Читать книгу Old Blastus of Bandicoot - Miles Franklin - Страница 3

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"The poor old horse, must go of course,

If cars have come to stay,

The engine is the greater force

And so must have its way."

The gossips had their say. The poor old horse, since then perforce

Has gone. Ah, lack-a-day!

God rest his bones! The wind intones

For him a heartfelt lay.

It was in those days, so lately fled, when horseless carriages were a curiosity beyond the seaboard. Some young bloods had made the journey from Sydney to Melbourne in one as the most enterprising adventure at command following the picturesque performances of the Boer War, and had thereby rendered themselves as glamorous as minor flight pilots of later years. Desirous of inspecting the country which produced their high-priced staples, a few German or French wool-buyers had penetrated by car to the Southern Tableland, but these were foreigners, and in local consideration, their potentialities were outweighed by their peculiarities.

It was another pair of sleeves when Sandy Lindsey and his son Ross came back from Sydney with a car of their own. Motor cars became a personal and local concern from Canberra to Brindabullah, Bombala to Yass, and back again to Bandicoot, and the kernel of gossip. Nothing had so titillated the neighbourhood since Mabel Barry "went wrong."

There was panic among the horses. Even the most ring-boned and sluggish, as though of instinctive premonition, stood on their tails and with terrified snorts and breathings, regardless of culverts or cuttings, backed from the devilish monster which threatened their existence. Horse breeders were derisive. Wait till the horseless wonder started up when no one was in it and careered over a precipice or crashed into a shop window in Monaro Street! Such evil-smelling, unnatural contrivances should be stopped by law. What were innocent women, mothers of large families, to do when a man had the right to make the roads unsafe for them? People who drove cars were murderers.

Such a clack, but a salutary change from morbid preoccupation with varicose and renal or uterine derangements.

The ordinary cackled as the ordinary do concerning each advance or innovation: the percipient and young were interested: none but were curious and agog to see the notorious contraption. From Bungendore and Tharwa, Uriarra and Gininderra everyone approached Queanbeyan hoping to see the new machine traversing the plains: to have seen it scattering the horses in Crawford or Monaro Streets, or standing before Walsh's Hotel, was achievement.

William Barry from Bandicoot expressed loud contempt. He condemned Lindsey's possession of the car as to be expected from such a flash jackass. Lindsey would be rightly served if the fakement ran away from him down the Eight Mile and broke his neck. If the car frightened his horses Barry wasn't going to wait to have the law on Lindsey, but would thrash him in Monaro Street for all to see. He ached for e justifiable demonstration against Lindsey. This was his unwavering attitude towards Lindsey operations. Many jokes were current about each new ebullition. So far, he, Lindsey and the car had not met in Queanbeyan or elsewhere. Such a meeting was the luck of Dora Barry, seldom allowed abroad alone owing to her father's notions.

Mabel, the elder daughter, never went to Queanbeyan or Yass at all—never. This seclusion was connected in Dora's mind with Mabel's weak heart: that the symptom was isolated had not yet occurred to Dora. Mrs. Barry was also a confirmed home bird on account of headaches, so it was usually Dora's father who accompanied her abroad. She was a great pet with him and when inclined could wheedle him to her needs.

She sang with natural ease and her voice was much admired by those who heard it raised in the tuneful Weatherley melodies. She had mastered the piano according to local standards, from her governesses, and now that the days were growing longer, had coaxed her father to let her take singing lessons. Owing to the singing lessons and contrary to custom, she was allowed to go to Queanbeyan unattended.

It was a glorious season and the combination of lambing and foot-rot had on one or two occasions made Father too busy to give a whole day to going to Queanbeyan for a trivial singing lesson. On the other hand, he was paying three whole guineas per quarter in advance for those blasted lessons, an enormous outlay for a bit of foolish ah-ing and squeaking—sheer robbery and impudence—worse than the bushrangers. And if a day were missed not to make it good! What was the world coming to, full of every kind of swindler bent upon making money without honest work. However, Barry was in the power of this extortioner and meant to have the worth of his guineas.

Thus Dora, under weighty, injunctions as to behaviour, and on Challenger, one of the best saddle hacks extant, had ridden to town alone one fine Wednesday. She set off gleefully, elated by her freedom.

"What on earth could happen me, Daddy?" she demanded, using her pet title, permitted on emotional occasions and to her alone. To other members of the family he was strictly 'Father.' "No one on the road could catch me on old Challenger, and there aren't any bushrangers."

But Father's suspicions were deeply rooted in spleen, in the stock allegations against human nature, and alas, in disastrous experience.

The girl skimmed across the plains which were pullulating with spring, a fair Monaro breeze whipping her cheeks to a deeper pink, and Challenger dripping with the sweat of too much green food and too L exercise. She had the coveted singing lesson and returned home in less time than allocated. Her father's careful questionings elicited nothing beyond that she had eaten her dinner at the Royal in company with old Slattery and his wife and Rose Ann from Whipstick Crossing.

Dora omitted to mention that she met Ross Lindsey bang in the middle of Crawford Street, riding his black racing colt, but newly broken. The colt had lately succeeded a prize-winning trotting mare that was the delight and envy of the youth of the district. Unable to resist a glance at the new colt, Dora had found Ross looking back after her. Caught in the act, she smiled. Ross promptly raised his hat and smiled in response, showing a set of teeth, long, white and narrow-arched—most fascinating. She was disappointed not to encounter the car, but this was something.

On the second Wednesday of her escape from tutelage she had better luck. Entering the town a few paces past where the Hotel Queanbeyan to-day catches the winds and the full glare of the sun without a sheltering tree, she branched down Campbell Street on an errand for her mother, and when she turned into Monaro Street, there before the Royal, for which she was bound, she discerned the motor car. She cantered up so as not to miss her opportunity. The engine was running and the approaching Challenger acted like any green two-year-old. He snorted and backed, and when his rider urged him forward, he reared uncompromisingly. Dora applied the whip. Challenger gave a ripping exhibition, which Dora and all the quickly gathering loiterers immensely enjoyed. The girl, sprucely habited, with her pretty tackle on the shining blood was a glad sight; she sat so easily and the horse capered so perfectly.

Lindsey, Sr., dived out of the bar and stopped his engine. Ross sprang towards Dora, who now rode around into the hotel yard. Ross followed. "Miss Barry, I presume," he said with a little excess of manner, which old Barry regarded as flash hypocrisy, but it was delightful to Dora. Ross would have been a dunce to presume her other than herself, as they had been reared on the same ridings, but Dora was of an inexperience to value conventionality. Ross hoped she had not been alarmed. With a "Permit me," he unstrapped her music and handed it to her with effusive compliments on her handling of the startled horse.

"Oh, that's nothing! Old Challenger is as easy as a rocking chair," deprecated Dora, flushing rosily.

"You could carry everything before you if you only rode at the Show."

"Father would never let me be what he calls 'conspicuous'," said Dora, hurriedly escaping, regretting the brevity of the encounter, while to prolong it was beyond her. Ross let her go with a gallant sweep of his hat plus another smile.

All through her singing lesson Dora was wishing such exciting happenings could be repeated, and was delighted when she went to dinner upstairs at her hotel, to see Lindsey already seated in company with old Slattery. They were talking politics and took little notice of Dora, but when she was leaving the room, Lindsey rose and opened the door for her, bowing with exaggerated courtesy and expressing regret that he had frightened her horse. Dora never had had anyone open a door for her, and thought it wonderful manners on Lindsey's part. When she later rode out of the hotel yard, Lindsey, Sr., was issuing on the veranda with Slattery, and gravely raised his hat again. A glorious and entertaining day.

"The gurrl remoinds me," remarked Slattery in an important and reverberating whisper, "that 'tis a pity owld Blastus wouldn't be afther burying the hatchet."

Lindsey himself during his courtesies to Dora had been thinking peace would be good business, but he dismissed his neighbour's observation with a nod and continued their discussion.

Dora thought of the inspiring encounter all the way home, all the way across the rolling treeless plain guarded by its lone English spire, till leaving the shouldered masses of Black Mountain and Ainslie the view widened again beyond the Eight Mile, showing Bandicoot Hill like another Mount Ainslie all bald and tamed in the distant foreground, and beyond it piled the vallary beauty of the Tinderies, the Bimberies, the Brindabullahs—all the blue and timeless splendour of the Murrumbidgee Ranges.