Читать книгу Up the Country - Miles Franklin - Страница 11

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Bert was up at daybreak to light the fires and fill the quart pots and then, while the women made their toilets at the stream, he and Philip caught and saddled the horses. For breakfast Bert produced the duck, which he had roasted overnight in earth under one of the fires, a dodge he had learned from the blacks. Very appetising the bird was too, in that early morning air that almost had a hint of frost.

Then on again: over peaks, through gullies of treeferns, maidenhair fern, musk and sassafras, round dizzy sidelings, conquering ridge on ridge of the last spur of the meridional range and attaining the more open country where Isabel and George Stanton had their home.

They were not so lucky in the weather today. After reading the sky, Bert hurried them through tucker time in twenty minutes, just long enough to case the packhorses and old Wellington, Mrs Mazere's hack, who was mud-fat and a little galled. At about four o'clock, he herded the women into the hollow trunk of an old forest giant left by an ancient fire, and stood before them to prevent their skirts from being splashed. An hour later and Bert observed, "It's turning into a steady pelter—I think we'd better push on." This was agreed to, and in his role as conductor of a ladies' party, Bert triumphed in bringing forth a couple of umbrellas which he had concealed in one of the packs.

"I've already tried old Wellington with one, just to be sure. I even took him over a fence with one, sitting sideways."

Bert's performance after the wedding, wearing a blanket to represent a habit and holding an unfurled umbrella aloft as he ran Mrs Mazere's Wellington over jumps, had been one of the most laughter-provoking pranks of the festivities.

"I got the tip from the parson, an' if he can ride with an umbrella, surely a woman can."

With skirts bunched around them, serge shoulder capes and the umbrellas for shelters, the women rode comfortably dry in the steady rain and enjoyed the novelty. The Mungee country being open with a well-defined bridle track, they progressed without delay, and the Stanton dogs loudly heralded their approach at about sundown.

The rain had given up for some time and Isabel came down to the home sliprails to meet them. The women dismounted to walk back with her while the men took the caravan on for the quarter of a mile to the house. It was the first visit of both Mrs Mazere and Charlotte to Mungee and they looked about with absorbed interest. Primaeval trees, imperial as any that ever guarded an emperor's avenue, still abounded on one side of the way, while on the other was a young orchard already in bearing and extensive flower and vegetable gardens.

George Stanton had taken up his run only four years before, but already there was a comfortable homestead. Amid the timber on the rich flats bordering two creeks there were potato and maize clearings. A three-acre wheat field had been cleared, the stumps of the lately deposed forest giants giving the appearance of tombstones. Native flowers bloomed in glorious luxuriance. Sheds and yards came into view. Plump hens and turkeys were going to roost and the heartening clamour of geese mingled with the raucous good-night laughter of the kookaburras. A stockman was driving in the milking cows in order to pen the calves for the night, and a shepherd could he seen with his hurdles on a further ridge.

The house consisted of the usual four rooms, two larger ones and two little lean-tos behind, with a passage right through and a straight verandah before. Set at a safe distance, in case of fire, was a building of similar design, with the front apartments being apportioned as kitchen and store room and the skillions as rooms for station hands. The buildings were all of slabs which were placed horizontally upon adzed wall-plates set in the earth and which ran between stout red-gum corner posts. Only the front room of the residence proper had a boarded floor, the others being of stamped earth. The roofs were of bark.

In an age of famous housewives, the Mazere women were especially renowned and the Stanton home bore witness to Isabel's skills. The verandah was enlivened with an extensive collection of pot plants, the little windows were adorned with lace curtains. Curtains and valances of dimity enlivened the home-made four-poster bed, and there were counterpanes of patchwork and crocheted antimacassars. The living room was wallpapered in one of the wild and woolly designs of the forties, though the walls of the other rooms were still covered with the Gazette or The Illustrated London News.

George Stanton was ambitious for a nice home and proud to have one of the Three Rivers girls in his, but he knew the best way to get on was to attend first to the things on which the home depended—clearing, fencing, building yards and developing good stock. This was only a temporary residence until he got time to build a better. He was reputed to have a head on him and it was predicted that he would get on.

He was a tall, quiet, thin young man, son of a settler who had preceded Mazere of Three Rivers in the district by a good ten years. His father had set him up on land that had belonged traditionally to a tribe of Aborigines. Advised by Mazere, young Stanton had dealt peaceably with the blacks, buying the land for some gaily coloured shirts, tomahawks, negro head and such commodities.

The dwindling remnants of the tribe still returned each year in summer and Isabel was generous with them. She persuaded George to give them a beast or a sheep or two for their corroborees, and she herself contributed garments to the gins, whom she sometimes employed in odd jobs about the house and garden. George found the men a great stand-by for the routine jobs of washing sheep and rounding up stray beasts, and for all the procedures of mustering and branding. The tribe was permitted to camp in their old haunt under the mighty river gums where the Mungee slept in a bottomless pool about half a mile below the homestead.

Mungee being the Aboriginal word for fish, the Mungee Creek got its name from that hole; it was thought that the fish bred there, they were so plentiful. In fact, the Mungee was really a river and a tributary of the Yarrabongo, which was a channel for countless crystal streams to reach the Murrumbidgee and thence to the Murray and the Great Australian Bight a thousand miles distant.

That night, happy faces shone in the glow of the home-made tallow candles that were held in tall brass candlesticks, polished until they were mirrors. Even chance callers lent a glow to the daily routine in the vast solitude of pioneering days, and real visitors were a carnival.

Everything was comfortable and ship-shape for the night. Bert's dogs, which had speedily come to issues with those of Mungee, were tethered in a number of kennels placed around the fowl house; a few dogs were drafted each night as sentinels against the native cats which could devastate a fowl roost of twenty or thirty birds in one attack. The bantam had been fed and let out to stretch her legs and, now in her cage again, was honoured by a lodging in the kitchen lest her larger relatives should put upon her before being properly introduced. There was plenty of accommodation for all—horses, dogs and men. Bert's packs were stacked on the verandah, and the side saddles hung over a crossbeam of the kitchen. Bert was not permitted to erect a tent; he was to sleep on the home-made sofa in the front room when the others had retired. The bride and groom were to be placed in state in the four-poster while the host and hostess retreated to one of the skillions; Mrs Mazere was to share the other with the servant girl.

The talk after the meal was all about George's doings. He had several men at work splitting timber for rails and slabs. He thought of starting his grand new weatherboard house with shingled roof in the winter.

"Fencing is the thing that is going to save us," he ventured. "I reckon if I could fence all my run and let the sheep out like the cattle, there would be no scab."

"I noticed some trees coming along that would split out two or three hundred rails easy," said Bert.

"You must point them out to me," said George.

As she listened, Mrs Mazere wished that Philip could have been on the way to owning so thriving an establishment, but she loyally stifled comparisons. It was not to be expected that her dear gentle boy could be as sharp for the main chance as one of old skinflint Stanton's brood. Anyway, with a brave girl like Charlotte to stand by him, he would soon be on his feet, and, she told herself, his father would relent presently.

The young people were easily persuaded to stay a couple of days and might have dallied longer, but for the imminence of Isabel's first travail. Philip and George had much to say, being friends from George's courting days; Isabel was come again a little girl to her mother's knee in face of the approaching event, and Bert and Charlotte, drinking in the Stanton-Mazere amenities with avidity, were inspired to a campaign of emulation.

On Monday, the young people started back over the ranges to Maneroo. The cavalcade was lessened by the absence of Mrs Mazere's hack, Wellington, and her packhorse Curlew, as well as Plover, another packhorse that Bert had sold to George; it was enlarged by fruit trees, rose slips and many plants for the orchard and garden which Charlotte was anxious to start at Pool's Creek, as well as Isabel's gifts to her. Like her mother, Isabel had taken to Charlotte, the Stanton insistence on principle and social standing in neighbours not being as rigid as that of Mazere Senior. It was George who said in the general handshaking, with no lack of cordiality, "Always be a shakedown here for you, Bert, any time you come this way."