But, bubbling and outraged, Mrs Bowen turned on him. “You stay where you are, young man. You make all the trouble, then you think you can just run away. Indeed. Where will you run to? The public house, I suppose, and tell all those good-for-nothings your friends what a fine fellow you are, bringing disgrace on this poor girl. . .”
“I don't understand.”
“Now don't lie to me, James Cabell. I know all. Deny that puppy Douglas Peppiott is your friend.”
“He is my friend, yes.”
“A fine friend! A harum-scarum hooligan. A nice one to talk. With his family. A grandfather who took a stockwhip to his wife and then drowned himself if you please, and a grandmother who. . . well never mind.” She leapt at Jennis. “What are you listening for, you wicked eavesdropper? Have I wasted all my love and care to raise a girl who listens at keyholes as well as leads young men on to make a fool of her? Leave the room at once. I've got something to say to this—creature. And don't listen at the door.”
Undisturbed by her mother's reproaches and flurried scurrying to and fro, to which she was used, Jennis obediently gathered together her book, crochet-work, handkerchief, and fan, rose, brushed her dress, and trailed leisurely from the room, smiling at James as she passed and for a moment blotting from his agitated spirit everything except his urgent desire. It swept over him when he saw the door close on her as a fear that he had seen her for the last time, and gave him the strength to say, “Mrs Bowen, there's something I want to tell you. It's about Jennis and me.” Mrs Bowen bounced off the sofa and plunged at him, seized the lapel of his coat, and shook him. “Never you dare to mention my daughter again. Making her name a byword in low places with your plots and schemes. That's what you've done. MY daughter. She could hold up her head with any of you. There's no convict blood in her.”
She bounced back on to the sofa and smouldered and panted for some time while James hopped from one foot to the other and cursed the Peppiotts and cursed his father and sweated in anticipation of some awful revelation.
“That Lucy Peppiott,” she muttered. “'I ought to warn you' she says. 'They say James Cabell is going to elope with Jennis. Douglas heard it at a place called Queenie's. It's all over town.'” She plunged at James again. “Queenie's? What's Queenie's? A—a place?”
“It—it's a bar in the Royal Hotel,” James gulped.
“And that Peppiott woman had the cheek to say my daughter's name had been mentioned IN A BAR! With Mrs Astley looking on and smirking, mind you. Why, everybody knows what SHE came from. HER grandmother was nothing but a London fly-by-night and her father was that old Curry who got rich stealing other people's sheep. Once his wife had to publish her marriage certificate in all the Brisbane papers. He was a crow-minder in the old days and many's the time my mother saw him being flogged at the tail of a cart in Queen Street when she. . .” She stopped and wriggled on the sofa, then went a shade redder and looked at James more angrily than ever. “Well? What're you grinning at?”
“I'm not,” James said miserably.
“You're thinking of that nasty, vindictive story about my mother bringing her first husband Duffy in to be flogged. Don't deny it.” “I. . .” James gulped. “I. . .”
“It's a nasty, vindictive lie of your father's. He'll hear from my solicitors about it. My mother was a lady and her first husband—he was sent out for—for stealing a loaf of bread.”
James hung his head.
“You don't believe me? Oh, I know you think you'd be conferring an honour on Jennis, don't you? Yes, I heard what your father said about it. Or was it you said it in Queenie's?”
“I never said anything in Queenie's.”
“Well let me tell you. . .” She took hold of his lapel again and nearly pulled the coat off his back. “If it was true, all the honour would be on the other foot, young man, because Jennis hasn't got any of Duffy's blood in her and everybody knows who your mother was—and what your father was too, for that matter.”
James felt the room disappear in a sheet of flame. He came out of the haze to find Mrs Bowen squeezing his hands against her bosom and patting his cheek and crying, “Oh, my poor boy! What a wretch I was to say such things. It's not true. Your mother's a fine woman. And that's just what I felt like telling those two women this afternoon. 'You've got two lots of convict blood in you, Mrs Astley.' That's what I wanted to say. . . Oh, there I go again.” She fussed around him, clucking and bubbling, and pushed him on to the sofa. “Sit down, dear, and take it calmly now. Just tell me the truth. I only want to help you. There. There.”
But as soon as he opened his mouth and said, “I only know I love Jennis and. . .” she jumped up again and screamed, “There you are. I knew it. You WERE plotting to run away with the poor innocent girl and bring disgrace on us. You can't deny it. Lucy Peppiott told me. Thank God I've got a few friends left with all this backbiting and scheming going on. And vipers coming into the house and biting the hand that feeds them. Ah, blood will out!”
“I wasn't plotting to run away at all,” James protested. “I mean, I want to marry Jennis some day. You knew that, Mrs Bowen. But my father says. . .”
She swelled over him. “What does he say?”
He hesitated, understanding at last that just this it was which had upset her—that his father should have forbidden him to marry Jennis. “He won't let me. That's all. . .”
She snapped her lips together and looked him up and down. Then she collapsed on to the sofa and began to laugh, rocking to and fro, her big bosom rattling its trinkets, and the tears running down her cheeks, while James stared uncomfortably at the carpet. “Well of all the funny things! Derek Cabell won't let you marry MY Jennis, MY daughter. Doesn't think she's good enough for him. And what did he marry? And what did his brother-in-law Dirk Surface marry? And what's that same ragamuffin now—a butcher boy in Sydney. Did you know that? A common butcher boy!” (This was not quite true, and Mrs Bowen knew it as well as James. Dirk Surface, after leaving Winbadgery in 1867, had gone to Sydney and, nagged on by his wife, had become a very successful merchant. Starting with a butcher's shop he now owned many butcher shops and had interests in meat canneries and freezing works and other enterprises of the same kind. But it suited Mrs Bowen to distort these facts.) She went off into unreal shrieks of laughter again till James could bear it no longer.
“Mrs Bowen, please,” he said. “My father's old and obstinate. . .”
“Obstinate? He's wicked—criminal. And you can go straight back and tell him from me that I wouldn't have any of his sons marrying my Jennis if he WOULD let them, if he came crawling on his knees. Tell him that. And let me tell you that my Jennis could marry anybody she liked. Not ragtag and bobtail, but real gentlemen. When we were in Sydney last year Lord Clanmorice's son, the Governor's aide, came to see her every day. Yes, every day. That's the kind of husband my Jennis will have. And now you take your hat and don't let me see your face in this house again. 'A bog-trotter,' indeed. Isn't that what your father called my father? 'Her grandfather stole his fare to Australia.' Didn't he say that? Don't lie now.”
“Oh, Mrs Bowen,” James cried, rising from her wrath. “I'm not responsible for what he says. I've finished with him. I'm going to work.” “Work at what? Horse-racing and gambling and drinking like your brother?”
“No. I'll go out into the bush and take up land, and I thought that some day I might—if Jennis still wanted to—and I'd made enough money. . .”
“What, my Jennis in the bush! A cockatoo farmer's wife! Milking cows and breeding brats! So that's your plan! Here,” she dashed across the room, snatched his hat off the table, dashed back, lugged him to his feet, and hustled him to the door. “Leave my house at once. The bush! What impudence! She speaks French and plays the piano! Get out at once. Get out!”
James went clumsily, and benumbed by his thoughts hurried blindly down the stairs. As he opened the front door he heard a patter of feet behind and Mrs Bowen panted along the passage.
She took his hand. “J
immy, forgive me. I'm upset by those women. You're a good boy.” She pulled his head down and kissed it. “Perhaps if you made money enough to keep Jennis like a lady, well—I'll see she waits a couple of years for you, anyway.”
A couple of years to make his fortune! James opened his mouth to protest but she slammed the door.
Chapter Three: Pulls Them Down
James hurried away from the house where lights were beginning to appear against the dusk. He was lonely and full of self-pity now. The egotism of his youth, which had sent him to Flanagan with the bland assurance that the wily old politician would help him out of sheer affection, had had a sad blow. In the last two hours James had learnt something important—that life does not shower its gifts on the deserving. A simple and obvious fact, perhaps, but every one has to find it out for himself. James was very upset.
As he slouched along between big houses where the lamps behind open windows shone on tables laid for the evening meal he felt that no man had ever been so shamefully deserted and betrayed. Every one except himself had money and freedom to do what they wanted, marry whom they loved, go where they wished; but he, if he was to get what he wanted, must spend the best years of his life slaving like a nigger in the bush and turning himself into a bumpkin like those fellows he had seen in the train. No, it wasn't right, and James revolted against the idea that the only alternative to doing this difficult thing was submission to his father. Life could not be so hard, so cruel. There must be some way if only he could think of it. More and more depressed he strolled up and down Queen Street, thinking and finding fewer and fewer arguments to deny that he must either go west and make his own way or crawl ignominiously back to Sydney. Yes, it would be ignominious. What explanation could he give to Harriet, to Mrs Bowen, except that he was not up to doing what he had boasted he would do. He thought of Harriet's scornful eyes. Oh, hell! Oh, hell.
James did not know it, but he was passing at this moment the very spot where his father had sat by the roadside forty-seven years before, struggling with the same thoughts in the same crisis of his young life, when he had to choose between returning to England at the bounty of his aunt or fighting a tough country and its tough people for a bounty of his own. Like his father, James tried to shelve a decision by crossing the street to the Royal Hotel.
At this hour the bar over which Queenie, the town's most regal DEMIMONDAINE presided in a gown of sequins cut low into her breasts, was always full of bloods young and old—squatters in town for a racemeeting, a wool-sale, or a spree, fat business men in side-whiskers and pugareed straw hats, racketing young men about town, and citizens with white suits stained by the dust and sweat of the day, to all of whom, in this bebustled era of sanctified wives and pure sweethearts, the raucous humanity of barmaid and whore was a blessed release. Essentially the same mob Cabell had seen and cursed the day he came in here with Flanagan, but half a century sleeker and richer. Money was plentiful, drinking on a tremendous scale.
James entered the bar with the abashed shyness of a sober man among drunks, and looked around hoping to see Peppiott or Geoffrey and find some excuse for picking a quarrel with one of them. Peppiott was not there but Geoffrey was, plump and important beside Shaftoe, at the centre of a crowd drinking champagne out of beer schooners. They had just come in from the races, and the ex-mentor, ex-storekeeper, exgymnasium proprietor, now resplendent in clothes of a horsy cut, with a gold watch-chain on his fallen paunch, a diamond ring on his finger, and a grey billycock tipped on to the back of his rusty head, was holding forth on the afternoon's sport to a gathering of thirsty pub-crawlers who had accepted the invitation to crack a bottle with him. Echoing his curses, shadowing his gestures, and backing up his rowdy boasts Geoffrey revealed more than ever the idiotic resemblance of a poodle to its master. He too wore a grey billycock tipped back, thumbed the armholes of a check waistcoat, and had a watch-chain and the beginnings of a little pointed belly.
James elbowed into the crowd, their faces swollen and greasy in the hot lamplight. Standing beside Shaftoe he saw one of the squatters who had come down in the train with him—the man who brought fifteen thousand to blow in town after ten years in the Never-Never. He was very drunk and promised to be drunker, for as often as he emptied his glass Shaftoe filled it again.
“Yes, gentlemen,” Shaftoe was saying, “we as good as had twenty thousand quid in the old stocking when they came into the straight. The mare was a length in front and going strong. Then something happened. She just dropped out of the race as if she started running backwards. It wasn't the boy's fault—I'll say that. He rode her like Old Nick, but she finished second last and—bang went four thousand. Well,” he drained his glass, “Shaftoe can take a licking. Another bottle of pop, Queenie, and we'll toast the winner.”
“Another bottle of pop, Queenie,” Geoffrey's squeaky voice piped. Queenie brought the champagne and Shaftoe filled the out-stretched glasses, with special attention to the drunken squatter. “To the winner, God bless him!”
“God bless the winner,” Geoffrey chimed in, flushed with drink and gambolling around Shaftoe's heels. He caught James's eye and winked. James turned away in disgust and found Cash behind him, smiling.
“Not drinking?” Cash said.
“With them!”
“Have one with me.”
“I don't want to drink,” James said. His desire for companionship was gone. He felt too miserable.
Cash looked at him. “You look as if one wouldn't do you much harm. But come and watch me drink, anyway.”
James tried to protest, but Cash put a strong hand under his arm and pushed him up to the bar. “Besides,” he said, “we're the only cold-sober men here, our friend's been so free with his tipple to-night. Great sportsman, eh?”
James grunted.
“Go on now, you don't see many shouting champagne when they lose.” He banged the bar. “Queenie, dear, a rum.”
Queenie sorted herself from the bevy of minor Queenies behind the bar, took the bottle from the shelf, and sailed massively towards them, pursued by yearning eyes, deftly evading eager paws, and sending back an impartial flash of gold-filled teeth. She had an eye like a piece of agate under the bang of golden hair and a voice accustomed to shouting down obstreperous cattlemen and miners, but both became liquid and warm when she looked at Cash and said, leaning her dimple towards him: “Oh, Mister Ca-ash. I am glad to see you. Where've you been hiding all this time?”
“Not hiding, Queenie, my love. Only down to Melbourne on business. I just got off the boat.”
“I suppose you saw a lot of pretty girls in Melbourne,” Queenie said wistfully, glancing at her reflection in the mirror, framed with fat gilt nymphs and cupids, over the bar.
“Nothing I liked as good as you, Queenie.” He patted her cheek.
“Oh Mister Ca-ash!” She rolled her eyes and cuffed him affectionately. Urgent voices called her and she went off, her gaze lingering. Stroking his beard Cash speculated on her rich curves. “Love's a damn funny thing now, don't you think, Jimmy?”
James grunted again and turned away from the bar. “I don't know anything about it. And I'd better be getting along.”
Cash held him. “Wait a minute now, mate. Did I say something?” He studied James at arm's length, his eyes concealed under their mica shields. “Well, if you're in that much of a hurry, I won't keep you, but here, before you go. Will you help an old friend?”
“Help who?”
“Sambo.”
“What's wrong with him?”
“He's lying down in some drum in Frogs' Hollow with d.t.'s—skinned alive with his guts burnt out by this tipple they've been helping him knock his cheque down on.”
“Who has?”
“Shaftoe—who d'you think?”
“But I thought Sambo got ten thousand for his share in the mine.”
Cash finished his drink and wiped his beard on a big, navvy's handkerchief. “That's true. And Shaftoe brought him down here and helped him off with it. They bought a
racehorse and Sambo paid Shaftoe to get it trained. It ran to-day. Where did Shaftoe get four thousand quid to lose on it? It was Sambo's of course. Only it wasn't exactly as Shaftoe said. Sambo lost and Shaftoe won. The horse ought to've come in but they had a crook jockey and now the bookie, who was only another one of Shaftoe's outside pals, will get the horse too. He took a note on the horse against an extra five-hundred-quid bet.”
James was horrified. “My brother Geoffrey helped to do that!”
“No. He hasn't the nous. But he's picking it up. Cogged dice and marked cards and how to split a pound note—he'll know it all by the time your old man gets tired of paying his bills and kicks him out.”
James slumped against the bar. A crooked brother as well as an illfamed father and convict mother. “But what can I do?” he asked, throwing himself on the quiet SAVOIR-FAIRE he felt in Cash as the last remnant of his own confidence to deal with the apparently depthless cunning and evil of the world collapsed under this new blow. All at once the young manhood was gone out of him, and he was again a nervous, frightened boy with sensitive mouth and uncertain eyes.
He made a curious contrast to Cash, squat, ugly, and sunburnt, with a stub of black cigar gripped in white teeth shining through his amiable mouth and rocklike beard. Everything about Cash was rocklike: he was like a squat, ugly rock over which many storms had beaten, weathering it to a core of impervious metal. Yet he was handsome, too, in a way. Vigour transfused his monkey-face, and even the stiff clothes and hard little hat of his new prosperity took a romantic flow and swagger from his energetic gestures.
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