Читать книгу Old Blastus of Bandicoot - Miles Franklin - Страница 6

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The row began farther back, they say,

When Chesham Park was Dead Horse Creek,

And bandicoots not far to seek,

Tho' the little dears are scarce to-day.

Dora was not allowed to ride to town on the following Wednesday. Her father drove her as usual and Ross Lindsey kept as carefully out of sight as a mosquito on La Pampa when dragon flies appear. Dora had a good lesson and was commended for her progress, but it was all a little dull, lacking a motor car about the streets or on the road to provide entertainment, and with no good-looking and prohibited young man to take off his hat to her as if he meant it. Not even Tom was in evidence to offer relief as something to snub. There was only old Slattery with his big red face and jew lizard frill of beard from ear to ear under his jaw. Rose Ann Slattery was slightly more interesting at dinner when she talked about the party to provide funds for the hospital. She wanted to know if Dora was to attend.

"You're old enough now, Dora. Now's the time to dance and enjoy yourself. Ross Lindsey is a crack dancer. He waltzes like heaven."

Dora said her father did not approve of dancing and that she had no one to take her because Mabel had a weak heart, and her mother was subject to deadly headaches. She brooded on that party and Ross's ability as a dancer all the way home. Being unaware of the main reason for the feud, she considered her father's dislike of the Lindsey's excessive. She had heard about the sheep, and that night asked Mabel to go over the old story in detail.

Lindsey once upon a time had seen a good opportunity to clear £3,000 in a cash deal, if only he could raise £1,000 for a few days. The bank manager was much impressed with his representations but demanded security. Lindsey offered his sheep—four thousand picked ewes for which he said he would not take £1 per head. He had been measuring the banker, new to the district, and no stockman.

He suggested driving the banker out to inspect. It was urgent. They would barely have time to see the sheep before dark. Lindsey had the intrepidity and the power of quick decision of a gambler. He knew Barry to be away in Yass. As he passed Bandicoot that morning he had seen the magnificent ewes in the paddock near the roadside, where they had been put to eat clown young briar shoots. Chance favours the daring.

They reached the sheep just as the sun was sinking back of Bandicoot and the ewes streaming up a hillside to camp for the night. They couldn't have been better arranged for inspection by a couple of drovers. Lindsey tethered his horses to the fence, and on foot hurried the callow bank man into the paddock among the bleating merinos. Even he could estimate that it was an exceptional flock in exceptional health and condition, as was everything under Bandicoot management, always.

The bank official was so impressed that he would have been willing to risk his personal savings on such security. The sheep were all branded with a big BB, but as they were in long wool it was not decipherable by the inexpert. It never occurred to him that he was the victim of a trick.

"I didn't realise you had such beautiful sheep, Mr. Lindsey;" he repeated. "A photograph of such a flock should be in the papers. Do you win many prizes?"

Lindsey said something about it being too rough on sheep to drag them about to shows. On finding that the banker was willing to make the necessary advance, Lindsey apologised profusely that he was unable to take him home with him for the night. He must unfortunately hurry back to Queanbeyan to send a telegram. He must act instantly—business before pleasure. The bank man fully understood. The jaded horses were whipped back across hill and plain, the travellers freezing in the wide wild winds that sweep over Canberra and Queanbeyan from the snow-capped Muniongs.

The bank man further understood Lindsey's need for secrecy till the deal was through, but later it was through the banker that the story became current. Lindsey never said a word himself. This was his defence when eventually tackled by Barry. He also urged his necessity. He had known the £3,000 was certain if only he had £1,000 with which to operate. It was a simple harmless dodge that injured no one and comforted the bank manager. If Barry had been at home he would have asked him, but Barry snorted at that. The story added lustre to Lindsey. Only Barry and the banker were dissentient, and the laugh was against them.

Dora listened with unusual attention to the old story, putting her own interpretation upon it. She found it amusing, and in any case, as it had been before she was born, she could not see that it mattered now. Ross too had only been a tiny thing in those days.

Mabel, alarmed by this attitude, marshalled other instances of Lindsey's lack of principle. Dad had "copped" him once making off with Bandicoot cattle, but Lindsey as usual had wriggled out of the situation. Dora didn't see why her father alone should be policeman, and she be guarded from the Lindseys as if they were contaminating, when they were courted by everyone in the district and out of it. Dora put it down to the general silliness of old people.

She knew there was another grievance with regard to Sid Lindsey jilting Mabel, and that Father seemed to feel worse about it than Mabel herself, in fact he acted as if it were a big disgrace. But that too had been before her birth, and she had never seen Sid Lindsey nor heard of him anywhere about the district. She wanted to ask Mabel the particulars of that story too, but it was not so approachable as the one about the sheep deal. Mabel was awfully good to shield her from work. There was never any danger of Mabel "telling on her," but in this Lindsey business, and when Dora wanted to go abroad alone, Mabel lined up with Father, which Dora put down to Mabel's advanced years.

She sat over the blackening coals with Mabel pondering the case. Dad, though fiery of temper, would surely not threaten to shoot Lindsey because Sid had changed his mind about marrying Mabel. Better to keep quiet and not let the Lindseys know it mattered. It made Mabel cheap, Dora considered. Some reserve about Mabel made it impossible for her to open the subject direct.

"Don't you think there must have been something else?" she prospected. "Lindsey must have stung Dad's vanity deeply in some way that he doesn't say anything about, but just lays it on the sheep deal and a few other things. Instead of being so jealous and raging, why doesn't Dad get up in society himself. He easily could. I'd like to find out what is really the matter."

Dora retired and sat for a time on the edge of her bed, embowered in her bright tresses, her Mind busy. She was full of concrete discontent and vague longings, for what she hardly knew, except that something should happen—romance, adventure, action to fill the days.

Mabel remained in the kitchen crouching over the dying coals. Dora's curiosity about old dead days frightened her. She shivered. The day must come when Dora would learn the truth, and Mabel steeled her heart. She had thought it dead long ago, but through the years it had recovered somewhat and when Dora should come to knowledge and repudiate her it would be a blow.

Dora was a clever girl, she could not permanently he kept in the dark about anything, also she was of an uncompromising disposition and would not assume innocence to keep up appearances. She already suspected that Lindsey's sharp practice could not be the real reason for so solid a feud. She would one day learn that the families had remained on visiting terms and marrying prospects till one dread day Mabel had stood before her father's terrible rage. Her mother, in a delicate condition preceding the arrival of Dora, had fainted dead away, and at intervals until Dora's birth her life had been despaired of.

Barry had taken his daughter's fall so hard that all the district rocked with the tragedy. Dave and Bob, the elder sons, taking their tone from their father, had threatened to shoot Sid Lindsey and traipsed about the bush with loaded rifles. So much rage was behind their threats that their mother was relieved to have them leave the district for a time. Mrs. Lindsey and Mrs. Barry had tried to retrieve the disaster peacefully by marriage, but the boys wanted murder. Old Barry, too, was violently against marriage, the only stand possible to his hurt pride.

Lindsey swore that Sid must marry Mabel or leave home and the district for ever, and meant it. Sid was recalcitrant. He put restitution to Mabel beyond possibility by marrying a barmaid in a public house in Yass. Gossip said he did this to be safe from Mabel, and also that he had been between two guns and married to spike one of them. In any case, Lindsey fulfilled his threat and forbade him the paternal roof for evermore.

The young Barrys went away to Queensland and had never been back since. Altogether a terrible business for both families, though Bandicoot saw only his own side of it.

Mabel stayed on at Bandicoot, caring for her mother, rearing her boy—when he came—becoming the household drudge. She never brooded on her case or put it forward. No one realised that she had one. Expiation was her lot. She worked and worked, a miracle among housewives, her service accepted as unconsciously as the sunlight or the rain. As soon as he was able to hold a tomahawk or cow's teat, her boy too worked always, knowing nothing else on Bandicoot, and nothing beyond Bandicoot.

The Bandicoot homestead became a hermitage. As it paid no visits, in time no visitors came to it. On the other hand, Chesham Park (it was but lately that park had been substituted for creek) took an upward trend after that £3,000 in cash. Lindsey, emboldened, made one coup after another. He ascended in the social scale and became firmly familiar with the pioneerage of the district, some of the households with pretentions approximating the landed gentry of Great Britain and Ireland.

Barry remained where he had started socially. He could not be ignored as a pioneer squatter whose beginnings were as early as any, and whose antecedents were more blameless than many. His father, employing a social boast in days when there were free and Government men, maintained that he and his father before him never had a key turned on them in their lives. Barry was highly esteemed for his honesty, for his ever-ready services to all neighbours, and his sound financial ability and pastoral knowledge, but his women and those of the would-be seigniorial cliques did not know each other.

Half a dozen years since Lindsey had built a fine stone house, and following this, Kate Lindsey had Chesham Park boldly embossed on her stationery. Fiercely loyal to the adzed gum posts of his verandas, Barry boasted that he had built his own house whereas Lindsey couldn't drive a nail without hitting his thumb with the hammer.

Georgina Lindsey, who had gone to the smartest school in Sydney, took advantage of her training to marry young Judson of Cobbramorragong, near Bungendore, whose sister had married a son of a seignioral and historical family of Queanbeyan district. In spite of Sid's disgrace and banishment with a barmaid wife—daughter of a bullocky-selector—Lindsey thus put the cap on his social connections, while old Barry foolishly made his daughter's disgrace a chain ball about the leg of his.

He had raged for a week about the Judson-Lindsey-Cameron alliances and the rottenness of these jumped-up people, giving themselves such infernal airs, all of them without any principle, and with pedigrees that could not stand nearly so strong a search-light as his own. If there was anything he despised it was this society frill and flummery. Dishonesty and immorality and a tissue of lies. There was old K—— of G——, one of the superfine swells, with whom Lindsey had managed to crawl in, like a native cat after the fowls, and it was well known that Mrs. K—— could never keep a housemaid because of the old man. No respectable ettler would allow his daughters near the place. Barry adduced other cases, all authenticated, enough to stuff a pillow case or the columns of the Queanbeyan Courier, which went to show that the society of Counties Murray and Monaro was like that of most other counties and boroughs.

Mrs. Barry had an unerring facility in deflation. "If you don't like society and think it's rotten, what does it matter to you, as you can't get in it?" she would logically demand. "And if Lindsey can get there, that takes him off your beat and you ought to be satisfied."

"But woman, think of the principle of the thing! Setting himself up, and a man's brands are not safe with him."

"There are lots of others who don't set themselves up who are the same about brands, so I don't see what that has to do with this argument."

"But goodness me, there's..."

"You're jealous, Father. That's what's the matter with you. It's a terrible thing to have a jealous disposition. You make yourself unhappy for no cause. Let Lindsey get up in society without a pedigree, if he can. What's the use of you having such a fine pedigree if you don't get into society with it. You can't use it for anything else that I can see. It's not like a sheep's. I'm always thankful that I haven't a jealous disposition."

What a triumph for Barry had he known how little was thought of the society lights of County Murray by those of the English shires and boroughs. The effect on him of the knowledge that there were sets which denied that Australia had any endurable society at all, was not to be computed, except apoplectically. How he would have acted-towards those who in ignorance and prejudice considered any swarthy Australian "Eurasian" or otherwise tarbrush, goodness alone knows, but Wm. Barry was so perfect a flower of his Own environment, that lacking interest in any other, he was saved much useless and irritating information.

Mrs. Barry would have been content could visits to Mrs. Lindsey have continued. It would have enriched her life to gloat even second-hand and vicariously on the social doings around Queanbeyan. She was not socially ambitious. She was the daughter of a brumby selector far up the Bandicoot. It had been a great social lift when young Barry of Bandicoot Hill Station had married her and brought her to a sthall home on the place, and later, when the old Barrys died, to the main homestead. She didn't know what her great grandfather nor even her grandfather was, whether free or Government men, and she did not care. She was satisfied with a pedigree inferior to her husband's, one reason her marriage continued to be a personal success. As a rule men prefer inferior wives. The superior can be so uncomfortably supertoploftical.

Bandicoot was the best-fenced, best-improved place in the district, and magnificently watered. Too much timber had disappeared but Barry had corrected that by buying a selection on his back boundary from which excellent timber for all purposes could be procured. No drought or other crisis was able to leave Barry without a bank balance. Even the nabobs envied and respected him for that. Lindsey rarely was free from an overdraft. But that was his own business and did not prevent his family visiting Sydney and appearing at the select races and shows and other social events around Goulburn and elsewhere, and Chesham Park saw many guests.

Barry kept his family confined to Bandicoot, a regime which ran smoothly till that very spring had found Dora verging on eighteen and restless for her birthright of fun and frolic and youthful companionship. Nature was very grand before and behind Bandicoot Hill, but it was singularly desolate to Dora's hot young heart expanding to life. Two or three young folks about her own age would at that date have made a social centre of a camp, and an unrivalled theatre of delight of Queanbeyan or Yass. The banal stagnation of her days would have been electrified, but she had little to do or see and champed her bit from one week to the next on Bandicoot. No callers but swagmen, drovers, or the odious Tom Harris and Concertina Mick, or old Slattery (without even Rose Ann who would have talked of those matters about which she longed to hear). Was ever such social bankruptcy!

She planned and re-planned her new dress. Dad was of the old brigade that insisted on his women doing their own dressmaking, and Dora's talent had ripened with practice.

The plains were glowing with bluebells, trigger plant, creamy stackhousia, the little pink tetratheca thymifolia and other flowers. Magpies, butcher and soldier birds, leatherheads, thrushes and warblers filled the day with music. The orchard was a paradise—the apple trees bridal bouquets with fluttering butterflies; the pear and cherry trees bridal veils, and the quince trees with a beauty of their own. The premises were hedged about with yellow broom and roses, old-fashioned hardy bloomers richly smelling. The flower beds were tightly packed posies of foxglove, snapdragon, verbena, sweet william, gaillardia, ranunculus, iris, calliopsis, lupin, larkspur, columbine, balsam, candytuft, gypsophila, pansies and other sweet friends. The wistaria shook out its exotic perfumed glory on the wide awning between house and kitchen, and was again the wonder of the district. It had been measured, photographed and reproduced in the Town and Country Journal.

The young lambs cried on the hillsides, the frizzy-tailed foals frisked with the soft young calves, chickens and ducklings ran about like balls of fluff. A burgeoning world was around Dora and her heart expanded with it. One of the most glorious inland views on the globe unfolded before her every time she went abroad but she scanned it only in the hope of seeing the magic motor car or a dapper rider on a spirited black colt, or sitting jauntily behind a prize mare in a trotting spider.

When she missed this sight one Wednesday it was a long time to wait till the next. True, she was free to ride about the station and was frequently to be seen galloping towards the main road on Challenger or on her own filly, Greygown. Lately she had taken it into her head to tear down across the new bridge and disappear up Dingo Creek which was a short cut to Chesham Park, otherwise six or seven miles distant from Bandicoot Hill. She dug up some of the maiden hair which abounded along Dingo Creek and took it home for her pots, should Father be curious about her direction. Then she would ride homeward by the road past Chesham Park gates about a quarter of a mile from the house.

On one occasion she was lucky in seeing the motor car full of people just about to turn in. Greygown was a nervous animal and inexperienced. She behaved frantically, really bucking in her fright and resentment of the monster, a pioneer among those that have superseded the Challengers and Greygowns—God rest their hooves!

Lindsey stopped the engine. The motorists were so alarmed for the girl's safety that they capered to her assistance, but she laughingly assured them all was well, and after bringing the terrified filly to a standstill and petting her arching neck, went off at a gallop, waving her handkerchief to show she was completely at her ease.

In the car with Lindsey were Blackett, Federal Member for the district, and Slattery and McTavish, the latter a lean old Scot with a naked upper lip in the middle of a stiff white beard. These two were neighbouring squatters but decidedly dunniewassals when compared with the social standing attained by Lindsey. They had a taint of the farmer about them and were mid-way between heaven and hell, as Bandicoot Sr expressed it. That the trio were riding about in the new car with Lindsey was such entertaining news that Dora risked telling it that night at tea, as the evening meal was called regardless of the bill of fare. Barry bit immediately.

"What were that old bogtrotter and that old sour belly Presbyterian McTavish doing with Blackett in Lindsey's motor car? Lindsey is very likely making-up to them for Rose Ann Slattery or Jean McTavish for that flash circus rider. He's so pushed for money, he's lowering the pedigree a bit—can't get the pure toff to take his flash son. It's always easier for girls to marry above them. Lindsey will be glad to rope in a goanna soon to save bankruptcy. And what was Blackett doing there? I supported him last election, but I won't again."

"Now Father, I think that downright silly," said Mother. "Blackett has to look after his supporters even if they do buy a motor car, and if he busied himself about their characters he wouldn't find enough to put him in Parliament."

"But you haven't seen him here. Isn't my vote and yours and Mabel's as good as old Lindsey's? and that old Slattery and McTavish running about in a motor car—the old fools! Can't they see that cars would only bring down the price of horses and oats?"

"Perhaps Mr. Blackett will come here to-morrow. He can't be in two places at once," said Mother, bringing peace for the time.