Читать книгу All That Swagger - Miles Franklin - Страница 7

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On another grand long day Danny set off once more for the hills. Four children and Johanna had to be transported this time. The ravines between Keebah and Burrabinga were impassable for vehicles. Doogoolook, quick at understanding and making signs, was free from the venial sins of white boys. He and Maeve shared one nag. Johanna had another and a side-saddle to herself. Kathleen Moyna had a quiet old mare and Della clung on behind her sister. Dunn had lately ridden down to find out what had become of his master, and was now in charge of a string of pack-horses.

Hannon had married the woman sent by Mr Moore, and they were left to keep Bewuck in order.

Johanna stayed two days at Keebah with Janet Urquhart, and from the amenities of this home drew fresh courage to advance beyond the surveyors, beyond the security of roads and fences.

During the descent, Danny had to go beside Johanna, while Dunn had the children. Urquhart and Doogoolook guarded the pack-horses against the fate of the Biblical swine. Dusk fell before the last lap, so Danny camped at his spring where the clearest, coldest water in Australia bubbled straight from the earth amid tree-ferns and maiden-hair. The children had their foster relatives to introduce them to wonderland. Johanna was weary and busy with the meal, while the men took off the packs and prepared the bedding.

Danny had brought the colt, named Nullah-Mundoey by the blacks, and went back to fetch him up to the company.

"He'll never go down the precipices, ye'r honour," said Dunn.

"What is there to prevent him, if I make up me moind?"

The animal, through being left behind, was heady. Danny admonished him. "On with you! You'll soon be in the valley, and then a gentleman's career among the ladies ever after, strutting about with a mug of consequence on you."

The second day was a repetition of the first and Johanna grew more depressed by the prison-like features of her retreat. Nearing dusk, the hut was reached. Johanna could have wept with weariness and despair, but Danny felt the elation of a conqueror. He could envision his domain denuded of the native standing armies, a place worthy of many sons to he.

"Come in, me brave Johanna. Here's your second home, all ready waiting for you. In another twenty years think what it will be, and us still in our prime."

"'Tis Bunratty Castle* itself," she sighed, "and ye not contint with seeing it. Surely, Danny Delacy, this is the furthest extremity of the globe, and there is no further place to drag me, but Purgatory itself."

[* Bunratty was a castle in County Clare "so strong that besiegers often had to content themselves with viewing it from a distance."]

Johanna was repelled by the grime and uncouthness of her hut. It had been a dreadful drop from Moore's to Bewuck; now she was at the end of a much longer fall from amenities, friends, music, books and every elegancy, even those attainable by green paint, and mortar of chopped horsehair and cow dung to fill cracks. The children could nearly run between the slabs of Burrabinga wails. More birds riotously guffawing, and higher precipices than at Bewuck hastened the night. Doogoolook had already exhibited a snake. The situation was too depolarizing for tears.

However, when hunger was satisfied, retreat to bed by the light of the fire in the big hearth was a relief from fatigue. All were soon asleep but Johanna, who turned over the realization that never again would she see the soft green plains of County Glare with its old homesteads nestling amid pet trees and friendly shrubs. Out on the flats, amid the tussocks and the thickets of tea-tree, the plovers were almost as plentiful as the ducks. More curlews than elsewhere—for these be solitaries—came as night deepened, and their chorale arose above that of the dingoes. Curlews were the banshee birds of Johanna's childhood, but these in the swamps of Burrabinga wailed the same melody as those in the sedges of Clare, and the homesick immigrant fell asleep comforted by a familiar voice in a strange lost land.

If ever woman earned an inheritance for her sons in Australia it was Johanna, but that night she was conscious only of the bruising of those impossible descents where it was too rough to sit on a horse, where a false step would have sent her crashing over the precipice. Now the mountain was a mighty bastion to imprison her among fearsome trees so high that they shut out the heavens—a frightening land of endless forests far from the gentle Shannon.

In the morning she found that the river had none of the mourning trees of the Murrumbidgee, and was lined with ferns more beautiful than those in the hot-houses of the gentry in Limerick. The children found the blossoming grevillea (rosmarinifolia) and adored it as ducks and drakes, and plucked the chookies of the banksia—misnamed honeysuckle. The valley was white as Ireland's May with tea-tree, and blue with mint shrub, a paradise replete with flowers for the children. Doogoolook and Maeve were conjurors as well as reliable guardians. The girl laughed with the jackasses and cawed with the crows, and reproduced the heavenly warbling of the magpies; they had wild things' eggs for toys, their young for pets.

All importation had to be on pack-horses that negotiated the worst pinches on their hocks. Everything possible was manufactured on the spot. With axe and adze Dunn quarried tables and stools from green wood as heavy as lead. Mattresses of sacking filled with grass were placed on stringy-bark on pegs sunk in the floor. The shutters were of greenhide.

"The peasants around Ennis would be surprised to see our bothy in the glen," observed Johanna.

"Moi, woman, the peasant's crib is a crumb begrudged from the overlord's spoils in an effete civilization. Our shortcomings must be endured only till the population advances."

"'Twould be rational to wait till the population had advanced."

"Och, you have no reason at you. We waited till the population was out of bounds."

Pelts of dingoes, wallaroos and beautiful possums were to be had for little effort. Those of half a dozen subsidiary species were not worth garnering. Fur rugs replaced blankets, skins cushioned the rough chairs. Johanna, tenacious in gentility, never surrendered her napery, though a special pack-horse had to import Russian sheeting. The earthen floor was carpeted by the hide of a packhorse, who had lost his life in pioneering at Delacy's Cutting. For ornaments there were emu eggs and lyre birds' tails, bullock horns and the skin of the speckled echidna, but Johanna craved china, pictures and cross-stitch mats, and vases with glass dangles like those which decorated the withdrawing room of her aunt in Limerick. And, oh, for the sideboard at Cooley Hall with its carved foxes' heads, and the stand in the hall with its ashplants and blackthorn sticks!

In time she had a garden meagrely furnished with immigrant plants. She struggled to extirpate anything native as a weed. She lacked originality to knead unfamiliar products into the dough of culture. She taught Maeve and Kathleen Moyna their letters. She instructed Maeve in her own catechism as she remembered it without the text, left at Cooley Hall, and forbidden by Danny. If she had not been excommunicated she could have found ease in describing her surroundings to her home folks, but she had no one with whom to correspond. She was starved by the spiritual emptiness of her days, but she grew reconciled in homemaking. She never had Danny's luminous satisfaction in pioneering. He was a torch of purpose; she had to step as well as she could in the rugged pathway lighted by that torch.

The blacks did not trouble them. They stopped on the far side of Numba Nanga, distant some days' ride. Danny gave them a beast or two each season. His live stock were prolific. He grew wheat, potatoes, maize, pumpkins and other vegetables.

Two winters slipped around and Johanna had a male infant in her arms. Janet Urquhart had come up from Keebah to attend her. She was a stiff, fattish woman and found the journey down the pinches almost as arduous as parturition.

With this son Johanna recovered her pluck, and Danny his desire for expansion. He had not dared to go farther than Keebah all this time, and had managed Bewuck by sending Dunn down at intervals. This was a tribute to his consideration for Johanna, as he lacked ability to delegate, a weakness which kept him from multiplying his own man power.

He was short of money to entice labour. In the Colony, farm labourers and grooms buried their avocations in the general term of rouseabout, and added the work of carpenter, builder, blacksmith, butcher or other trades according to their capabilities. Those were the years of the tussle between Wentworth, patriotic native son, and Gipps, ablest of Governors. The Governor had to support the Crown against Wentworth's claim for local control of immigration, land sales, police, education and so on, and among the cross currents, speculation in land and general mismanagement bore their usual fruits.

The nadir year of 'forty-three was reached. Banks failed, many people were bankrupted and there were more than a thousand unemployed in Sydney. No one had money to employ labour or buy land. Fine bullocks brought only ten or fifteen shillings per head. Boiling-down establishments were rendering them for 5/- each. In the bad 'forties tallow was one of the Colony's chief exports. Delacy mustered cattle in the hope of disposing of them at Goulburn, where there was a boiling-down establishment. Johanna was willing to remain alone with Maeve, while Doogoolook, as well as Dunn, helped to steady the cattle beyond the Murrumbidgee departure. He was now such a part of the pipe that he did not remove it. His family used his brow for kissing. "You won't be alone for more than four days, barring accident. Nothing could harm you here. The bushrangers are a thing of the past."

"I might he glad of their company," said Johanna, brave indeed, tossing her head.

Danny was riding a "foine lump of a colt", which required a breaker, but Danny was undaunted. The cattle were so tame after the first tiring day that he sent Doogoolook back at once. Dunn went across the Murrumbidgee, and then Danny pushed on alone to Bewuck. Hannon helped thence for a couple of days, when Danny dispensed with him also, intending to pick up the first helper available.

He could not dispose of his cattle at Goulburn, and was proceeding to Parramatta when he met a dealer who offered a decent price if Delacy would help him on the way to Bathurst. To this Danny agreed. He sold everything but the Nullah-Mundoey colt and his old pack mare, and with these steered at right angles to Major Mitchell's Murrumbidgee line on his way home after five weeks' absence.

He rode through rolling or hilly country on his strapping horse. The tall trees, the bright birds, the quaint animals filled him with wonder and delight. The spaciousness, the opportunity to pioneer was sufficient to his energy. "No man needs arms to protect himself from annything but jungle 'beasts," he was thinking, "and they don't exist in this paradise; and dayvil if anny one could expect people to be more civil than the natives."

The quiet pace of the fat cattle and the luscious kangaroo grass were as energizing to horse-flesh as boogongs to aborigines, and Lancelot Nullah-Mundoey was flash. When Danny stood in his stirrups and shouted "Arrah!" Lancelot was provoked into a tidy buck. A masterly prop landed his rider on the hard ground, stunned. Lancelot made off and devoted himself to getting rid of the slippery new saddle which had expedited Delacy's fall.

Sunstroke would have finished him on that blazing day but for the meat-eating ants. Pain partially brought him to. Subconsciously he crawled to the shade of a tree. There was no settler within leagues, but a few miles eastward, two bullock drays were snailing their way from the Port to one of the stations farther out, and were to cross Danny's track at sundown.

Mr Alwyn Evans, from Kilpoonta, two hundred miles farther along the overlanders' line, had gone down many weeks earlier to meet his bride, who had come out from England. On the previous day he had ridden forward because of rumours of hostile tribes on the Lachlan, and the fear that the home, which he had worked four years to establish in Major Mitchell's wake, might be in ashes to meet its mistress. The Rufus affray and other disgraceful incidents were only a year or two past. He had left his wife with the drays, and several assigned men, who had proved themselves trusty partners.

The dogs found Danny. The men unravelled the story from the horses' tracks. Injuries such as Delacy's were common in bravura days. With the help of her servants, Mrs Evans examined the man for wounds. His body was snowy where the sun had not touched it. The small shapely hands were work-roughened, but the delicate feet had always been booted. He was dressed in slops, the rough shirt none too clean, but in a pocket was a handkerchief of pure linen, unused. Danny was never a sniffler. The men were interested that his back was unscathed. It was evident he was a free man, and probably a gentleman. His papers had gone in Lancelot's saddle-bag.

Abrasions on the right leg had kept the ants from his eyes and ears. The flesh was eaten in spots half an inch deep and as large as a Spanish dollar. The bone was broken. Mrs Evans put her patient in her own sleeping accommodation and had a hunk prepared for herself in the second dray.

Danny remained unconscious. Mrs Evans and her men did their best, leaving cure to Nature. They swung the man on sacking fastened above the bed of the dray, and went forward through a trying week. Then they were met by Evans who said that the danger had been averted. He brought a surgeon to look at Danny, a shepherd from a lonely outpost, a clever man driven to the Colony by drink, who in the lean 'forties could find no professional opening. He had his books and instruments and was playing a useful part in that pioneering which called the flawed, the outlawed and the surplus to nobler service than falls to many of the sheltered and redundant in crowded grooves.

There were dangerous symptoms. The leg was beyond setting. The surgeon hacked it off. There were no women at this station, so Mrs Evans would not leave Danny. Evans upheld her action though he was rampant to be at Kilpoonta ere rain should detain them. The swinging stretcher was improved. They moved forward before a week had ended.

The patient's state was beyond the surgeon, who attended him on the journey. His escape from death through mortification was a miracle attributed to healthy blood. Following the amputation he began to groan and then wandered into delirium. He sometimes called on his mother and sometimes on Johanna. His accents were Irish. An advertisement describing him was prepared to await a traveller as far as the nearest post office and thence to Sydney for insertion in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Weeks from the time that Danny had been injured he reached Kilpoonta on the Lachlan. In the joy of arrival the newly-married pair did not neglect the stranger. Who was he? Whence had he come? There was not much machinery for instituting inquiry. The mystery was of lively interest in the far solitudes.

The surgeon continued to marvel that life could be retained. He would he more surprised, he said, if the man ever regained his senses as the symptoms pointed to injuries to the skull. They were unaware of Danny's wiry constitution and vitality.