Читать книгу All That Swagger - Miles Franklin - Страница 5

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Guarding the illusive land were throngs of giants—the stateliest trees on the globe. Delacy was like an ant in the aisles of box trees and towering river gums, but he attacked them as an army, grunting with effort, sweat dripping from him. His slight form grew as wiry as steel; his hands were corneous and scarred with the work of felling and grubbing.

"Mother of God!" little Johanna cried, as she saw the columns toppling. She was sick with terror lest her world of Danny and the child and the animals should be crushed there by the lorn river, with none to come to the rescue. It resembled the destruction of a universe, as in fact it was. A world of unexcelled, unrealized wealth had to go up in smoke that a small patch might be cleared to grow bread, and a hut have safety. Felled, the timber encumbered more ground than standing, until, with the help of men supplied through Mr Moore, Danny rolled the smaller logs into fences, and burned the remainder. He was out before daylight. He could scarcely desist for meals. Johanna brought him food and drink at intervals. The burning-off kept him until midnight, his pillars of fire licking the starry heavens low above his gorges.

In the evening Johanna would put her child to sleep, and help by gathering up the sticks. This work relieved her loneliness, intensified by the moaning of the river oaks, and the noise of the queer grey birds that threw laughter back and forth for miles, until dark and after. Their lusty guffawing, upon the smallest provocation or upon none, had a brow-heating effect, and she was mortally afraid that the bunyip would rear his undescribed form from the fish hole, or that the ghosts would cry in the crossing. These fears festered; she dared not confess them to Danny. He had none of the cruelty of the cowardly, but he had an inability to estimate the torments of the timid, which is sometimes a part of fearlessness. He had the heritage of his Irish temperament, which had enabled his exiled compatriots to turn desperate plights to brilliant victories, though Danny himself was free from swashbuckling taint. He despised belligerence. He disregarded firearms. His warrior prowess was thus freed to assault the continent of Australia, and he did not grizzle because he was unarmed and single-handed.

Though not at Bewuck until November, he was ready for the autumn ploughing. One of Moore's men, named Hannon, and trusted by both Delacys, was left to guard the new home. Danny borrowed the stockman's daughter, aged eight, from Quebarra for company for Johanna. The arms were also left with her—a broken cutlass and a flint-lock musket. Should the fire die out, a greasy rag, ignited by firing it from the gun, could be applied to punk. Danny with his sledge and the second man set out to forage for seed and provisions at Bandalong, thirty miles distant. Drays were scarce in the district of some fifty square miles, but two belonged to Danny's protector.

Danny's courage was as inexhaustible as his energy. Johanna therefore merited extra consideration, as her fortitude was cold and stricken. Her unborn child depressed her and made her a prisoner in the gorges with the river's banshee trees and bunyip hole. Endurance horn of necessity kept her from breaking down during those breaking-in days. Danny scarcely realized her heroism in remaining there. She did not realize it herself. Danny did not recognize himself as heroic, and had no wish to spare from the combat to worship other heroes. Martyrs he would have overlooked as hypochondriacs or malingerers.

"Now, you're all set, Johanna, Mavourneen," he observed, when ready to depart. "Hannon will look after you like a father, and what could hurt you here at all, annyway? The bushrangers have died out, and would nor come for so little. If they do, let them have it. It's the fighting and defence that makes all the trouble."

"But it's a queer man who does not defind himself."

"The trouble with defence is that the few it saves are nothing to the danger it brings upon innocent people by provocation. And now tell me, you'll be all right, me brave Johanna, who has come over the seas with me."

"Would there be anny good in telling ye annything else? Get on with ye, and waste no time in returning."

"You may be a little lonesome now, but this is to be a greater place than Cooley Hall, with a finer town than old Ennis on top of us."

"Ye'll be too old to enjoy that whin it comes."

"Och! You must look to the future. 'Tis only the beasts and nullities have no foresight."

Johanna suffered keenly during his absence. Hannon slept at a distance from the house. When the jackasses ceased, the dark fitted over the tree-tops like a night-cap, and the boobooks hooted, or the native dogs howled, or the little booraby bears wailed like tortured children. It was the dark of the moon, and the river more than girth deep, so Johanna was sure it was a ghost that screamed there. She went to bed at dusk, gathering Florry—the visitor—and her own child with her, and shuddering at every sound. Sometimes she wept, but empires are not wrought, nor won, without the tears of the weak, aye, and of the strong. "Tears wash the eye", as the young Delacys later wrote in their copy-books; and Johanna had fine, flashing eyes, independent of spectacles, to the end.

When the sunlight left the gorge she would climb with the children and an old dog up the track where the sun still shone across the plateau, and there watch for Danny's return.

"He can't be here yet, Misthress," Hannon would say.

"'Tis an excursion away from the dungeons of me castle," Johanna would reply.

At length a party approached among the more open timber. Mr Moore had lent Danny a dray and four bullocks. There was the horse slide and a third horse farther away. Danny hurried forward.

"Sure, Mr Moore is a white man if ever there was wan. I've got a power of potatoes and pumpkins and all manner of seed wheat and barley, and suckers from fruit trees, and flowers for a garden in me spare time, me brave Johanna."

Spare time among settlers was a rare elegancy.

"And Johanna, will you believe me, they have a township laid out by Moore's. There's to be a store and a lock-up; and churches and schools and a post office will come. Sure, the teamsters congregate there from three directions, and there's a power of traffic already. People are buying blocks for farms."

The stir of Danny's returns compensated for his absences. His booty was sometimes inutile but always entertaining. This time he had beads—as for the Island trade—but there were also two Dutch toys for the children, a roll of dowlas, twine and sail needles, raisins, writing paper, powder for ink, and a keg of tobacco. Sperm candles were a contribution to Johanna's elegancies.

"I'd rather a roll of flannel for your underclothes than so much dowlas."

"Sure, I'll be warm working in dowlas. I have wan kag of chisel-pointed lath nails and another of green paint. The paint is sour own. A place can be made a palace with a dab of paint and a lick of plaster."

The recital progressed before the horny log fire while Johanna and Florry prepared the meal.

"But now, Johanna, can you guess what more I've got?"

"A newspaper!"

"Och, I have a dozen of them!"

"A letter from Ennis?"

"Not this time, but 'twill come."

"Mr Moore has lent ye some hooks."

"I have wan, but there will be no time to read, so I resisted more."

"Did ye bring me anny burrds, Danny-boy?"

"Och!" It was a shout of triumph. "As fine a pair of turkeys as ever you saw, and thim 16/- the pair in Sydney this mortal minute; and a little cock and two hins."

"I'll go see they are not smothered," exclaimed Johanna. "Leave them be. You haven't guessed what more it is I've brought."

"I'd like it to be a cask for a tub."

"I've wan big enough for a bath, and a little wan to make pails beside it; but what more have I?"

"Ye'r so full of wonders, Danny-boy, that ye might have the Brown Bull of Cooley himself hid along the track."

Danny loosed a shout of triumph. "You've almost said it. I have the next thing to the Bull of Cooley or the Shan Van Voght captured. I've got a fine lump of a colt—the brown entire."

Johanna strove to be impressed, though the poultry were more to her understanding than a crippled horse.

The colt had been the hope of Mr Moore's stud. Eyes of men, dulled by the "System", had brightened at sight of the animal who combined all the virtues and graces. Then, about a year since, the groom had been galloping him in sight of the household, when he put his foot in a hole, and crack!—with a sound like a pistol, the off fore fetlock was clean snapped. The jockey was killed, and put a gloomy seal on the fate of the Singer, son of Skeleton.

"'Tis a pity not to give him a chance of his life," said Danny, who loved a good horse for his beauty and usefulness, though he had as great a contempt for horse-racing and all that went with it, as he had for army swagger.

His idea of a stringy-bark stocking for the fetlock was carried out by a surgeon guest. Danny slung the animal and tended him constantly for weeks. That was his way, with no purpose other than absorption in the enterprise for its own sake. The horse had grown dangerous after Danny's departure, but was so calm when handled by his old friend again that Moore said: "You've earned that horse, Delacy."

Thus Johanna saw the animal in the twilight. He was in poor condition and unkempt after his journey on three legs, but his eyes were wide and wise, and he had the stance of an emperor. "Is he really such a grand beast and all?"

Doubt impelled speech from Dunn, the dour man holding the halter.

"Sure, ye'r honour, there's not his aquil in the Colony this day, beggin' ye'r pardon for spakin'. He's own son of Skeleton and by a mare of the purest blood herself. And Skeleton himself was owned by the Marquis of Sligo himself at first; and he sowld him to none but a prince, him wid the name of Ester Hazy. It sounds loike a faymale and all, but 'tis a man, as Oi've been towld by thim that's seen him at the great race meetings.

"Sure, he was the bist horse of the year whin Lord Sligo purchased him, and the bist horse of the year in owld Oireland is the bist horse in the world, beggin' ye'r honour's pardon, for mintioning it to wan from the owld place herself. By the Calendars can be seen Skeleton's manny successful performances. He was considered in ivery way superior to Arrogance, who won the King's Plate at Doncaster in as short a toime as iver before or since. But Skeleton was superior. And Master Robert was decidedly the best of his year before him. Master Robert was the dad of Skeleton and was got by Buffer. His dam was Spinster by Shuttle, and his great-dam by Sir Robert, great-granddam by Bordeaux, great-great-granddam was Sperenza, own sister of Saltrom, by Eclipse."

Johanna retired. Refinement decreed that ladies should feign ignorance of the presence and purpose of stud animals.

This information had been read to Dunn from the newspapers by a lettered fellow-lag, and Dunn had committed it to memory as a poem. "Sure," he added, "Skeleton as a two-year-old ran at the Curragh of Kildare and came second to horses he afterwards beat to smithereens."

"By damn!" said Delacy. "We're in the presence of royalty. Me fortune's made entirely. What is more, Dunn, I go by the dam. This fellow's dam was a thoroughbred, and a perfect lady to boot. The nullities think anny old dam will do. Observation shows that the mother is equally impoortant—more so, to judge by human beings."

There were now free immigrants arriving under the new policy of assistance with funds derived from the sale of Crown Lands, but the towns and the big men had the pick of these, and Delacy, short of capital, was dependent upon ex-ticket-of-leavers, who sometimes imposed upon him because of their grey hairs. His personal industry continued unabated. He robbed from the nights by working in the light of log fires in the barn, called the kitchen, and used as the men's hut. There took place the grinding of wheat in the hand mill, the making of halters, hobbles and ropes of greenhide, and the construction of big saddle-bags employed for transport over an ordinary saddle. The useful pack-saddle had not then come into use.

Hannon and Danny ploughed with two steady bullocks lent by Mr Moore, and a pair of milkers' calves. It was part of the day's work to pursue the bolting team around the paddock, Hannon trying to "whoa" them while Danny clung to the precious borrowed plough. Palings were split for Johanna's garden. Land was set aside for fruit trees and vegetables. The jackasses followed plough or spade for the fat blue-and-ivory grannie grubs that popped from the gleaming furrows. Danny found them entertaining companions and mingled his laughter with theirs. The brown colt became a member of the family and helped to shape its fortunes—all in the trend of the times.

Johanna had been startled on the morning after his arrival when she saw her husband sitting on the ground with the entire's foot in his arms as he refitted the splint.

"The Saints preserve us! He could batter ye to pieces."

"Arrah, he's as gentle as a lamb. You've only to treat him like a Christian."

Dunn bad the congenial task of groom, and many a feed of sprouting barley was filched for the horse.

Mrs Wade left Florry at Bewuck to help Johanna, and later came herself. Mrs Fullwood was cut off by the river's winter level. The infant settler was one of few arrivals during the cold months. The Delacys were remote from roads. A man or two came, having heard of the colt, and there was a messenger from one of the big stations towards The Plains to borrow salt and a bag of flour.

There were floods of marsupial visitors, some of whose species have since been extirpated. One of the men had to be on duty all night to save the crops. Gentle furry things fell into simple traps or to Rover and his colleagues. Their flesh fed the poultry and pigs, and scores of their skins were pegged out to dry. Pelts of kangaroos and wallaroos were marketable. Kangaroos were also eaten. Cattle were too precious to be made into beef at the beginning.

Spring came and ripened towards summer and Christmas. The waters of the Murrumbidgee subsided, and Delacy's tenancy was contested by the Fullwoods and Butlers. One morning Heulong cattle supplanted the Bewuck herd right to the fence of the cow paddock, and not far away were Butler cattle from Glenties. The little, man was to be squeezed out by the bigger squatters on either side.

Danny summoned his dogs and rode to contest this. In charge of the Heulong stock was a man named O'Neill, on a good horse. He had his instructions, and rode belligerently at Danny, pulling a pistol from his holster. Fullwood and Butler were cronies of the Commissioner, Danny was a penniless immigrant wedging his way on to the river.

The pistol was so enraging to him that he rode straight at it, ordering O'Neill to drop it, "before I skelp the eyes out of your head, you scoundrel, doing the dirty work of some cowardly crawler, who's bought you for a plug of tobacco and a taggeen of rum."

O'Neill shouted. "Take back ye'r durrty words, ye little shrivelled bastard Prodestant heretic! Get off of ye'r horse and meet me man to man."

"Impty the charge from your pistol and I will," said Danny, "Though it's thim that's above you I should be meeting."

O'Neill, surprised, obediently discharged his pistol and replaced it in the holster. He had been a bruiser and smiled to think how he would dispose of Delacy and get the reward from Butler and Fullwood. The men dismounted, tied up their horses and took off their coats. Butler's man, who had been in the offing to report, now rode up. Butler himself halted at a distance behind the trees, and there were Danny's two assigned men from Mr Moore.

None of the Delacys had the physique of boxers. They were as slight as reeds, with delicate hands. Danny's only chance was to rush his opponent. O'Neill waited for him, parried him easily, and with one blow brought the blood from Danny's nose; a second closed one of his eyes, a third, on the point of the jaw, laid him out. It was over in a minute. Butler came from ambush with contemptuous mien. Danny's men gloated to see one of their own fraternity as capable as O'Neill. They despised Danny, insignificant and unable to shake a fist in self-defence.

"Pour a drop of water on him and take him home to his wife," ordered Butler, and rode away with his man. The victor mounted his horse and drove the Heulong cattle towards Bewuck homestead. Danny lay winded for some time, then he sat up, went to the river, and soused his head in the clear cold water. His men hung about currishly, without contesting the encroachments of O'Neill. Charles Fullwood, who had watched from across the river, rode out of sight well satisfied.

O'Neill had not punished Delacy too heavily. But for the closed eye and a slight dizziness he was quickly himself. He made no remark to his men, but mounted his horse, and with his long heavy stockwhip in hand, rode towards O'Neill.

"You've beaten me at that noble art," he said mildly. "I met you because otherwise I would have been open to the insinuation of cowardice, but I fear no man in heaven or hell, and I'm no man's servant but me own. Me brave gladiator with the pistol and fists, acting for another, who's too craven to represent himself, now it's for the second round. The first was to your pattern, the second is to me own. Your horse is better than mine, and you have a whip the same, and I hereby give notice that I'll skelp you off me premises. Arrah! Begin!"

O'Neill took up the duel. Delacy was on him with a yell, getting the first stroke at the horse's flank and sending him rearing and plunging. O'Neill had as little chance when agility was demanded as Delacy when it was weight. The little man got in two cuts for the big man's one. O'Neill's shoulders had not so stung since he had been on the triangle. As Delacy gained the ascendancy, he ordered his men to round-up the trespassing cattle, and with dogs barking and biting, they were driven into the river, to the consternation of Butler and Fullwood.

Danny had earned the men's respect. He gave instructions as to where the cattle were to be pastured, and rode home.

He explained his eye to Johanna as the result of fly bite, then prevalent, took a meal and rode away to Mr Moore, who used his influence with the Commissioner for Crown Lands. Delacy was allowed to add to his holding land to which those already settled wanted the right without payment. Seeing that he had a protector, Butler and Fullwood desisted from open hostilities. They feared they had gone too far in setting a lag to attack a freeman.

The tale spread from the Heulong and Glenties men to the stockmen of Quebarra, and returned to Johanna from Florry's mother. Mrs Fullwood was perhaps the only one who did not know of the encounter and she did not withdraw her neighbourliness from Johanna. Gossip was that Fullwood discarded O'Neill for exceeding his duty in carrying the issue to a physical fight.

"Time will test the whole pack of them—which are min and which are crawlers!" grunted Danny.

The next stir was the approach of blacks. A man from Glenties reported to Quebarra that Bewuck was their objective. The fish hole was their feasting and camping ground. Two tame aborigines came to herald the tribe and to inform Danny that he was on their territory.

"God help us! What's to become of me and the children," exclaimed Johanna, terrified.

"Sure, we have taken their ground," said Danny. "But these have never hurt a hair of the settlers front here to The Plains. I'll go meet them like a Christian and see what can be done."

One of the Moore bullocks had developed lumpy-jaw and had been left to Danny for disposal, so he rode to meet the dispossessed with the oppressed servitor as a peace offering. One of the envoys was with him, and introduced him and explained the bullock. It was accepted as a princely gift. The unarmed Danny was received as a brother, and guffawed in concert with the men. When he got on his horse, one of the envoys brought a girl piccaninny and signified that she was to be taken on the pommel. Danny was elated, but Johanna received the child with mingled feelings.

"They'll be after ye with spears, taking ye for art abductor." Her elder child, now three, was terrified of the girl's dark skin and asked would she eat the baby. The Australian was not alarmed but full of curiosity about the white babies and their clothes.

"Dayvil if ever I met pleasanter people, smiling from ear to ear, they were so pleased with Bally. It wrung me heart, the poor old fellow walking along with me so friendly and intelligent, but he is only a beast after all. The child reminds me of a wild turkey, but as you see, not wan bit uneasy."

"Murra me, that ever I was born and came roaming to the wilds! They've given the child to ye for fosterage, and that's why she is so easy."

"Be the powers! That would be an honour to you, me brave Johanna."

She saw the adventure. "If it wouldn't bring hordes of murdering savages upon us. In anny case I must put a shimmy on her, not to let her be a shame before me and a bedivilmint to the min."

Late that night shadows stole between Johanna and the moon on her tiny window. Danny sprang forth and called on the prowlers to halt. They were petrified by his booming tones. He lit a candle and invited the visitors to investigate the fate of the piccaninny. They were impressed to see her already in white man's garb in a bed beside the cot of the toddler, from whom she refused to part.

"That one sit down longa white pfella—all same as white pfella," they said. The child's account must have been satisfactory for she was left where she was—adopted. Only Danny tasted the roasted boogongs brought as a present, which, he recorded, reminded him of dried plums.

Her people camped at the bunyip hole, on the other side of the river, which gave some safety from the mangy curs. Otherwise, as Danny pointed out, they were far less destructive than a company of whites would have been. "And me having taken the heart of their ground! Sure, they're the most generous and forgiving Christians," he exclaimed. "They make a contrast to old Butler and Fullwood, trying to batter me up."

Peace was aided by abundance of cod and bream. One or two cod weighed more than a hundred pounds each. Danny strutted among the bucks with the enjoyment of a boy, and they taught him how to use for fish-bait the big casuarina grubs without puncturing them, lest they leak away in a milky fluid. One of the men had been with Major Mitchell, and came to the home. He was interested in the colt's wooden stocking and called him nullah-mundoey—wooden leg or boot. Johanna was amused by the half-tamed gins, and set them to wash for her in return for a garment or two.

At the end of a fortnight they moved farther south to the mountains that beckoned Danny as the Lorelei, and where there remained undisturbed by whites a hundred or more square miles teeming with fish, waterfowl, turkeys, marsupials, emus, snakes, lizards, boogongs and other food. In the retreats near Numba Nanga the aborigines held their ceremonies safe from intrusion.

The little girl made no attempt to leave with them. "'Tis romantic, Johanna. She is left with us like an ancient chief's daughter to rear up in civilization."

They were not clever enough to extract her name. As a gesture to Johanna, Danny christened her Maeve, after the chieftainess who had had such an inordinate desire to possess the Brown Bull of Cooley. The child was lovable and willing, and Johanna's first native-born servant, though in Danny's commonwealth she ranked as a daughter of the house.

Delacy, as the Colony at large, was completely the grazier and little the farmer. He could never ascend from his gorges to the higher land of Quebarra or Glenties without exalted emotion. He would gaze towards the Australian Alps and collaterals, extending for eighty or a hundred miles around the translucent horizon, and feel as a poet drinking from the fountain of inspiration. There lay a land to be wrought to his heart's desire. With this attitude of the visionary was interwoven the need for energetic action. It the rare moments when he sat with Johanna before retiring he talked of going up the Murrumbidgee with his surplus stock and settling in a valley that the blacks called Burrabinga.

"Utterly inaccessible," Johanna would say with failing heart.

"Wasn't Australia inaccessible till Cook found it, and America out of bounds till the Puritan Fathers settled it? No place inaccessible if you have the moind to go there."

What Johanna really felt was that the mountains were all too accessible to Danny.

"Sure, we must look ahead. 'Tis only the beasts and nullities have no foresight. I'll need territory for me sons."

"And thim not born yet! Counting chickens before they are hatched."

"You'll have more luck with time," said Danny cheerfully. "I'll be too late again if I don't look cut. There's Urquhart at Keebah these five years, and him building a fine house by Government min, near as good as Moore's."

Danny had already been in the coveted territory in pursuit of bushrangers that had stuck up Moore's stables. He had also helped a late explorer to follow the Hume-Hovell line to the Murray; when, according to Johanna, he had better have been minding his own business. But what is the business of an adventurous dreamer but to penetrate the forest and traverse the untrodden plain and establish outposts.

"It would be snore sinse to wait till there is more population," Johanna would say.

She could not understand his urge to go first, his exaltation in reaching beyond roads and fences. "Someone must first make the road, me brave Johanna," he would chant. "Have you never considered that every road was no road wanst? 'Tis amazing to consider the min away back in the immensity of time who went first—even in old Ireland."

"But there's no call for ye—a man with childre—to be that wan. There's reason in all things, and there's little in rushing ahead to the backward places to be lost and to starve."

After the second harvest there was no restraining him. He had his holding ring-harked and fenced in paddocks near to the house, and a relatively large portion under cultivation. He had a house and garden and a sprouting orchard; he was overstocked, and Heulong and Glenties harried him whenever possible without coming into the open.

Hannon, blacksmith by trade, carpenter by natural gift, was a treasure. That he should ever have been a lag was, Danny said, a reflection on the "System". Danny had no hesitation in leaving him in charge of the place and of Johanna. Johanna had confidence in Hannon, but she hated to be left at Bewuck. Maeve, fat and sonsy, was merry company and helpful. Wade, with a wife and children, was still at Quebarra, only nine miles distant, so Delacy felt that the country was thickly populated. He would not be commendable to common sense, the crown of which was profit if he confessed that there was a compulsion on hint to push farther out, to do, to be, to put something into life and country, without envy of those who might pillage fortunes in his tracks. And without such as Delacy whence would conic wealth for harvesting by the sane self-seekers? Why should not he himself seek gain? But it is in a man's stars whether he is a giver or a getter, and the two are separate as marble and mud.

Johanna became resigned as the enterprise took shape. Danny's eyes had the light that had shone in them seven years before, when he talked of emigrating.