,” said the dusky one, cheerfully. “That one gettin’ old, boss. Better me ride one of this year’s lot—eh?” He handed over a leather mailbag and a bundle of papers, remaining poised on one foot, in evident anxiety as to his answer.

“One of the new young horses?—what, to carry out mails and parcels? No, thanks, Billy, I’m not keen on experiments that lead to broken legs,” replied the squatter, laughing. “Old Bung-Eye is good for the job for a long time yet.” Then, in answer to the downcast face as the black boy turned away, “I’ll see what Mr. Jim says about your taking one of the new lot out mustering—if you behave yourself and take him gently.”

“Plenty!” said Billy, rejoicing. “That black colt, boss—him going to make a mighty good horse——”

“We’ll see what Mr. Jim says. Be off—it’s high time you had the cows in the milking-yard.” The gate slammed behind the ecstatic Billy as his master went back to his chair and unlocked the mailbag.

He lifted a rather furrowed brow half an hour later at a step beside him—the housekeeper, round, fat and cheery, her twinkling eyes almost lost in her wide, jolly face.

“Will you have tea now, sir?”

“The children are not in, are they, Brownie?”

“Not yet,” Mrs. Brown answered, smoothing her spotless apron. “Mr. Jim said they’d be back at four-ish; but when it comes to gettin’ back it’s generally—as a rule more ‘ish’ than ‘four.’ Would you rather wait a little, sir?”

“I think so,” said the squatter, absent-mindedly, his glance wandering back to the letter in his hand. “Yes—there’s no hurry, Brownie—and Miss Norah seems to like to pour out my tea.”

“She do, bless her,” said Mrs. Brown. “I always say meals aren’t the same to Miss Norah if you’re not there, sir. Poor lamb—and so soon goin’ back to that there school. Mighty little she gets for tea there, I’ll be bound.”

“Well, she doesn’t strike one as ill-fed, Brownie—and you know she likes school.”

“I know she likes home better,” said Brownie, darkly. “Me, I don’t hold with schools. I was glad when Master Jim came home for good an’ I’ll be gladder when it’s Miss Norah’s last term. Edication’s all very well in its way, like castor-oil; but you can get too much of it. Why, Miss Norah’s grandma never even heard of half them fancy things she knows, and where’d you find a better manager of a house than she was? What she didn’t know about curing bacon——!” Brownie sighed in inability to express fitly the superhuman attainments of her nursling’s ancestress.

“Well, you know, Brownie, I look to you for all that side of Norah’s education,” said Mr. Linton pacifically. “And you say yourself that the child is no bad housekeeper.”

“I should think she isn’t,” retorted Mrs. Brown. “Mighty few girls, though I say it as shouldn’t, cook better than Miss Norah, or can be handier about a house. But where’s the use of all them other things? Physics, which ain’t anything to do with medicine, an’ brushwork that’s not even first-cousin to a broom an’ physi—something—or—other, which is learnin’ more about your inside than any young lady has any call for. No, I don’t hold with it at all. But it doesn’t seem to hurt her, bless her!”

“No, I don’t think it hurts her,” David Linton said. “Learning does not seem to make her any less healthy, either in mind or body; and that’s the main thing, Brownie. You mustn’t grumble at the bit of extra polish—they all have it nowadays, and it’s no bad thing.” His eyes lit up suddenly. “There they come,” he said. “Is your kettle boiling?”

There were sounds of hoof-beats on the track, faint at first and then more distinct. The dogs burst into a wild chorus of welcome. Brownie disappeared hurriedly in the direction of the kitchen, and Mr. Linton lay back in his long chair and gave his letter a half-hearted attention, his eyes wandering to the door in the porch. Presently came quick feet and merry voices, the door swung open, and three people entered in a pell-mell fashion and descended upon the verandah like a miniature cyclone.

“I know we’re late, but we couldn’t help it,” Norah said breathlessly. “There was such a heap to do in the Far Plain, Dad—you ask the manager!” She shot a laughing glance at her brother, an immensely tall individual, who responded by lazily pitching his hat at her. “Oh, the wind is cold, Dad—we raced home against it, and it cut like a knife. But it was lovely. Have you had tea? I do hope you haven’t.”

“I waited for the mistress of the house; and Brownie gave me her views on the Higher Education of Women,” said her father. “She seems to think you’re learning too much, Norah. Are you worried about it?”

“Not so much as my teachers,” said Norah, laughing. “And their anxieties seem all the other way. Oh, don’t let us think of school, Daddy—it will be bad enough when the time really comes.”

The third of the newcomers uttered a hollow groan. Like Jim Linton, he was a tall, lean boy; but while Jim gave promise of as mighty a pair of shoulders as his father’s, Wally Meadows exemplified at the moment length without breadth. Everything about him was lean and quick and active; his brown hands were never still, and his merry brown face was always alight with interest, except in those deep moments when those who knew him had reason to suspect some amazing outbreak of mischief in his plotting brain. Finding that no one observed him, he groaned again, yet more hollowly.

“What’s the matter, old man?” Jim asked. “Toothache? Or lack of tea?”

“I don’t have toothache; and Billabong doesn’t have any lack of tea. If you haven’t just had tea here, it’s because you’re just going to have it,” said Wally severely, and with truth; for in an Australian bush home tea begins to occur at an early hour in the morning, and continues to occur with great frequency all day. “No, it’s only the idea of school. You’re so hideously old and important now that I suppose you forget all about it, but it’s only two Christmases ago that Norah and I used to dry your tears at going back. Didn’t we, Norah?

“What about your own tears?” Mr. Linton asked, laughing.

“Why, I shed them still,” said Wally. “I could begin now, quite easily. Didn’t you hear me groan?—I’ll do it again, if you’d care for it. It isn’t any trouble.”

“Don’t think of me,” begged his host. “I wouldn’t put you to the exertion for any consideration. And really I don’t believe that any of you mind school half as much as you make out. You have an uncommonly good time when you’re there.”

“Yes, of course we do,” Wally said. “School truly isn’t a bad old place, once you’ve got to it. But a fellow gets a bit restless as age creeps upon him, you know, sir—and especially since this old reprobate left and took to station-managing, I’ve been feeling it was about time I got busy at something beside cricket and footer and lessons. And now, of course, it’s worse than ever.”

“Now?”

“Well, you see, so many of the fellows one knew are in camp. Lots of the seniors left almost as soon as war broke out and the Australian Contingent was started. Wouldn’t I give my ears to go!” said Wally hotly. “And they say I’m too young. Well, Mills and Fisher and Ballantyne were under me in the footer team, and they’re taken; they may be a bit older, but I can handle any of them with one hand. It doesn’t seem fair. However, I expect there will still be war when I get to the age limit, and then I’m off!”

A slow flush had crept over Jim Linton’s grave face. He rose and went to the edge of the verandah, staring across the garden, and kicking with his heel at a grass-tuft trying to grow up in the gravel. There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence; and Wally, seeing his chum’s hand clench tighter on the stockwhip he still held, bit his lip and mentally informed himself that he was an idiot. Then came footsteps, and Mrs. Brown appeared, panting behind a loaded tea-tray.

“I was getting quite worried about your pa having no tea, Miss Norah,” she said, cheerfully. “But he wouldn’t let me bring it till you was all home.”

“And we were late, of course,” Norah said, penitently, jumping up and making swift clearance of the hats and whips encumbering the rush-work tea-table. “But there was such a heap to do. We found one poor old sheep down; and when we were close to it we discovered that it was in a sort of barbed-wire entanglement. It had picked up a loose piece of wire somewhere, and managed to wind it round and round its body, buried deep in the wool. And its poor cut legs!”

“Could you save it, Jim?” Mr. Linton asked.

“Oh, yes, it’s all right,” Jim answered, turning. “Beastly job, of course; the poor brute was even more stupid than the average sheep, and kicked itself into a worse mess when we came near it. We had to get Norah to hold down its head while Wally and I got the wire away—and that meant cutting it out of the wool. It looked as if a very amateur shearer had been at it with blunt nail scissors, by the time we had finished; I never saw anything like the way twisted old barbed-wire can imbed itself in wool. However, the patient was able to walk away afterwards; he had two battle-scarred legs, but they didn’t seem to worry him much.”

“How are the cattle looking in the Far Plain?” his father asked.

“Bad enough,” said Jim, stirring his tea. “The grass, such as it was, has gone off very much since I was out there last, a fortnight ago. The Queensland bullocks haven’t put on a bit of condition since we turned them in. And the creek is awfully low. Take it all round, Dad, I don’t think we’ve ever had such a bad season.”

“No; Billabong never was as dry—in my time, at all events,” said David Linton. “It’s the worst year in these parts that any one remembers. Australia is certainly having its full allowance just now—war, increased taxation, political troubles; and on top of all, the drought. I suppose we’ll worry through them all in time, but the process is slow.”

“Where were you to-day, Dad?” Norah asked.

“I’ve been through the lower paddocks; they always stand dry weather better than the Far Plain, but they’re not encouraging, for all that,” answered her father. “The cattle are holding their own, so far, but nothing more. Did you see any dead ones, Jim?”

“No—but two that were sick look weak enough to be thinking of dying. We got one poor brute bogged in the creek—not badly, thank goodness; we were able to get him out, but it took time. Some one will have to go out there every day until the boggy places are dry enough to be safe, or we’ll certainly lose some stock. Drought years,” said Jim, solemnly, “seem to mean plenty of extra work, extra expense, extra worry, and extra everything except money.”

“They do—but we’ll pull through all right,” said David Linton, cheerfully. “I know it’s disheartening to see the old place looking like a dust-heap; still, we’ve had a lot of good years, and we mustn’t grumble. And even if it does look dry, there’s plenty of feed and water yet on Billabong. Neither is the bank likely to worry me—if the worst came to the worst, and we had to shift the stock, or to buy feed, it can be managed.”

“Things might be a heap worse,” said Norah. “Why, we might be in Belgium.”

“You’re like Mrs. Wiggs, who consoled herself in her darkest hours by reflecting that she might have had a hare-lip,” said Wally, laughing, though his eyes were grave. The great war was in its very early stages, and only cable messages of its progress had yet reached Australia; but the heroism and the sufferings of Belgium and her people were ringing round the world, and from the farthest corners of the Empire men were flocking to fight under the Allies’ standard and to thrust back the German invaders. Half a dozen of the Billabong stockmen had gone; it was a sore point with the son of the house that he had not been permitted to join the Expeditionary Force with the men with whom he had so often ridden at work.

“I hear there’s no fresh news,” he said. “We met Mr. Harrison, and he said there was nothing.”

“No; I telephoned at lunch-time,” said his father. “But there’s an English mail in, and the papers should make interesting reading. We will have them to-night.”

“Well, it’s getting dusk, and I have one sick wallaby to look after, eggs to gather, and chicks to shut up,” said Norah. “Come on, Wally, and I will let you crawl in under the haystack to the old Wyandotte’s nest.”

“Your kindness, ma’am, would electrify me if I were not used to it,” said Wally, ruefully, getting his long form by degrees out of the low chair in which he was coiled. “Why you don’t put a chain on that old Wyandotte’s horny leg is more than I can imagine—I believe it’s because you like to see me worming my way under that beastly stack. Man was not made to emulate the goanna and the serpent, young Norah, and it’s time you realised the fact.”

“I don’t see how it affects you, at any rate,” said Norah, cruelly. “Boys of seventeen!” She tilted a naturally tilted nose, and patted Wally kindly on the head as she passed him. “In a few years you will probably be too fat to crawl under anything at all, and meanwhile it’s excellent exercise.”

“It’s a good thing for you that you’re a mere girl,” said the maligned one, following her. “When the meek inherit the earth I’ll come in for all Billabong, I should think, for certainly you and Jim won’t deserve it. Don’t you think so, Jimmy?”

“All the real estate your meekness is likely to bring you won’t embarrass you much,” said his chum, grinning. “One’s recollections of you at school don’t seem to include anything so meek as to be startling. In fact, now that I come to consider the matter, Dad and Norah are about the only people who ever have a chance of observing your submissive side. And not always Norah.”

“I should think not always Norah!” said that lady. “Meek, indeed!”

“As a matter of fact, there’s no one who makes me feel my own meekness so much as Brownie,” said Wally. “There’s a dignity about her that you would do well to cultivate, Norah, my child. I think it comes with weight. Still, as there seems no chance of your attaining it, how about looking after the wallaby?”

“It’s high time,” said Norah. “I told Billy to feed him whenever he thought of it, knowing that would not be more than once, and probably not at all. Coming, Jim?”

“No, thanks,” said Jim, from behind an outspread Times. “Not with the English papers in, old girl—and war flourishing.”

“You can tell us about it when we come in,” Norah said. “I’ll race you to the paddock, Wally!” The sound of their flying feet died away, leaving two silent figures on the verandah.