Читать книгу Old Blastus of Bandicoot - Miles Franklin - Страница 4

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He raised his hat with winning smile,

She turned her head, but no word said;

She laughed, and that is all.

But as a fire in grasses tall,

When wind is high, a smile or sigh

Can carry young love many a mile.

In warm weather it was old Barry's custom to snooze after mid-day dinner, to have tea about three-thirty and then work till dark. He was getting up in years and a division of the day was grateful to him when practicable. He had no need to slog now, but ceaseless industry had been his youthful habit and he clung to its semblance by rising at dawn and ignoring the time he spent on the verandas. He extended his formidable vision with a pair of binoculars, and any man thinking ca'canny tactics would pass on Bandicoot Hill Station was speedily undeceived. Old Barry's muscles had developed first as son and then as owner, ringing, felling, grubbing, scrubbing and burning-off on its wide acreage. He was so proud of his battle against the trees that he would never admit that Bandicoot Hill was too treeless. In later years never a blackberry, briar nor castor oil plant remained to hide from view sheep, horse or man. The proprietor could sit on one of his verandas and inspect the home paddocks of rolling country or foothills intersected by the main road and also by a stream, which can be herein known as the Bandicoot River, though it is otherwise written on the map. If he contemplated mustering in the other direction, he could look up to the treeless peaks of his own ranges, and, locating his beasts, set out or depute a retainer. Nor could his stock be driven off by marauders, unless on very dark nights, always spread out under his eye as they were.

Hardly a tree showed to the top of the skyline behind the house where the western sun hung, and high on the rim of the chief peak—Bandicoot himself—a salt shed was outlined. Beyond that edge were gullies and gorges still untamed backing into the mountainous region which has since become Federal Territory and summer relief country. Here Bandicoot was bounded by part of Lindsey's run, and much of Lindsey holdings remained "unimproved." Old Barry's opinion of Lindsey's back paddocks was so familiar as no longer to be amusing.

Barry spent hours on one or other of his verandas doting on his peerless Vermonts, prize-winners unbeaten in a wide radius including Cooma, Bombala, Yass and Goulburn. In the hot weather it was the family's custom to have afternoon tea on the back veranda, a comfortable retreat shaded from the sun and sheltered from the famous Monaro winds.

The day that Dora encountered the Lindseys was unusually hot for the time of year, so the family moved out. Father, through the binoculars, recognised Dora, a speck five miles distant across the ridges, and she arrived before the tea things were cleared away. A spirited horse going homeward and ridden with youthful zest ticked off the miles in record time. She put Challenger in the stable to cool a little before he could have a drink, and made her way through the big white gates of the backyard, feeling no fatigue from nearly fifty miles in the saddle since early morning, an arresting figure of young womanhood in her form-fitting habit of dark cloth, smartly held. Galloping in the breeze and blazing sunlight had made her delicate cheeks fiery red, and she pulled off her neat felt hat and white veil showing a mass of red-gold hair restrained in a heavy plait but escaping in shining tendrils around her snow white brow and ears.

"Good-day, Mick!" She nodded with disfavour at a man in dark shirt and working trousers, who was eating his tea at the edge of the veranda. He never raised his hat to her. He did not know enough to take it off when on the veranda. He sat on his hunkers—when there were plenty of seats—his jungle beard wagged as he ate, and she knew his eyes were slyly aware of her every detail. How nice if she could have come home to find a young man like Ross Lindsey present instead of this one.

She even looked with disappointment at her father, who had his shirt sleeves rolled up exposing his broad forearms, tanned as brown as leather. He too had a brushwood beard, differing only in colour from Mick's. Why couldn't he trim it neatly like Mr. Lindsey's, and not look so much and so complacently the old bush-whacker? Nevertheless she advanced upon him, kissed him filially and proclaimed that she was starving.

"Better hurry," remarked her mother, "or Arthur will have everything gormandised."

Arthur was her younger brother. There was only ten months between him and Dora. Some said there was not seven months, which is the key to a relationship of which Dora and Arthur alone were ignorant.

"Is there any mail for me?" inquired Dora, noting the papers strewn about. On mail days Mick Bell, under excuse of collecting his own mail, of which there was rarely anything but a circular, would ride in from his selection beyond Lindsey's, picking up the Bandicoot bag at the turn-off as he came. Governor, his fat old nag, a cross between a coacher and a light draft, was flinching the flies off his flanks under the hawthorn trees near the stables.

"There's this," said Father, self-consciously producing a parcel from behind his chair.

"Anthony Hordern and Sons—goodie! What is it?"

"It's addressed to you, not me."

"Save the string," said Mother.

"I was in such a hurry, I forgot," said Dora, sawing with a knife.

A length of fine white muslin, laces, ribbons and sashes billowed from a packet weighted with a fashion book. Everyone crowded to look, even Mabel the elder daughter, who was thirty-seven, and looked forty-five, and thought of nothing but work.

"Aw! Girl's stuff!" said Arthur contemptuously, wrinkling his freckled nose.

"Did you expect a pipe and bowyangs for Concertina?" said Dora, looking with animosity towards Mick's knees, and thinking he'd be out of place if anyone like Miss Lindsey called. "Oh, Father, you are a duck-a-down-dilly for keeps."

Satisfaction beamed from Father's large red face as he bent himself from behind the newspaper for Dora's hug. "Make it up nice and pretty from the book, for your birthday, and I'll get your photo taken in it for Christmas...There's never anything in this dashed rag, I don't know why I pay for it," he observed, tossing the paper aside. It was seized upon by Mother, who had been waiting for it.

"Aw, I wish I was a girl," complained Arthur. "Dora always gets everything."

"Never mind, Arthur. You hill the potatoes as Father told you and I'll see that you get a Christmas present too," said Mother.

"Aw, a pair of Blucher boots I suppose, w'en me toes are acting potatoes outer these. Why can't I have me photer taken too?"

"You an' me could be took together to scare the crows from the turkeys," offered Mick.

"Don't choose a style too hard to do up and make more work," said Mother.

"I'll do it up for you, Kiddy," said Mabel. "You make it just as pretty as you can."

"You're a trump, Mabel! I'll make a dress for you too."

"Oh, I don't want anything gay."

Mabel brought Dora some fresh tea, and Father inquired concerning her day in Queanbeyan.

"I forgot in the surprise of the parcel. I've seen the great and wonderful motor car; and didn't old Challenger just play up!"

"There's a long article in the Queanbeyan Courier about it," remarked Mother.

"Where?" demanded Father. "You might have had the politeness to mention it."

"You ought to have seen it. You had the paper first."

Father snatched the paper and after reading for a few minutes shouted: "Him, blast him! The bleeding skunk is not fit...

"What is the matter now, Father? Everyone has known this three weeks or more that Lindsey has a motor car."

"Matter, woman! Matter! One of the lowest blasted scoundrels that ever walked God's earth..."

Father became incoherent as he tore the paper across and stamped on it. Dora pieced it together and began: "'Our readers will learn with pleasure...'"

"Our readers—be damned! With pleasure, be damned! Never let that blasted rag come inside the house again!"

Unmoved by so familiar an outburst, Dora proceeded, "'Alexander Lindsey, the popular owner of...'"

"Good God! Pop'ler! A jail bird at large—pop'ler!"

"But that's the way to be popular," interjected Mabel.

"'The popular owner of Chesham Park'," persisted Dora, adding her comment. "Good for old Sandy! He ought to call it Wombat Castle and be done with it. He'll be an English lord next if he doesn't take care! What a lark!"

"I knowed the place w'en it was Dead Horse Crik," contributed Mick Bell, and added gratuitously: "He's been made a Justice of the Peace."

"I wonder he wasn't that years ago," said Mother.

"A J.P.! The first thing he ought to do is give himself ten years without the option. Blasted..."

"Listen! Listen! to the book of words. 'Mr. Lindsey, who is a leading pioneer of the district...'"

"A leading cattle duffer is nearer the mark..."

"'Has converted what was at his coming primeval forest...'"

"Primeval forest, be blowed! It was just bush—poor wallaby scrub most of it, not near as good land as Bandicoot. That's written by some of these townie liars that are wrong in the head."

"'...primeval forest into a valuable estate'."

"Estate be blasted! He started like the rest of us. We had a good bark hut before he was born. I am the King Billy pioneer of these parts among them that's still living, mark my words! My father put up the first slab hut this side of the Murrumbidgee. All the world came to look at it. Sandy Lindsey never came here till thirty years ago, and where did he come from? Nobody knows. R'ared in some town I suppose. He came here and sat down on the tail of my coat. I treated him white..."

"'Mr. Lindsey was the first in the district to instal the telephone'," proceeded Dora.

"So as he can listen to other people's business—the crawler! I wouldn't have a telephone if it was put in free."

"I wish we had one," murmured Mother.

"I knowed him when he hadn't a second shirt to his back," inserted Mick in his lingering drawl, as though he lacked sufficient bellows force to propel the words from his beard.

"You always knowed everyone when he hadn't a shirt to his back. Must have been in the Garden of Eden," rebuked Dora, and continued. "'Mr. Lindsey, who has done more for the district than any man in it, is again to the fore in purchasing a motor car'."

"More for the district! He was only a new chum. He didn't know a stringy-bark from a brittle gum till I showed him..."

"An' he never can see w'en another brand ain't his own to this day," slyly assisted Mick.

"Gosh, man! You're right there. And he couldn't ride an old milking cow, that's why he's got this—motor car."

"He doesn't need to ride a milking cow that I can see; that would curdle the cream," observed Dora, antagonised by Mick's pandering to her father's bile. "A car would get him miles and miles ahead of a horse, let alone a cow."

"You'll see him sitting in the bog out there by Slattery's and he'd be glad of a cow—or a team of bullocks to take him home, mark my words! With all his flash motor car he never has known enough to run a fire break."

"I knowed him w'en if he wanted a w'eelbarrer he'd have to borrer it."

"Yes. I wet-nursed him, and how did he reward me?—By duffing my cattle and riding the tails off my horses while I was down with a bad back. Now it's a motor car. Some dodge behind it I'll swear, like the time he got his advance on my sheep."

"All the same, Mr. Lindsey spoke very nicely to me."

"He would! Them snakes in the grass are great at speaking nicely. But what right had he to speak to you at all?"

"He was having dinner at the Royal."

"I've left two hotels because of him, and if I have to leave a third...Never let me catch you having anything to do with a Lindsey."

"There's not much danger. I don't think they'd find us stylish enough to touch with anything but a roping pole. Ross Lindsey said..."

"How do you know what Ross Lindsey said?"

"I met him face to face in the hotel yard. He had as good a right to be there as I had, and I couldn't bolt like a piker with a hot brand on her hide. It was so silly, we laughed, that is all."

"Enough too! Laughed! I'm sorry that a girl of mine wouldn't know better than to lower herself by laughing with a Lindsey. A Barry and a Lindsey could never laugh together except in hell." Father had assumed an arch-episcopal tone which was droll to Dora. She laughed.

"What are we to do then—pipe our eyes?"

"Now my girl, don't be pert. Nothing is gained by treating serious things flippantly, and this is more serious than you know. Lindsey and his brood of vipers have done that to me which can never be undone in this world, nor forgiven in the next."

"Now Father, that about the next world is a little too strong—blaspheming against God, I call it, and Dora, you've had enough argument with Father now. Let Lindsey and his motor car alone: time will show whether it's a success or not."

Father, checked for the moment, took up his glasses and scanned the landscape.

"A good deal of castor oil down there near the peppermints, Arthur." The lad could always be pounced upon when other quarry eluded.

"Aw! It grows like old boots with all this blooming rain," defended Arthur between gobblings.

"Cut it out before it seeds," commanded Father continuing his long-range inspection. "Two or three of those old ewes look like foot-rot. Did you notice them as you came along, Mick?"

Mick evaded. "I reckon you're the only man I know can see the condition of a beast seven miles out on the run."

"And there're too many cotton tails there for my health. One—two—three—four—five. I must take a go with the poison cart and get One-eyed Sam in there with his dogs. Gosh! I never saw such a season. We'll have a devil of a time with fires if it turns dry with all this grass."

"All the same, Bandicoot is cleaner of rabbits than any place this side of the watershed," commended Mick.

"God bless me soul, I'd have it as clean as the backyard if it depended on me, but with a J.P. running a breeding ground for all the vermin known next door...but now that he has a motor car we'll have the millennium before they choose the Federal Capital. Well, this won't do. Are you staying the night?"

"I don't mind if I do. Old Governor has a bit of a stone bruise."

"It's lucky it's always near here when things happen old Governor," said Dora.

"Run the cows in with him and turn him out. He'll get his belly too full anywhere now...Too much grass! If it's not drought, it's fluke and foot-rot...Now Arthur, are you going to see those sheep through Stringy-bark, or am I? Mick can give us a tune on the 4 concertina to-night."

"Goodness gracious Arthur, are you never going to be done!" exclaimed Dora, rescuing the tea cloth from a clumsily held teapot.

This pricked Mabel. "A pretty thing if the boy can't even have enough to eat."

"Enough, yes. But he must be a boa constrictor."

"Growing boys never know when to cry crack," said Mother pacifically. "But get along now, boy. You'll have another chance as soon as your work is done."

"Pooh! Dora's stuck-up because she has a new dress," said Arthur, grabbing a final supply. "Dora, the Roarer, the Rick-stick-storer; the Reebor-Ribor-Cock-tailed Dora! Dora's growing a moustache!"

"And Arthur wishes he was—always looking in the glass to see if it's coming," countered Dora.

"A moustache!" said Father ponderously. "Never let me hear you say a coarse thing like that about any decent woman—or an indecent one either. If you do, I'll give you such a skelping that you won't sit down for a week. Mark my words!"

"He only meant it in fun," said Mabel tensely.

"Well, get about your business and come back at once and don't get talking to the drover."

"I was torkin' to him w'en he came larst night, an' he arsked me w'at relation I was to old Blastus—that's w'at he called you, Father. An' I told him he was a mutton-head, that you were my Dad. An' he tried to shove it down my throat that you are my grandfather. He bet me a bob. He said to arsk you an' see how you took it. Some of these blokes try to be funny an' don't know how, I reckon."

"You mind your business and let the drover mind his," said Father, helplessly mild, and added: "Leave old Challenger saddled."

"Orl right! But that's w'at that bloke said." Arthur went out through the back gates, slashing with his stockwhip and whistling for his dog.

Mabel took refuge in the kitchen, but not before Mick Bell could wink at her.

"Dora, before you change your habit, are you man enough to run the horses from the River paddock and pick out those we want? I promised to go and look at that fistula on old Mother Turpey's mare."

Dora put on her hat and taking a stockwhip went out the back gate with Concertina Mick. Despite her attitude he found her irresistible and now offered her his hand to mount. Dora was off before he could attain old Governor to accompany her. She looked back and flipped roguishly at him with the whip, calling out: "Mick, I knowed old Challenger before he had a saddle to his back."