Читать книгу Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang - Miles Franklin - Страница 10

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Peter eluded him all next day. Labosseer took Spires with him out on the runs, and towards dark Peter sat on the step at the door of the men's hut and read an ancient Bulletin till some time after the Cook's bell had croaked. He then gobbled his meal and with a lantern continued to read.

"Cripes!" said Beardy, who had grown grey in the service of Sylvester Labosseer, and knew the history of every man who had come to Gyang Gyang for the last thirty years. "Ain't Peter Poole just dead scared of a skirt! He's like a dawg that's been cot in a trap. I often wonder what wuz the trap that frightened the guts outer Peter."

"Aw, there's nothing to be afraid of in women," said Bill Jamieson grandly. "I reckon if you treat 'em offhand they fall for you, an' there ain't enough stuff in their skirts to hide wot they are these times. Wot's Black Peter actin' like a stung goanna for now?"

Labosseer was thinking much the same. Peter had been with him off and on ever since he left school. Labosseer had a high opinion of his capabilities and principles; but Peter had left him for periods amounting in all to several years, and Labosseer felt that during these absences something must have befallen the young man to account for his kinks. Labosseer nevertheless had such affection for him and found him so useful that he always secured him when available. Peter should by now normally have been married or on the way to marriage, and according to Labosseer's estimation of him, coupled with his willingness to advance him, have been in a managerial billet; but Peter sat back in the traces, and though women's glances followed him with approval, he wore a beard and fled from them with an occasional curse, which Labosseer neither upheld nor understood, it not having consonance with his own experience.

He was pondering if Peter's present "stung goanna" attitude did not have something to do with the arrival of Bernice or Spires. Had Peter a streak of jealousy amounting to madness? He had discussed it with Oliver Burberry as they rode out on the second morning after Spires's arrival to inspect the latter's paddocks on Whiskey Plain.

It was pleasant for Labosseer to have that season a colleague of his own generation with whom to compare notes. Burberry's life and outlook approximated that of Labosseer, only Burberry had been lured by the jazz and tinsel of the city to retire in his prime to those kill-time and companionship delights which are irresistible to bushmen as a contrast with the dull monotony and isolation of long days on the sheep-runs.

A few months of days in the surf or at the zoo, the moving pictures or the theatre, and Burberry's soul wilted like frost-bitten pumpkin-vines under the realization that he was of no importance in Sydney and had nothing to do.

"Good lord! I was like a cockatoo in a cage," he explained to Labosseer. "There isn't a blasted thing to do in those beastly suburbs. Nothing but that infernal idleness that rots a man, and among a crowd of bally imbeciles who don't know a gummy ewe from a two-tooth wether hogget, or a heifer from a cow, or a store beast from a fat, when they see it."

"I always think it must be pretty dull."

"Dull is no name for it. It is hell and damnation. It's no use, a man who is used to handling sheep all his life, the gambling with them and the pleasure of seeing them all white and clean from the shears—even the worry about drought or floods and flies and strikes—he can't do without it, that's all, or if he tries to, he won't live long, I reckon. That's what gave me indigestion, I'm sure. A man can't live in the suburbs I reckon unless he's been reared to it and is flabby from the start. If he falls into a flabby way of lying about after he's been as hard as nails, he's a goner."

To resist premature senility and to obey his physician Burberry had to return to the land.

"I'll put you in the way of securing a lease and a flock, and put you through your paces so that next year you'll be qualified for a job of rouseabout," Labosseer had said to him.

"Do you mean it?" Burberry had shouted at Labosseer; and there he was at Gyang Gyang the summer of Bernice's advent, handling sheep like any station-hand, only with a zest that brought him from his bed at 5 a.m. singing like a trombone, and took him through a twelve-hour day more like a boy than the colts, sustained with satisfaction to have escaped the purgatory of being idle and of no importance.

"What Peter needs is a good love affair," Burberry responded to Labosseer on that subject. "He's beginning to turn in on himself and go sour."

"I've often wondered if that wasn't it, myself. But he seems to have taken a dead set against women."

"Lots of young fellows think they have till some girl wings them. Peter might come a crasher any day now."

"I don't think he'll crash over poor little Mona Drew, though it's pitiful to see her look at him, like a kiddy at a bottle of lollipops."

"No, but we've got your goddaughter now. Some fun is sure to happen. Might be good for her, too, and it will make a break for us all looking on. A place needs a woman about it."

"I wish something like that might happen. There's no young man I know that I'd sooner go tiger-hunting with than Peter. I've never found him poling on any other man, or shady in principles, but every now and again he throws up everything and deserts. Nothing seems to stop him at such times, and it looks as if he's ripening for a break-away now. It irritates me, a flaw like that. There seems to be no reasonable explanation."

Spires could have furnished explanation had he been a psychologist, or release had he been a Christian. But Spires was an opportunist—and Peter increased in crankiness.