Читать книгу Cockatoos - Miles Franklin - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Larry Healey was ploughing. His horses were hidebound and weak, and the earth was caked like cement. Broken, it took the thirsty winds so that the ploughman moved in a suffocating cloud which filled his ears and nostrils and at times obscured the beasts from sight. Some of that virgin dust did not resettle, but floated high into the air to waste far and wide in the Pacific. For several seasons past the seed had been decoyed above the ground by occasional showers, only to wither before reaching the ear, and Healey had pondered for a fortnight whether it would not be wiser to feed the grain to the starving stock than again to waste it in the earth. The fall of a penny had decided him. He was working in the hope of rain next moon.

On reaching the end of the furrow, where briers high as trees upheld a decrepit brush fence, the horses were given a spell while Healey spat the dust from his mouth, eased his bandless felt hat from his grimy head, and, taking a view of the brilliant sky, wished to God it would rain. Then he jerked the reins—one of rope, one of green hide—and the horses toiled to the opposite headland, bounded by a gaping drain, a grove of dusty wattles and a stud fence. Here he again regarded the relentless arch and wondered where in hell all the rain could be. The theorists who ranted of the security in an agricultural life ought to stand in his old blucher boots! It was grand for those who held fat billets in the Government, with a big screw every month regardless of droughts, floods, or pestilence, to flute of the joys of being on the land. They were having a fine loan of the taxpaying numskulls. All the fat went to the middle-men and officials. Their carpeted offices, padded chairs, and the pleasures of an exciting life were supported by the sweat of the men on the land. Let the town parasites take the plough in the dust, or depend upon livestock for a living in a grassless season, let the grind of it knock understanding into their fat bellies, then hear what they would spout about it!

On all the cockatoo farms of Oswald's Ridges and a hundred adjacent communities were other dusty ploughmen thinking similar thoughts as they scanned the heavens and hoped against hope for rain next moon.

Oswald's Ridges lay between two lesser roads that branched from the Great Southern Road as it left Goulburn, and Healey and his neighbours were members of a community gathered within the radius of attendance at the little public school, with their homes from twelve to twenty miles from Goulburn Post Office. Entrenched families of the district, such as the Oswalds and their cousins the Gilmours, grandsons of abler or more fortunate pioneers, lorded it analogously to the county in England, on which society in the region was sedulously and snobbishly modelled. Their estates, long since mellowed from stations, had been grants to earlier colonists with capital or influence of some kind with officialdom. The only land near to town procurable by the poorer settlers were the gullies and ridges fringing the picked holdings and thrown open to free selection without survey by the land acts of the sixties. In its natural state such country would support little more than a few marsupials or goannas to the acre. Nevertheless, among the selectors some of the hard-headed and thrifty were in the way of becoming squireens or gentleman farmers in relation to the big men, but as yet there were no symptoms of a peasantry firmly rooted in the earth.

The smaller people on the Ridges scratched like cockatoos to rear large families respectably; the fathers and grown sons supplemented meagre farm earnings by shearing or droving or by carting firewood to town. Wood-carting was a poverty-stricken resource which Mrs Healey opposed. "We've fallen low enough without coming to that."

The low rough hills southward ranged up with the miles from Healey's property to a view of Lake George, where all was blue, the water shading into the hills, the hills into the ether in soothing loveliness. From Bungonia to Jingera, from the Tidbinbillas and Coolgarbillies of the Murrumbidgee to the South Coast stretched an area warm and brilliant from prolonged drought, haunting, unique in the blue haze of distance, but acre by acre it was a piteous scene. The droning autumn winds lifted the dust in whorls, the little dam beds were dry and cracked, many water channels empty, paddocks as bare as roads, stock without condition to face the winter. Those animals still able to lift themselves staggered round the waterholes, famished and moaning.

The tree-tops stilled as the sun beat a retreat through the scrub of the gully behind the Healey homestead and a little girl in kip boots splashed with whitewash and with an apron of sacking over her frock came round the corner and began to ascend the track to look for gum on the wattle-trees.

"Now, Freda, don't run away to the scrub when you know it's tea-time."

"I'll be back in a minute, mother."

"Girls much younger than you are are twice as helpful to their mothers."

Rebelling inwardly against this as untrue, the child turned back. She was glad this was not her real mother. As soon as she was old enough she would run away.

The sun, irked by imitating a moon all day in the dust, left his world to the brief twilight as Healey freed his jaded horses. They rolled to relieve their hides, then made towards the creek in whose deep waterholes remained their principal sustenance. Their master straightened himself painfully. He suffered in the chest and shoulder from an old accident, which had left the scar of a horse's hoof on his temple and a more crippling scar on his mind. He was unusually uncomfortable tonight, and hoped this presaged rain. His eyes were inflamed with grit and he rubbed them with horny fingers and beat some of the dust from his patched moleskins as he approached the house with the winkers over his arm.

A family of turkeys settling for the night on the pigsty fence were wrangling loudly about positions. Mrs Healey said it was too dark to do any more to the fowlhouses and came inside to see what progress Lizzie, the servant girl, had made with the evening meal. A family of six gathered round the table—two children, the parents, Lizzy Humphreys, and Ignez Milford. The only conversation was Mrs Healey's altercation with her brood. When he had eaten Healey said he was going to Mazere's for some bluestone. Mrs Healey resented his escape from the house.

"Tell Isabel I can't get over to see her because you are using the horses for ploughing," she complained.

The Mazeres lived three miles away near the road that ran from Goulburn to Kaligda and Gounong. This family, as the Healeys, had come from up the country. Both had fallen to the rating of cockatoos, or farmer-selectors, through inability to keep on the higher ledge of squattocracy. The parents had known each other at Bool Bool, and their families were intertangled in the large clans thereaway. The Mazeres had tried to better themselves by shifting from the back regions of the parental holdings to the neighbourhood of Goulburn, where better opportunities could be expected for the young people. The Healeys had their own reasons, definite and private, for desiring to escape from Bool Bool and their relatives, and, having small capital, had landed on the poor property adjoining Mazere's.

Mesdames Mazere and Healey felt themselves superior. Their meals were accompanied by serviettes and they each had a piano. Mrs Healey was the only woman of her community who kept a girl to help her in the house. Mazere, for a year following his arrival, had driven a pair in his buggy instead of the single-shafter usual among the quasi-farmers. They also gave their houses names whilst most of the other cockatoos were satisfied with the general address of Oswald's Ridges. The Healey place had been known as Blackshaw's deep waterhole till Mrs Healey turned it to Deep Creek. At Mazere's a board on a corner post of a pisé structure roofed with stringybark announced: RICHARD MAZERE. REGISTERED DAIRYMAN. LAGOON VALLEY.

Other boards round about proclaimed similar information, largely legendary; some time had gone by since the smitten region had yielded dairy produce beyond a restricted ration for the homes.

While Mrs Healey was lime-washing her fowlhouse, Blanche, the eldest Mazere girl, was doing the same to the Mazere dairy, and her mother was carrying water from a dam some hundred and fifty yards distant in the effort to save her pot-plants. Allan, the second boy, was feeding a miserable poddy on swill thickened with pollard, and allowed the handle of the bucket to slip over its ears. The calf bolted with a terrified bellow; Allan doubled with laughter to see it collide with a fellow sufferer. As it ran blindly in another direction Mulligan the dog and Billy the pet lamb joined in the chase. Dick, the eldest son, who was chopping wood, dropped his axe and ran after the trio.

As the calf passed Blanche with boys and beasts in pursuit she seized its tail and hung on till she brought it to a standstill.

"Poor little thing, it's a shame to run the flesh off it," she said, as Dick released the shabby trembling creature.

"I assure you it was an accident," minced Allan, who was a budding wag.

"You'll get a lift under the ear that won't be an accident if you give any cheek," retorted Dick.

Mazere, like his neighbour, turned loose a pair of skinny horses and went housewards feeling dirty, uncomfortable, and weary. He had a withered worried face about which the breeze, heavy with soil, scattered his scraggy beard. He was met at the door of the kitchen by his wife's plaints, "Everything is unbearable with dust. My back aches so that I'm sure it's kidney trouble."

"Blanche, why don't you help your mother more?"

"I do everything I can." The over-anxious girl was beginning to regard any joy or relaxation from work as sinful. She established her mother on the sofa, gave her a cup of tea, and then served the family.

Mrs Mazere was difficult to cheer. Her low spirits were attributed to the turn of life, complicated by a weak heart. She dwelt lugubriously on a list of victims of the dangerous age.

"What's this turn of life that women are always croaking about?" inquired Dick.

"Croaking!" wailed his mother.

A glance from his father and a squelching word from Blanche gave the youth to understand that he was guilty of a breach of decency about a feminine mystery comparable to the coming of babies. Every fool knew the facts of that by the time he was ten, but they could be discussed only as indulgence in secret vulgarity by boys and men. Dick walloped around on tiptoe and punched Allan to relieve his resentment of such humbug.

Relief was general when later Healey at the open door announced, "Good evening! Any hope of rain?" Larry was generally a cheery sight when away from his wife.

Mrs Mazere revived. "Come and have something to eat. Is Dot well?"

"I just rose from the table, thanks. Dot's complaining of pains in her back, but I'm afraid they won't bring rain."

The men found comfort in discussing their situation together. Fodder was unprocurable, even at prohibitive prices, and winter approached. The winter of the Southern Tablelands was bleak with many weeks of nipping frost, sleet and wide wild winds that could take the last ounce of flesh off stock and find their way through the possum rugs on the beds.

At ten o'clock the visitor procured bluestone, debated quantities per bushel, and prepared to depart. Mrs Mazere sent an invitation to the Healey family to stay for tea on Sunday after church. The neighbourhood was to muster two days later to intercede with the Almighty for rain. The little wooden church with its toy porch, set in the scrub beside Mazere's wheat paddock, belonged to the Wesleyans but was attended by all Protestant denominations every Sunday afternoon. Mazere accompanied his neighbour as far as the stable and they lingered outside searching the sky for signs of rain and having a last masculine word. Healey, though several varieties of fool in his own estimation and many more in his wife's, nevertheless considered prayers for rain as too foolish altogether.

"It's not praying we want, it's practice. If all the parsons and priests prayed for seven years they couldn't so much as raise one grasshopper one inch from the ground without practical measures."

"Some reckon we're being punished for our sins."

"So we are, the sins of ignorance. We need men to study the natural geographical and climatic conditions of the country and then follow methods of fodder and water conservation in the rolling seasons to tide over the droughts. You can take it from me, there's no use in mumbling prayers."

"The fat would be in the fire if you said so. It makes a bit of an outing for the women, and church is a good thing to keep the youngsters out of mischief."

"It would be more Christian to let the horses spell for the day, but it'll be all the same in a hundred years."

"Yes," agreed Mazere. "What is to be, will be. See you on Sunday."

Oswald's Ridges was indebted to Ignez Milford for adding spice to the daily round. Her lively and unconventional ideas caused commotion among tamer fowl. She had taken it into her head to have a musical career and her parents had weakened to let her come as far as Goulburn to study. This was feasible because the Milfords also had connections in the up-country clans, and for safety Ignez had been deposited with the Mazeres and Healeys. She parcelled her time between the houses to obviate any jealousy and to divide the wear and tear of her presence. When Mrs Mazere was given to headaches and the piano annoyed her Ignez went to Mrs Healey. When Mrs Healey suffered from nerves Ignez returned to Lagoon Valley.

Mrs Healey was to give Ignez piano lessons. Ignez was confident that she could study the theory of music herself from textbooks. Mrs Healey was devoid of musical gifts, but, as prescribed for girls of good family, she had been taught the piano. She was skilful and efficient in anything to which she turned her hands, and had learnt to execute the scales and Czerny and the conventional repertory of drawing-room "pieces", including a Chopin waltz or two and more popular favourites, without a wrong note and in unimpeachable time. She sat beside Ignez for some weeks, but Ignez speedily discovered that her teacher had not the musical knowledge to see or even the ear to know when her pupil was playing other works than those placed on the piano rack. As a beginning, and entirely by her own study, Ignez gained ninety-nine marks out of a possible hundred in the examination in the theory of music set by representatives of the London College of Music. Ignez was hailed as a prodigy and on the strength of it agitated for a more advanced teacher. Mrs Healey took this as an insult rooted in Ignez's conceit and became hostile to the girl's ambition. The two foremost teachers in Goulburn each charged two guineas a quarter. This was considered waste of money by the Milfords, who were unlettered musically, but they compromised upon a woman at one and a half guineas, and Ignez rode to town like the wind once a week with her music roll strapped to her saddle dees. An escort was unnecessary because, as Ignez's father pointed out, she could ride like a horsebreaker, and as long as she rode her own mare nothing on the roads could overtake her. The Milford brothers of Jinninjinninbong bred horses for Indian remounts and there was good imported blood in their walers.

The only dangers to which Ignez was open in her attempted musical training were artistic. These were so grave that she was foredoomed to defeat, but she and those around her were all so abysmally innocent of what any muse demands of those who would follow her that tragedy did not yet cast its shadow. Now sixteen, the girl had a singing voice of extraordinary depth and resonance that filled her adolescent head with dreams. Dick and Allan Mazere and their mates teased her as a bullfrog, but those of musical pretensions were emphatic that she had a remarkable organ. There was the opinion of old Salvatore Tartaglio, a fossicker for gold in a deep wild gully of Jinninjinninbong. When he had come to the homestead for rations, if it also happened that someone had treated him to alcohol or that he had procured a bottle or two of Italian wine, he would demand access to the piano. The vitals of the instrument would be exposed to view and given such exercise as they had not known, and sometimes, if not too hoarse, Salvatore would sing. He would deafen his listeners with operatic arias delivered in the open-throated Italian bellow with more fortissimo than the piano or pianissimo now beyond his ruined organ. There was a legend that he was a stranded opera singer who had contracted the gold fever that had raged in the early nineties on the western goldfields.

He was lavish in encomiums of Ignez and her voice. Santa Maria! What a natural voice! If he could have the training of it! The divine Malibran, Trebelli! All the notes of me, Salvatore, all the notes of Patti, but the voice is cut in two. He, Salvatore, alone could weld that division and make the voice into one tremendous organ. When he was elevated he would rave and weep till the men would calm him by making him helplessly drunk and then take him away to a bunk in the men's hut. He was so unkempt, so dirty, so wild in his uncontrolled emotion, that his bedraggled and depreciated foreign culture could not become evident to the inexperienced circle of Jinninjinninbong, with its conventional and limited codes of gentility.

He would rage that he must take Ignez away with him to save her from the surrounding barbarism, and teach her and bring her out in Paris, in Vienna and Milan. Ach, Santissima! He would show them that Salvatore, the great, the incomparable Salvatore, could return in this new triumph through such a pupil. There would be wild nights. Salvatore would later be deflated, sick, remorseful, morose, threatening self-destruction. He would creep away to hide his shame in the lonely gullies, the cause of his plight, whatever its nature, locked within his breast. His extravagant eulogies were put down to drunkenness, his temperamental aberrations partly to madness or simply to foreignness, peculiarities almost synonymous to untravelled provincials the world around.

As Ignez excited him unduly it was thought wiser to send her to a neighbouring run on some errand when Salvatore was due to appear. Old men often went dotty about young girls, and Salvatore, both drunken and foreign, might be dangerous.

Ignez secretly hugged Salvatore's pronouncements. His praise was intoxicating, and as an accompanist he seemed possessed of magic that could help her with her voice in the middle. He taught her to sing "Ombra Mai Fu" translated to fit her big fledgling divided voice. O santissima, Maria!

Yes, some day she would sing to others—clever, well-dressed, notable people—whose response would be similar to Salvatore's. For the present the church service to ask God for rain was at hand, at which to her own accompaniment on the few live notes of the tiny moth-eaten organ in the little church in the scrub she was to sing "O Rest in the Lord".

In addition to musical gifts, Ignez was an avid reader and took a precocious interest in politics. She despised the usual small talk of women so that they censured her as unsexed, though they revelled in her outbursts.

"I hope you're going to vote for woman's suffrage at the next election," she observed on Sunday evening at tea after church at Lagoon Valley. She had been reading of the work of Lady Windeyer and Miss Rose Scott and ardently espoused their platform. "Mr Mazere, Mr Healey, and Mr Masters, that makes three votes."

Arthur Masters was attributed to Blanche, who hastened to observe, "I think it would be horrible for women to vote. It would make them like men."

"That would be horrible indeed!" Arthur grinned, and Blanche laughed, well pleased.

"Tosh!" exploded Ignez. "Men think women are too weak to study politics, but even in the most hampering states of maternity they are not too weak to feed pigs and rear poddies. When it is wet they paddle knee-deep in cowyards—in silly long skirts, too."

"It would be a grand sight at present to see a few of them in boggy cowyards," chuckled Healey.

"Ghost, yes!" agreed Mazere.

"Ignez, you should not speak so," admonished Mrs Healey.

"But it's quite true. This talk about some things and not others making women masculine is idiotic."

"It would give you the pip," admitted Arthur Masters. "It would be far easier for a woman to vote than to barge around a cowyard." The Masters dairy was a model for the district. A woman never worked in it. Arthur's pronouncement disappointed Blanche. Her views had been tempered for his approval, but he was watching the animated face of Ignez.

"It's like riding," pursued Ignez. "Girls can ride as well as men, even got up in silly binding skirts and other handicaps that would drive men dilly. I've a good mind to ride astride."

"It would be much safer," conceded Healey.

"But it would look so unladylike," insisted Blanche, again failing to win the commendation she craved.

"As to women voting," observed Mazere, "what good would it do when there's nothing to vote for but a useless lot of old windbags?"

"It's the principle of the thing—being classed with children and lunatics."

"You can have my vote, Miss Milford," said Masters. "I'll cast it any way you like if that will satisfy you."

"That wouldn't alter the principle of the thing."

After tea Ignez repeated "O Rest in the Lord". Dick and Masters listened entranced, more with the singer than the singing, which Blanche thought too loud and unrefined. Mrs Healey then played hymns. Ignez found the pitch of these discommoding, and as secular music was forbidden on Sunday, discussion was resumed with the girl as its centre. Mrs Mazere tried to retail her ailments but the zest of the general talk defeated her.

Young Dick was determined to drive Ignez to Goulburn one day soon to seek information regarding the turn of life and other mysteries. He felt that Ignez would be free from the nastiness and pretence of the other girls, which made him feel silly or unclean. He was envious of Arthur Masters, who would escort Ignez home by way of Deep Creek since she was on horseback and all the Healey family would be in the buggy with its rattling tyres and its crying need of a coat of paint. He got ahead of Masters in tossing Ignez to her saddle, which she reached with the lightest touch to her toe.