Читать книгу All That Swagger - Miles Franklin - Страница 12

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Gold! Gold!

Delirium set in and prevailed. From Van Diemen's Land to Moreton Bay the population skedaddled. Free workers set off as one man. Others absconded. Sailors deserted. Ships lay empty in port. Squatters, professional men, clerks, ploughmen, shepherds, stockmen—masters and men alike—forsook employment and tamily. The wise and the silly, the strong and the weak, the old and the young, the comfortably placed and the destitute, the good and the bad, the rough and the gentle scurried in the direction of Bathurst where it was rumoured that gold, man's most permanent god, his ablest and least changeable friend, was to be picked up from the surface of the earth.

From Sydney to Bathurst the camp fires blazed in a chain by night. The road was often a river of mud through which, by day, struggled a nondescript collection of humanity, burdened with nothing or anything from a garden fork to a compass. It was then that the Australian learned to roll a swag and pad the track hungry and cold, sweating or fly-tormented in a strange and lonely land.

Gold! Gold!

Richer discoveries in the new Colony of Victoria resulted in wilder and bigger rushes there.

Tales of gold went across the seas. Ships crowded south packed with diggers. Among them were heirs and cadets of lordly houses, desperadoes from many nations, skilled diggers from California, poets, callow professors from Germany, auctioneers, cheap Johns, impostors in rich release. People ran with greater alacrity than if St Gabriel had proclaimed an authentic heaven wide open.

Gold! Gold!

Gold trickled across counters from leather pouches and tinder boxes. It was carried in belts and small bottles and dusty tins.

On the sheep stations adjoining Bewuck the merinos were abandoned to scab and footrot and dingoes. Delacy himself, could no more resist such a call to adventure than the magpies the resurgence of spring. Johanna fought against the first rushes in New South Wales with barbed shafts.

"An old married man! Ye with wan leg already gone in ye'r brave adventuring! Ye, that could have nearly been a grandfather had ye been a proper father, and not distressed me by ye'r capers."

It would have taken the Bull of Cooley to hold him from Bendigo and Ballarat. "Sure, I may as well go where there's promise. I can' be running the whole country with meself and Hannon alone. I might search the world with a small tooth comb for another chance of plucking up gold from the roots of the grass."

"Ah, scatteration! When ye've dragged ye'rself to pieces to establish the horses and cattle at Burrabinga, and a depot and a home here, why leave everything to the native dogs? Ye'r stock unbranded for those who like to stick a mark on them."

"Och, every one will be running with me. The young stock will stay with their dams. And to think, me brave Johanna, if I brought you a fortune!"

"Ye'll more like be bringing me something worse than the wooden leg. How could ye work a claim on wan leg?"

"Couldn't I lepp over manny of them that has four, when I set me moind? Sure, it's all in the moind."

Urquhart, with ten children, and whom Johanna had thought a model of common sense, announced his intention of accompanying Delacy. Johanna was defeated, but luckily Hannon and Doogoolook stood by her. There was also a mild old poodle of an English gentleman as tutor. Johanna had to resign herself to observing the neglect of the substance for the chase of the shadow, but Danny was no longer a hero. She was seasoned to his sorties. His absences were a relief.

The hour came for him to mount the mare, a good animal in her prime. Attendant upon her were two able colts packed with digging and other gear, and merchandise, including tobacco. Johanna accompanied him as far as the sliprails beyond the household premises. From there she turned back to set her will on Bewuck.

She desired education for her children. Hitherto they had had only scrappy lessons by those ill-designed to impart their knowledge. Danny was accustomed to suspend lessons if tutor and pupils could forward the farm work.

Johanna prepared to send Della, now twelve, to Sydney to a boarding school nominated by Mr Moore. He was going clown and took charge of the girl and paid her fare. Johanna held her breath about such a daring step, but if Danny was for ever to be capering about the country, leaving her no better situated than a widow, and in some ways worse, she must do something for her daughters. She was tempted to send them to a convent, but resisted because the Roman Catholic creed and the brogue would be detrimental socially, and they must acquire refinement and accomplishments to the end of securing husbands with civilized homes in Sydney. Her desire was to rescue her daughters from some of her own hardships and heartbreaks in "this blackfellow pioneering, with me life in me hand and me heart in me mouth from wan unholy terror after the other".

It was a year of floods. Every stream Delacy and Urquhart met was a banker. Several had to be swum at the risk of life. How Delacy swam the Yackandandah on the tail of the mare, and smashed his wooden leg in the passage, was one of his staple anecdotes when old, and swimming the Yackandandah was a byword with his descendants.

Urquhart lost a horse in the Campaspe. They had to camp in their wet clothes several times, and without a fire, because their tinder was wet. They were also without food for forty-eight hours, on two stretches, until they reached some lonely shepherd's hut. At one they were offered £3 per hundred to shear sheep, as all the men had deserted for the gold fields. They refused this to haste to fortune and the livelier adventures which have but lately receded from Australia's pioneering scene, and which are recorded in the yellowing newspapers and in many a romance of the time, or in those since constructed with varying accuracy. They were arduous rough experiences, sometimes dangerous, and more coarsening than romantic, in aggressively democratic, not to say familiar association with bogus lords and parsons, soothsayers, table-rappers, medical quacks, harridans and strumpets, sleight-of-hand artists of exceptional daring and great diversity, audacious swindlers, bushrangers and other criminals—a hodge-podge savingly salted with men of grit and resource, and women of unconquerable endurance and respectability.

Delacy and Urquhart were robbed of their first £100 by a third mate, while asleep. Years later they learned that he was blown to pieces in a mine in Queensland. They were stuck-up by the notorious Black Douglas and his gang, and were triumphant that it was so soon following the first robbery that they had not an ounce of gold between them. Danny had one promising alluvial claim but was too slap-dash to win the good of it, and his leg hampered him in shaft sinking.

Homes and families at length became enticing to both men. Johanna's indifference concerning Danny's absence helped to draw his thoughts to the Murrumbidgee. Urquhart postulated that with the rise in stock, they were risking the loss of certain prosperity in mere gambling. Live stock would not include so many "shicers" if one were wary of "shysters". Neither had any affinity with the lawless elements and were lucky in withdrawing before rebellion culminated in the Eureka Stockade.

One evening at afterglow the dogs heard the jingle of hobble-chains and quart-pot and gave tongue. The family ran out, saw the silhouette on the dazzling skyline and answered Danny's hail. He dismounted on a mended peg and shouted for each member of his family. "Wait till I show you what I have brought."

"I can see the owld pipe ye haven't lost this time. Has it taken root entirely? Maybe I should be thankful that it's wan leg ye still have intact."

Danny went inside, for the moment he did not miss Della. He was told that one of his colts sold on the diggings had reached home ahead of him. He produced his nuggets. Johanna accepted several as keepsakes, but maintained an aloof manner. Women were compelled to be subservient, an attitude in which Johanna had been racially bent from the days of Brehon law, but, psychologically, the Danny who had lured her over the seas was dead. She was now aware that she was wedded to an insignificant fellow, eccentric because of his abnormal honesty, and incapable of providing the refinement and elegancies she adored.

The moment came when Della's absence had to be explained. Johanna made her plunge, her pulse not so confident as her mien. Danny was astonished.

"Is at a school-mistress you are making of her? Aren't there husbands enough in a country crying out for population?"

"What kind of husbands for those who know nothing but to run after turkeys and chase crows? They'll be on the level of barefooted sluts from the bothies around Ennis, unless I contrive for them to see something different. If it was not for Cooley Hall in me own remimbrance, 'tis often I'd wonder was I annything but wan of the savages that roam in a tribe."

"You should have consulted me."

"Consult the wind, and ye away with it!" Johanna threw up her chin. "How did I know if ye'd ever return, or return with ye'r wits; and me daughters running to seed."

"Maybe you did right," temporized Danny. "Sure, I'll have the means hereafter to put things to right, and you'll be riding in your carriage before long, me brave Johanna."

Flaying gained the ascendancy, she continued, "And me beautiful son, he must be a gentleman, with learning more than lie can accumulate from a rouseabout."

"We'll consider all these things at the proper time."

Bewuck had prospered under Johanna. Wheat, also hay, hides and butter had soared to a fabulous price. There was a ready market for eggs and poultry. Even feathers were saleable. Johanna had money to send her children to school. Danny was not so great a hero by comparison. Nevertheless he had yarns of the Yackandandah, of the new Colony of Victoria, of the bustling city of Melbourne, alive with rich diggers and their ladies, of men lighting their pipes with bank notes and shoeing their horses with gold. He had sufficient currency to renew leases at Burrabinga, to buy more acres around Bewuck, and make additions to the homestead.

Johanna did not allow her advantage to slip. Robert and Honoria must also go to school in Sydney. Danny gave his consent vaguely, and as a sop because he was wild to be away with stockmen to collect cattle, now worth as much as £20 per head, and all the world was demanding horses. He was also eager to retreat to Burrabinga because of another gift he had brought from the diggings, and which he wished to keep from Johanna as long as possible: a taste for rum. This had grown during long shifts of standing to the waist in cold water until dysentery became prevalent and rum the universal panacea, as well as a disinfectant for polluted drinking water. At Burrabinga be would be able to enjoy his grog, and would no longer refuse his employee's invitations to drink with them. However, he never tippled to the deterioration of his energy and industry.

Having his consent to the education of Robert and Honoria, Johanna cheerfully bade him go. He stipulated that the other two boys should be left to him to rear to pastoral pursuits. For the present they remained with the new London misfit in the schoolhouse beside the bunyip hole.

The ridges of Delacy's territory, and for eighty or a hundred miles surrounding it, were alive with descendants of animals that had early been driven off by the blacks from the overlanders' route. In fenceless days many a beast sought a mate and founded a community in the wilds. In the withering droughts they migrated from the parched plains to the fountful hills; And from the head of the Murray to Monaro, to Bathurst and New England, they mightily increased, sometimes with the aid of well-bred runaways. During years when cattle had been unsaleable they remained on the runs until they died of old age.

Delacy erected trap yards and drafting crushes. Money flowed from effort. Urquhart, himself a straight man, deplored Danny's honesty as extreme, because he refused to confiscate the horses and cattle that drifted to Burrabinga. To Urquhart's remonstrance he would say, "Am I a horse and cattle thief? Sure, weren't min hanged in the old country for lifting a sheep, and am I to risk destroying me character? You can be a lifetime building a good character and lose it in twenty-four hours by a single act of foolishness."

His truthfulness was more than that demanded by common sense. Not another such horse-toper was known from the Murrumbidgee to the Lachlan. When vending he declared the blemishes of his stock before reciting their excellencies. This eccentricity had some reward. People in Sydney sent to him for horses. Novices in buying came to him because he could be trusted. He did not, however, grow as rich as some of his neighbours.

Wealth was not to be wrested from the land without more avarice than Delacy had. The earth has her lean seasons of droughts or plagues, or her times of surplus when demand hangs slack. There were dingoes and disease, and as live stock rose in value with the discovery of gold, bushranging and cattle- and horse-duffing became staple industries in the wilds of Monaro. Danny was a heavy loser to thieves who settled around him.

The family wanted more land at Bewuck, with the mountains as an outlet, but Danny still hoped to persuade Johanna to live at made cuttings around the worst pinches. Notwithstanding, there was money to bank, and banks of re-established reputations to engulf Johanna's hoards. She hated to surrender her currency, and Danny failed to extend her partnership to his cheque book. Women's part in the struggle was accepted as their unpaid duty—Burrabinga. He put up an abode to replace the burned hut, and by women as well as men.

The making a gentleman of Robert, as well as the polishing of Della and Honoria, was expensive, and Delacy was constantly in need of capital.

Robert was the pride of Johanna's heart, and it was her secret ambition that he might take to scholarship, and even return to Ireland and become a priest. He favoured his mother in features. He had her keen black eyes and her nose—the nose of an emperor. He needed it at college when he found himself in a class of select young gentlemen, much his junior in years, but so far in advance in their studies that they ridiculed him as a dunce and a country lout. He had neither wealth nor any connections, nor was he fashioned to pound his way. Taller than his father, he had the willowy grace that distinguishes the Delacy descendants to this day, and the floss silk black hair, the delicate Delacy hands with the filbert nails.

No word of the agonizing humiliation of his first months escaped into his home letters, because the family were so sure that he was on a superior and enviable plane of existence. Nor would he admit defeat while Della could remain at her exclusive school. He had a weapon in his tongue and found his feet as soon as his prowess with horses earned him the protection of a leading boy whose father kept riding and carriage horses. His mother's generous response to his secret requests for money provided a wardrobe which also helped him to victory.

His brothers followed a different routine. On harvest days they were hullabalooed from bed before dawn, and Harry was so drowsy that he sometimes fell asleep in the wallaby hole in the log fence on his way to bind sheaves, and would not be found until the other workers were returning to dinner at noon. Danny had no mercy on these two children. He had none on himself. He took credit that he did not ask the meanest convict to do what he would not do himself, a procedure which with time has developed a national attitude of hostility toward special rewards for any outsize talent but that of money-making. It was not the procedure to make Delacy a wealthy overlord nor to hold the respect of the servile, who are refreshed by worship of a financial superior, and who can recognize no other. Delacy's superiority was of that quality which is derided, or at best tolerated as eccentricity in a private person, and which, in those dedicated to public service, is violently opposed until it succeeds, and which is posthumously acknowledged by the effigies which make disfiguring bird-roosts in public places.

The education of William and Harry was of the sketchiest, though Danny, son of a schoolmaster, considered tutors indispensable. There was always a sprig of sere leaf of the British upper middle class in the school-house in the orchard. Generally he would be the product of Public School or University, with classic knowledge useless to himself and unwanted by boys destined for the land, but which was pleasant to Delacy in conversation, to which he clung as a mental necessity as stubbornly as his wife clung to elegancies. Some of these tutors were victims of alcohol; all had some cardinal defect due to which they had been jettisoned by their families. Most had as little facility in imparting their superfluous knowledge as they had in enforcing discipline. School hours were relegated to winter nights or wet days, when an hour or two would be set apart for lessons by the light of a slush lamp. The walls had wide cracks that let in the breeze; the boys were more concerned with the possums that came in between the wall-plate and the bark roof, than with the Wars of the Roses or Greek mythology, though Henry VIII was of masculine interest. The hours were further curtailed by slyly turning on the clock or by inveigling a nostalgic exile to read national ballads.

The boys were tired and sleepy, whether the harvest were ripe or only sprouting. Their evening meal—mostly of salt beef and potatoes—was delayed until they shot a minimum of sixteen possums each. The possums came at dusk from the pipy trees near by to feast on the luscious imported wheat so conveniently set in their habitat. The boys had to be quick or the marsupials scaled out of gunshot. In the phrase of the day the eucalypts took two men and a boy to see to the top of them.

The pelts had to be skinned and pegged out with hundreds of fine nails on logs or walls, but Johanna would not let them encroach on places adorned with the first "kag" of green paint, or its successors. Then came the tanning and sewing of skins into rugs on winter nights, by the light of big fires. Each sewer was rewarded by the price of a rug. Some of the best brought £5—a big sum when minors commonly worked for their fathers without wages.

Sometimes a tutor would do his duty during the quarter leading up to pay-day, because in grotesque surroundings there was more salt in occupation than in idleness. Thus, despite interruptions and recreations, William and Harry had a little reading, writing and "ciphering", and were literate for their day. Harry accumulated stores of poetry to furnish his isolation and nourish his spirit. Old expirees, casual labour, contributed tales that had descended from the seanachies and bards of Tara's zenith, and earlier. Some were familiar with stories of Cormac MacArt, the great king, grandson of Conn of the Hundred Battles, and son of Art the Lonely, whose reign was full of plenty and such honesty that there was no need to guard flocks or to bolt doors. Stories from Gaelic legendary found fresh voice to the song of the Murrumbidgee and disclosed a glint of the glories of the Ard-Rights of Eirinn and of the grand feis. The deeds of the Fianna and their immortal hounds, the high test of learning which they had to reach, as well as those other woodcraft tests, which young Harry could emulate, were especially inspiring. The tales lost none of their spell in the garbling, tales of Nial of the Nine Hostages; tales told originally by Oisin, son of the chief bard of Fian, and which, though accounted pagan, could charm the tired Patrick himself; tales which time could not extirpate and which in the language of would-be conquerors still spring fragrant and poetic from the soil of Ireland.

Harry, spellbound beside the roaring log fires, gave the honour anciently due to poets to their tales. Endowed with imagination, he translated dream people to his native forests. They existed for him in the voices of river, wind and rain, or stood in the shadows beyond the firelight—a company of friends that made him love the night. They were of his inner life which he hid from the profane. Oh, that he could be a seanachie and recite the deeds of noble men, and himself attain nobility!

The boys were fortunate in Maeve and Doogoolook, who educated them to their environment. Saved by Danny from superstition, they had no fear of the bunyip, and the area had no other terrors. Before he was eight Harry could swim like a binghi. A favourite sport with him and William was to dive towards the middle of the hole in the hope of routing the bunyip* on to the bank. The bunyip had a strong personality during his reign. William and Harry and another younger friend all but saw him one morning.

[* The oldest inhabitants of the district are agreed that a bunyip existed and that he was probably a large otter, shy and now extinct; or, that when the rivers remained undisturbed, except occasionally in summer by the blacks, a few seals may have worked their way all the thousands of miles inland from the Bight, to remain in exile until they died of old age.]

They had left the catch of their night lines on the table rocks of the fish hole while they sought grubs. On returning-they found only the head of a cod which had weighed about ten pounds, and something, which they described as the size of a calf, slipping into the water. Cooees brought Danny and others, and they all saw the undecipherable tracks of an animal leading from the water to the fish head and back into the water.