Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  “He'll come to a bad end that boy,” Miss Montaulk said.

  “Serve him right.”

  Geoffrey brought news of the great world, a ball in the Exhibition Hall, a levee at Government House, a race-meeting, a polo gymkhana. . . He winked. “Aren't the chaps breaking their necks to meet you?”

  “What chaps?”

  “Oh, chaps. Doug Peppiott was asking me.”

  “Is he tall, very brown, with a moustache.”

  “A ginger moustache—yes, that's him. He was asking me questions about you.”

  Harriet blushed. “He's very good-looking,” she said ingenuously. “Watch your step, Sis, he's a heart-breaker.” He chucked her under the chin. “See you later.”

  He waddled off importantly down the drive and out through the big iron gates. Oh, for somebody to scale those iron gates! It happened in books, anyway.

  She was passing the time by trying on a new dress in her room one afternoon when she heard the gates open and the weary clop-clop of a cab horse come up the drive. Looking out she saw Cash get down and run up the front steps. He had just returned from the mine and called to see her father, who was out. Impulsively, after glancing at herself in the mirror and touching the little kiss curl over her ear, she hurried downstairs into the hall.

  He was already there talking to the maid, who was giggling and red in the face. But Harriet had no time to notice this, for she arrived at the bottom of the stairs in such haste that she stumbled, caught her foot in the hem of her dress and would have fallen if he had not caught her up, lifted her, and set her on her feet. “Upadaisie, girly. Want to break your neck?”

  She was annoyed with herself. “I—I—what are you holding on to me for?” she said, trying to free her arm. “I've got two legs, haven't I?”

  “I like that!” Cash said, laughing. “You fall fair in a man's arms, then blame him for having them there.”

  “I didn't fall,” she said indignantly.

  He glanced up the stairs. “Were you making a bolt from that old fireeater?” She put her nose in the air and hurried past him into the drawing-room, thinking: “There, you made a fine fool of yourself. Now he'll think you only ran down to show yourself off to him.” She rushed at the piano and pummelled the keys till her ears were cool.

  It was a beautiful afternoon. The bougainvillea was in flower along the fence, like a tremendous Persian carpet hung out to air. A breeze from the river distilled the oversweet smell of pine-apples ripening on a string along the veranda. She began to sing without thinking what she sang:

  Alas, my love, you do me wrong To cast me off discourteously. And I have loved you so long, Delighting in your company.

  “Pretty,” he shouted, “pretty.”

  She started round on the stool. He was leaning against the door, his arms folded and his hat on the back of his head.

  “I didn't know you were listening,” she said coldly, rising.

  “Don't move. You make a pretty picture.” Against the cascade of green passion-fruit vine falling across the veranda her pallor and white dress were a cool vision for a hot man. “You sing nice too. Your pa told me.”

  Harriet smiled.

  “Ah well,” he said, “listening to little girls sing about their sweethearts won't feed the pigs. I'm off. Tell your pa I called.”

  Harriet's ears burned again. “Little girl,” she hissed at the piano, and pounded the keys till Miss Montaulk called down the stairs, “Please have a little consideration, Harriet. My poor head. . .”

  Her fury passed. “I suppose I am a frumpy little girl really,” she told herself. She returned to her room and studied her face. Yes, a skimpy, frumpy little girl. “And I'll never be anything else,” she said aloud, flying into a passion again, tearing her dress off, and stamping its fresh organdie under her heel. “I'll just wither up like a passion-fruit and HE'LL keep me here, pretending I'm only a little girl and don't need a husband, and that's all he wants.” She threw herself on the bed and punched and bit the pillow and cried.

  After this, the first time Cash had spoken more than ten words to her directly, he never came to see Cabell without looking in at the drawingroom to say hallo and tell her how pretty her dress was. But much as Harriet looked forward to the little break in her tedious life, Cash always seemed to rub her up the wrong way, so that she was tossing her head and flashing her eyes at him all the time he was with her—“like a match spluttering,” he said. He enjoyed the sight and always departed laughing.

  “Men must be awful fools,” she told Miss Montaulk. “He thinks I'm a little girl.”

  “So you are, my dear, or you should be very glad men think so. You're safe as long as they look at you that way.”

  “Who wants to be safe?” Harriet said. “And I'm not a little girl. I'm as much a woman as—as Emma Bovary was.”

  “Goodness!”

  “Yes, I am. I'm just like her. I've got the same feelings. I could do the same things. I could be terribly, TERRIBLY wicked.”

  Miss Montaulk's long upper lip came down over her buck teeth. “I should say you were! A girl who could understand what that book was about—and say so!”

  At last a little incident happened to open Cash's very dull eyes. He arrived one day when Cabell was out and sat in the drawing-room to wait. He kept his hat on as usual and his fat, black cigar in the corner of his mouth. Soon the stagnant air was so heavy with smoke that Miss Montaulk had to go out on the veranda and choke it up.

  “After that I reckon I'm as good as St George that smoked the dragon out and carried off the maid. What d'you say?”

  “I don't believe there are any St Georges.”

  “You wait. You'll be carried off.”

  “I was only thinking of my brother James,” Harriet said quickly. “He says he's in love with a girl and Papa is against it, and he's too frightened to run away and marry her.”

  “So you've been giving him advice too. It's easier to preach than to do.” “Men must be awful cowards then,” Harriet said. “If I was a man and I loved a girl I wouldn't care what people wanted.”

  He considered her, trying to make up his mind how much she knew what she was talking about. Her candid eyes of a young girl, serene, icy, humourless, with the colour hard and sharp on immaculate whites like fresh paint, stared back at him. “Such things happen in fairy-tales,” he said, smiling. “Not in life.”

  “If I was a man it would happen.”

  “Then it's a mercy to fathers that you're only a little girl.”

  She bridled. “I'm not a little girl. I'm a woman. Don't you think I understand? Perhaps I understand better than you. If any man ever falls in love with me you'll see whether it only happens in fairy-tales.” Cash was silent and thoughtful. Her words and the passionate way she spoke them laid open the drama, only vaguely suspected before, between Cabell and his daughter—in fact, the whole family. “Poor devil,” he thought, “he's brewing a shinnanikan for himself.” Then, looking again at those untouched eyes, that girlish, slight figure with the almost transparent hands, and her face burning with an indignation which always reminded him of the ineffectual brief fury of a match, it was for her he felt sorry. “Don't want to go expecting too much,” he said. “Damn hard place to get your own way in, the world. You want a hide like a rhinoceros.”

  Harriet tossed the world over her shoulder with a confident flick of her wrist. “I'm not afraid of it.”

  “No, that's the trouble. I reckon Jimmy wasn't afraid of it till the time came. Oh well, I suppose it depends on the man.”

  “Depends on the man!” she said contemptuously. “I'd wait till I died if I depended on a man. They shake in their shoes when he's about, the ninnies.”

  Cash laughed.

  She noticed again how pleasant the laughter-wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were and how strong the hands, covered with little black hairs, lying on his knees, but she demanded angrily, “What are you laughing at?”

  “You're such a thorough-going little spitfire I reckon
you'd be equal to carrying off St George and dragon and all.”

  “You're making fun of me.”

  “Not at all. I. . .”

  “Yes, you're making fun of me because you're a man and you want to think all women are just little girls. Like David's Dora. Oh, how I detest her—simpering little fool. Or else like the sticks in Sir Walter Scott's novels. And they're not. Or if they are I'm not. So there.” He chewed his cigar in silence again, slightly abashed. “How old are you, Miss Harriet?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Yes, yes, you're a grown-up woman all right,” he said, apologetically and as though it had just dawned on him.

  Harriet went very red, but conquered an impulse to turn her eyes away and hide her hands behind her. They had begun to misbehave in an unaccountable, idiotic way.

  “I daresay your pa'll be sending you home to England soon now,” Cash said.

  Harriet did not answer. Her father and all his schemes and false promises seemed suddenly remote. She felt happy and mischievous. “Would you miss coming here to laugh at me?”

  “I'd miss seeing you right enough,” Cash said. “You bet I would.”

  “But aren't you afraid I might run away with you, Mr St George?”

  “If I was twenty years younger you wouldn't be game to ask that.”

  “Oh, wouldn't I?” Her eyes shone at him through their long, brown lashes.

  He patted her hand and rose. “Now you're laughing at ME,” he said. She stood up and they both laughed gaily.

  Then he was laughing alone and she was forcing herself to smile while her eyes circled the floor. Before she knew what she was doing she was on her way up the stairs to her room. She threw herself on the bed and hid her face. “How shall I ever look at him again. Oh, I was terrible—bold.”

  When she returned to the drawing-room Miss Montaulk was busily fanning his cigar smoke out of the air. “What were you talking about?” she demanded.

  “Nothing,” Harriet said with guilty haste. “Oh, nothing at all.”

  “That's untrue. You were talking about men and women. I heard.” “And you were eavesdropping?”

  “I was doing my duty. I shall speak to your father about him coming in here. He's the kind of man who knows bad women.”

  “Oh!” Harriet's face stiffened. “That's a lie.”

  “You little fool,” Miss Montaulk said, her eyes shining with the same virgin, happy brightness as Harriet's in the cracked mask of rouge and powder. “You've fallen in love with him.”

  “Why, he's old enough to be my father,” Harriet said quickly.

  “I'll see that your papa puts a stop to it, anyway.”

  But there was no need for her to trouble. Harriet ended those visits herself.

  The next afternoon was a Sunday. Cabell took them for a walk in the Botanic Gardens. They passed Cash escorting a lady, who clung to his arm with possessive affection. She was a big, red-haired woman dressed in purple silk with a purple ostrich feather trailing a yard behind her hat, and much jewellery. She waved to Cabell.

  “Who was that with Mr Cash?” Miss Montaulk asked.

  “Some lady friend.”

  “Lady? A creature. He's a nice kind of gentleman to allow in the house with a young girl, I must say!”

  Cabell gave Harriet a startled look. Her face was blank and guileless, a trifle pale. Alone with Miss Montaulk he said, “I'm surprised to hear you talking that way in front of a child like Harriet. Of course she doesn't understand, but. . .”

  Her big teeth snapped hungrily at his ear. “Haven't you seen how she always dresses herself up when he comes?”

  Cabell watched, but whenever Cash was about Harriet stayed in her room. When he came to dinner she had a headache and excused herself. “I thought you liked Cash,” Cabell said.

  “I think he's odious—vulgar,” Harriet replied indignantly.

  Cabell was satisfied. Miss Montaulk reserved her opinion. Then a new development in his tangled family affairs drove the matter from Cabell's mind.

  Chapter Five: Larry at the Crossroads

  The manager at the Reach wrote begging Cabell to come back quickly. The shearers were giving trouble and all the wool would be ruined.

  He was a decent young fellow named Bellamy, a wool-classer by trade, and Cabell had given him the job for his usual double-headed reason—because he remembered Bellamy's mother as a gay young girl in the early days of the valley before the bush had broken her spirit, and because he counted on Larry and Emma's old regard for the Bellamys to keep the peace at the Reach while he was away. But he was wrong. Between the lines of the letter it was easy to see that six months of fighting the passive resistance of Larry and Emma had broken Bellamy's nerve.

  He closed the house up and hurried back to the station with Harriet and Miss Montaulk to find things even worse than he expected. The first big strike in Australia, a maritime strike, was just starting. He saw its insolent manifestos placarded on trees and fences all the way from Brisbane. As the coach was galloping out of Pyke's Crossing some shearers hooted him. He recognized Goggs.

  Bellamy looked done up. “The washers've been here for five days. They won't do a hand's turn till they get another sixpence.” “Shear in the grease.”

  “The shearers won't sign on unless you pay the washers.”

  “What'd you do with them?”

  “I tried to argue, but. . .”

  “You milk-sop, what's the use arguing. Bang their heads together.”

  “There are forty heads all told,” Bellamy said dryly.

  “I'll soon fix them. This is Larry's doing.”

  “No, it's not Larry. It's more than that. It's something that's sprung up all over the country. They're forming a union. Organizers are going around everywhere. There's one in the valley now. He holds meetings. It's like a Methodist revival.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A fellow named Coyle.”

  “Coyle, eh?” Cabell said, got his whip, and rode out to the camp where the washers and shearers had established themselves. They were derisive. He wasted no more words but hurried to Pyke's Crossing, combed the pubs, hired every available horse, and at the end of ten days had a new gang of shearers at work. Then he sacked Bellamy and brought in Custard, the north countryman he had saved from being lynched at Larsen's Bakehouse, to be manager.

  Still things did not go well. On the fourth day of the shearing, when Cabell was busy going over the books in the store, he heard shouts. The shearers had knocked off and were crowded around a man delivering a speech. Recognizing Coyle, Cabell got his gun, whistled up the kangaroo dogs, and set off to see what was afoot.

  The men saw him coming with the gun and the dogs, and some of them made for the shed, calling “Look out, here's Rusty.”

  “What're you scared of,” Coyle said. “A man with a gun against twenty of yous, against twenty thousand of yous? You're scared because you don't know how to stick together, as mates should; and that's what I'm here to tell you. Join the union, boys, and don't scab on your mates no more, and it won't be long before he's looking down the barrel of the gun, not you. As mates we stand, as scabs we fall—that's the ticket.”

  Cabell went up to the fence. “Coyle, come down before I pull you down.”

  “You know me and you know him,” Coyle said. “Will you stand by and let a mate. . .”

  But Cabell had him by the boot, and he came down on his back in the dust. He rose slowly, brushing his coat and looking at Cabell with his dead, cold, truncated look, like a sleep-walker or a blind man.

  “You know what I told you last time if I saw you on my property again?”

  “It's not your property. It's everybody's. You only stole the use of it.”

  Cabell called the dogs to heel. “See that gate?” He nodded to the front gate, a good quarter of a mile away. “I'll give you a minute and a half to get there before I let the dogs go.” He pulled his watch out. “Get!”

  Coyle picked up his swag and already running waved to t
he men, “I'll be back, mates.” He had fifty yards to go when Cabell, true to his threat as Coyle knew he would be, sooled the dogs after him. They vanished into the long grass and appeared on the flat, their hunched backs red in the sun. Coyle was astride the gate as the dogs reached him and leapt snapping at his legs. He kept them off with his swag and fell away safe into the road.

  Intimidated, the men returned to work, Cabell to the store.

  Emma was waiting for him. He tried to pass her without speaking but she caught his sleeve. He was surprised, seeing her so close for the first time in a long while, to notice how she had aged. The skin which used to be moulded tightly to her jaw and cheek-bones now hung in spongy bags. Her shoulders sagged. It was as though some vital sinew had snapped, as though her face had been broken into little pieces and put together again carelessly. He freed his arm but she followed him to the counter where his books lay open.

  “I've never asked you for but one thing, Derek,” she said, “and I've given many.”

  He said nothing.

  “Now I want to ask you again—I'll go down on my knees if you like—to make Larry manager at the Reach if you must have a manager.”

  “You must be barmy.”

  “Perhaps I am. But think of all that's happened in these years. It's not much to ask.”

  “Holding a gun at my head again, eh?”