Читать книгу Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang - Miles Franklin - Страница 3
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Black Peter threw the reins of his saddle-horse over the horse-shoe on the snow-gum beside the grindstone and left the pack-horse to browse on the budding everlastings.
"Hey! I'm off now," he called. "Did the Boss leave any fresh orders?"
There was no reply save the conversational warble of magpies all around the horizon, and the ejaculations of a braw old rooster on the wood-heap, where he was looking for a handsome black snake, which earlier had disturbed one of the ladies of his harem. The man entered a rough slab structure roofed with mountain-ash palings and with a veranda fore and aft. A billy and a kerosene-tin boiled above the logs in the ten-foot hearth, otherwise the place was deserted. He whistled. A chained dog yelped in response—the Cook's second-best dog. All the others were with the men. The men were on Wild Horse Plain burning off winter tussocks. Smoke modified the blue of the ranges far away to the left.
A hawk out of the limitless blue settled in the blackbutt above the wood-pile and fixed a predatory gaze on some half-grown pullets. The rooster cackled hysterically. To be threatened from both ground and air was unnerving. The man disappeared into the main abode and reappeared with a gun.
Crack! The report rattled among the timber along the echoing ridges and seemed to enlarge the far-reaching, uninhabited silence. The cock's overhead enemy fell almost at his feet. A big white cockatoo screeched approval from a dead tree near the cowyard.
The January sun sparkled in a fleckless blue sky and shimmered in visible waves above Gyang Gyang Plain, where merinos nipping the blue tussocks were distinguishable only by movement from the outcropping grey slate and granite. Far and wide to the high blue peaks of the skyline, space and sunlight, sunlight and space, spring and vale, plain and rocks, daisies and tussocks and jumbucks reigned in a glory of solitude. Black Peter gazed all around with sweeping glances born and trained to distance, missing little, but there was no sign of the Cook. He cooeed preparatory to mounting. The Cook rose up from behind a tea-tree bush, all bridal with bloom, and approached with two kerosene-tins of water from the spring-head.
"Hey! You must have been jolly sound asleep."
"Asleep your grandmother! I was gettin' water."
"All right; you were getting water. Did the Boss leave any fresh orders?"
"He said you was to take the car to Goonara and bring back a passenger who's comin' through on the service car."
"Did he say if there would be much luggage?"
"He said you was to tell her he'll be home before dark. A wire come through just as the Boss was settin' out."
"Whew! a lady. Wonder where'll we put her. Old or young?"
"I dunno. Some kind of a pommy tart I reckon from what the Boss was sayin' on the telephone—come out from Paris on a ship."
"Scissors! She'll find Gyang Gyang a little off. You'll have to put a patch on your pants to keep your backside out of sight."
"Too right!" said the Cook with a grin. "An' you'll have to cut a few feet off your beard or you won't be able to kiss her good night without her gettin' lost in it."
"I'll leave that to the cuckoo geezers who are always after the girls. You'll have to give us coffee for breakfast and cakes for tea every day, and keep your cigar ashes out of the porridge."
"If she don't suit the grub, she can go and put up with ole Bluestone."
"Don't get shirty!"
"I ain't! The Boss said you might drop a match or two on Black Plain as you go by."
"Goodo! Chuck us a few boxes, will you?"
Black Peter dismissed the horses and went to the woolshed where the Boss's car was. As he brought the machine into the open, something like a large white pocket handkerchief adrift in a breeze descended from the dead tree near the cowyard. Cocky had come to inspect operations. She was a well-known identity on the station and arrived most summers in her cage in the Boss's car in company with the Pup. She settled on the steering-wheel and announced, "I laid an egg and sat on it, I did."
This was historical fact attested by eye-witnesses, but Cocky was more often referred to as he than she.
"You did no such thing. You couldn't. You're a blamed old rooster," said Peter, laughing.
"I laid an egg and sat on it, I did," the raucous voice insisted.
"Well, then, you're a sour old maid, and should be ashamed of yourself." The man seized the outgoing mailbag and took the steering-wheel from the bird, which flew back to her perch and screeched. He set off with throttle wide around the unofficial gradients of Gyang Gyang Hill, thence through a whole school of little crystal creeks across the tussocks of Black Plain and Telegraph Hill, and skirted Burnt Hut Range towards the main road—one of them—which leads to Adaminaby or Jindabyne, Cooma or Dalgety, Bega or Bombala, Bambooka or Buckley's Crossing, Billilingera or Bool Bool, Tumut or Tooma or Tumbarumba, or whither so the traveller wills in the commodious and airy loft of Australia.
Peter wished he was away on Wild Horse Plain poking fire-sticks in the tussocks to sweeten the grass, and any other man going to meet an unknown female. Not that he was bored by women. Far from it. They were disturbingly entertaining, but dangerous. The only way to be safe with the —— was to avoid them like a poison bait. If a man could be muzzled or tied up like a dog when poison was about it would be all to the good. It certainly would have been on one occasion when early disaster left him a complex as hard as the cancers on flooded gums, and as indissoluble by any influence that Black Peter had so far met. Prohibition was his precaution against repetition of catastrophe.
2
Doll Drew put a shade more powder on her pinched weather-beaten cheeks and looked along the road for the twentieth time that afternoon. It was mail-day. The service car might deposit someone on the dusty front veranda to break the monotony of existence in the community of one dilapidated pub, one general store, a police-station, a post-office and two or three drovers' homes clustered on the rough plain. Goonara was a god-forsaken stagnant hole, a hang-over from mining days long dead. No visible gardens lent amenity to the houses, no trees threw shade on the road that lay naked to the blazing sunlight. Why anyone dwelt there was a source of speculation, but no place is immune from some kind of animal or insect.
Doll and Mona, as well as Maggie their married sister, had been born in the old pub, the Crow's Nest, so were inured to their environment. Their father had seasonally gone shearing or droving, and at other times had been one of the regulars to uphold a veranda post or breast the bar. He used to talk of making a home somewhere down the country, but all he made there was a grave beside the flooded stream that drowned him. Mrs Drew remained in the Crow's Nest with her parents, old Bluestone and Grandma Bellingham, till she found a grave among the snow-daisies on the hillside near by, and her daughters continued with the old people.
Big events were unknown to the young women. They had not yet seen Sydney. All their hope of adventure, romance or a better way of life depended on some young man. They saw few, however, except the drovers who belonged to the place or came each summer. These did not attract them. Tourists flew through without staying for even a meal, if they could manage it, resentful of metropolitan tariff for deplorably primitive service and accommodation. Anyone who stayed longer was generally some compleat angler greedy for the big bag to be had in the unfished streams around Goonara, and men as a rule leave fishing to those ample of midriff and already anchored to compleat wives. The hopes of Mona and Doll therefore turned to Gyang Gyang, which each summer provided several desirable bachelors. There was Harvey Liddle, known as the Dude for his smart appearance and his predilection for girls. He had been the hope of every girl in the district two years before, but his friendly attentions grew no more nor less, and it was believed that his serious affections were placed on a dainty little maid in Bool Bool. Pending her surrender his car was open to all the girls for fifty miles around, and he was always ready for a dance or picnic to make a break in the long days shorn of all companionship but jumbucks and dogs, and far from neighbours.
There were one or two other bachelors regularly on the station, and this year there was Black Peter. Doll still had hopes of the Dude, but Mona had set her heart on Peter. He was tall and strong. Even the shaggy disfigurement mentioned by the Cook could not disguise his youth and claims to good looks, nor could his stern prohibition of women submerge his charm for them. Mona was given to pleasant expectations on mail-days. Now and again Black Peter took the short cut over Burnt Hut and rode for the mailbag. While waiting for it he would yarn a while with Granddad, who had known Peter's great-granddad (the old original Black Poole of Curradoobidgee) and his grandam, as he did those of everyone who claimed to be a true Monaro-ite. Mona would sit and look at Peter, though she could never make Peter look at her. She felt nevertheless that he was conscious of her, and his charm was not decreased by aloofness. Intuitively women knew it for aloofness rather than indifference.
Both girls' interest in the mail today amounted to trepidation owing to the lady passenger for Gyang Gyang. Would she be young and pretty and a menace to their chances with the Dude and Peter? Belle Leyden at the post-office had received the telegram and telephoned it to Gyang Gyang. She had connected Mr Labosseer with the Cooma Hotel and listened in while he dictated a message. From this she learnt that the lady was Mr Labosseer's goddaughter. Belle had passed this on to the girls at the Crow's Nest. They speculated together and hoped that a goddaughter would be rather old. All Mr Labosseer's real daughters were married and over thirty.
"If she's only a goddaughter she won't be able to stay there. Goddaughters don't have to be relations," said Mona.
"Perhaps she's some bird Mr Labosseer is sweet on himself," said Belle. "But they say that his daughters take fine care he shan't marry again."
"Aw, they couldn't stop him if he wanted to. I don't think anything could stop a man if he really wanted to, or make him if he didn't want to," said Doll. Mona sighed in agreement with the final sentiment and looked long and far along the rocky barren road sinking over the wide horizon and washed away into watercourses that were ruinous on tires.
"I reckon a man just plays about to suit himself unless he's cornered in some way," Doll added. She too gazed long and longingly down the dusty road. The girls' hearts chafed for something to happen, but no speck upon the wide skyline yet announced the mail-car. No speck upon the rifted hills of the razorbacked range with herringbone ribs called Goonara Plain in another direction could be mistaken for a messenger from Gyang Gyang. Nothing stirred about the spacious scene but the sheep; nothing broke the deep blue overhead but a pair of eagles high up attended by their baleful playboys the crows. Not a tourist to unfurl a line, not a drover to rub against a veranda post or breast the bar!
