Читать книгу Up the Country - Miles Franklin - Страница 12

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Her first grandchild, a boy, was four weeks old before he, Mrs Mazere and the new parents left Mungee so as to be back in time for Christmas at Three Rivers.

"Well, Mamma, I'm very glad to see you back," said her husband with unforced geniality on her arrival. "If you had stayed away a week longer, I should have been advertising for another old woman to keep me company."

If she had stayed much longer, he would have gone after her. As it was, he had managed to remain on his dignity by the magisterial visitation to Gundagai and a stay at the new run at Nanda, where he was staking out his second son Richard. He was expansive to his son-in-law about the new grandson and all Mungee doings, but the subject of the Maneroo wedding was taboo. He reiterated his attitude towards the whole affair as he tied on his night cap and waited for his wife to extinguish the candle.

"I believe Philip has insisted upon cutting himself off by marrying the Pool hussy. Well, he can see how he likes getting on without me."

"Industrious young people with colonial experience like Philip and Charlotte need have no fears about getting on."

"So that is your argument! On that score it would be a good thing to marry our girls to any rowdy as long as he has colonial experience—and not to think of family at all!"

"'Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity,'" quoted Mrs Mazere, and blanketed further conversation on the plea of fatigue. Sleep soon came to her, but her husband lay wide awake and restless.

Though he was highly emotional in temperament, Mazere was veritably soft-hearted at the core. But his temper was so undisciplined that it befooled him. Indeed, it was owing to his high temper that he had found himself in the colonies. A chip off his father's block, it seemed that father and son were unable to co-exist harmoniously under the same roof. This, coupled with a spirit of adventure in the younger man, at length resulted in his being cut adrift from the parental home and flinging off to the colonies, when the century was still young.

Opportunity awaited a young man of his education, who had been brought up among the landed gentry of the south of England. His first post in the colony was official and, as part of his duties, he was required to see that the convicts to be flogged received the prescribed number of lashes, and of the requisite severity.

The ferocity of fellow creature to fellow creature sickened and horrified the young man. After the first ordeal, he was violently sick at the stomach. Following the third, he flung himself moaning on his bed, completely unnerved. Never, never, he vowed, would he witness such barbarity again. For over a week, he suffered headaches and a cough and some fever. It was, in short, funk, and he threw up his post and decided to take up land.

To sum up, he had not that cold, ruthless brutality which is the basic ingredient—when stripped of its glamour—of the courage that involves the sacrifice of others; that courage which results in deeds of daring that crown their initiators as heroes about which sagas are handed down through the generations. He lacked the essential "nerve".

It was entirely beyond him to look on in cold blood while a fellow human was suffering the torment and pain of fifty or a hundred lashes. The wealth of the Indies, the pangs of starvation—neither could have bribed nor driven him to again witness the duty of the depraved monsters who wielded the rawhide thongs with pride in the fiendish artistry of their work. Had some cruel stroke of fate sentenced Mazere himself to the lash, he could never have bared his back and walked to the triangle with the spartan fortitude of some of those early unfortunates who, while taking up their positions, would call upon the floggers to do their worst; or those, their blood spattering the surroundings at each cut, their backs raw from nape to loin, who could turn with a grin upon their torturers and say, "If that's all you...can do—"; or those who, after receiving fifty lashes, jibed at the officers till they were ordered back for a second dose. Then out into the chain gang again, into the heat and dust with their swollen, gangrened, flyblown backs to be bent again in the construction of the great roads—northern, western, and southern—that were to be the main arteries of the new nation and that have remained forever as monuments to the men who made them.

The automobiles purr softly along those roads today, up by old Emu Plains, where nary the shadow of an emu has fallen for many a long day; over the Blue Mountains to Bathurst; by Homebush, Moss Vale, Bowral and the high, clean, windswept Southern Tableland: by Goulburn and Yass; Cootamundra and Gundagai; Wagga Wagga and Albury; on, on to beautiful Melbourne. Do the shades of those manacled labourers ever come back to see the automobiles roll along the highways that they built—in such agony and humiliation that some preferred and connived at the death penalty in preference to life in such hopeless and brutalising misery? Do they know that hearts swell and tears fall in remembrance of them a century later? Have they forgiven as fully as they expiated? And those who had authority over them, from a generation lacking gentler understanding of men's deviation from ordered paths—have they repented and been scourged and purified?

Thus young Mazere fled from officialdom, taking up land near Parramatta, and presently was captivated by the elfin figure of Rachel Freeborn. As soon as she was ready—when she was just seventeen—they were married and began a family. The first years went by and eventually Mazere was lured by stories of the deep, rich soil further up the country and the money to be made growing wool. When, by thrift and industry, they had acquired implements and the nucleus of flocks and herds, young Mazere and his friend and neighbour, Brennan, went on a tour of exploration. They nearly settled at Berrima, thought about Yass, and flirted with Goulburn and Bungendore, but something a little better just over the next blue spur of the ranges always beckoned them. They finally halted at Bool Bool, beautiful as paradise. Here the young men staked out their claims, applied for licences and were warmly welcomed by the families who had preceded them.

The two young men travelled their livestock up and lived in a humpy for the first summer. During the slacker winter months each assisted the other to erect dwellings of slabs and stringybark, with greenhide hinged shutters as windows, in readiness for their families' arrival. Mazere, being the better farmer, stayed up country with the houses and livestock while Brennan returned to Parramatta, took charge of the families and, with the aid of a couple of bullock drivers, began the pilgrimage. Their goods were piled on two-wheeled, springless, bullock drays to which the faithful Snaileys, Blossoms, Strawberries and Ballies of that decade were yoked—and it was trudge, trudge, bump, bump, day after day. It took three months to make the journey which motor cars do today between one dawning and the next.

When it rained they hove-to under the drays, and were well protected by splendid new tarpaulins supplemented by stringybark lean-tos; when a stream was high they camped on its bank till it was navigable. They had roast duck and kangaroo tail soup for dinner—sometimes—and they had damper for breakfast and dinner, always; they heard the little koalas cry in the trees at night like lost babies, and at dawn the kookaburras waked them with wild, abandoned laughter.

Little Rachel Mazere cut her first tooth at Mutta Mutta crossing. Young Tim Brennan broke his collar bone at Bowral, and no one could do anything with him but Mrs Mazere. While they were waiting for the flooded Wollondilly River to go down, Tim's third sister, Bridgit, was born—for that's how it was, you know, for pioneer women up the country not so very long ago. It was there, on the banks of the river, that Mrs Mazere had her first unaided experience of midwifery, an art in which she was to become skilled.

Philip Mazere was happy up the country, out of reach of brutal officialdom and its demoralising effects. He was the right man in the right place and transplanted something of the imprint of the old country squire to his new estate. He introduced garden flowers to the district, as well as vegetables, fruit trees, vines, tobacco planting, grains, blood cattle, horse teams, steel ploughs, billiards, family prayers, daguerrotypes—the list grows too long. He was a progressive, peaceable, industrious and capable settler. He could ride well enough and shoot sufficiently for his needs, though he could never bring himself to slaughter the larger beasts.