James had a brief struggle and got his wooden expression on. “Are you quite recovered?”
“Oh, quite. I was never far gone, you know.”
The first shot in a long battle. The tireless, stinging malice of her tongue surprised even James. Not an opportunity for ridicule, scorn, or slanderous DOUBLE ENTENTE did it let pass. He thought she must lie awake at night thinking of nasty things to say. Perhaps she did. She would not have had to work her invention hard, though: James was a very open mark.
This trip to England, legendary England, was an apocalyptic adventure and excited James to exclamations of naïve wonder. London: his first glimpse of a big city; the height of the buildings; the fog; the noise of the traffic; the multitudinous life; the wealth and luxury, the poverty and degradation; the Queen (“By jove, the Queen herself!”) driving down Whitehall (“In such a dingy coach!”); the changing of the Guard (“Don't gape, dear, they'll know you come from the colonies”); the Tower of London; Westminster Abbey (“And Wordsworth lies under that stone!”); the Bank of England (“Incredible!”); the Archbishop of Canterbury preaching in St Paul's; the Burlington Arcade (Good lord, his clothes were ten years behind the times); Covent Garden, Tetrazzini (“Don't clap as if it was a music hall in Brisbane, dear”); Watling Street (“Caesar might have stood here!”); “And this is the Old Bailey, my dear. You must have heard of it”; dukes and marquises by the dozen, butlers and footmen (“I do wish you wouldn't look as if you thought they would bite you”); the Lord Mayor's banquet and Mr Joseph Chamberlain asking him questions with respectful attention (“He knows of my father!” “No doubt they have a record of your mother, too”); a week at Owerbury (“So he really did belong here!”); Tenterburn Hill, the gorsebush in the yard, the crack in the north wall, the chimneys worn by the weather, the murky portraits of Cabells down in the hall—just as his father had told him (“Good lord, look, Julia, my father at eighteen!” “Really? It looks like another Tichborne Case, my dear.”)
Julia had been travelling since she was six years old. It was all as familiar to her as the back of her hand. She sighed and yawned. “Forgive me not sharing your colonial enthusiasms, my dear,” she said. Now Julia WAS a bitch, for she had once looked forward to being James's guide in this romantic Old Country.
“A Cabell came over with the Conqueror,” James's cousin, David Cabell, told them proudly.
“Indeed. You are twice distinguished then, James,” Julia said.
“How so?”
“Didn't you have ancestors who went over with the First Fleet?” She leant her face towards him, as if provoking him to smack it.
The temptation was sometimes almost too much for him. A red mist blotted out his sight and his hands itched to take her by the white, insolent throat and choke her. He went away by himself trembling, scared out of his wits by the violence of his feelings. “My God, can it be true what Cash said?”
His only protection was to deafen himself, blind himself, and make himself more wooden. He soon had a highly developed instinctive mechanism for repressing the least sign of interest or pleasure in the world around. A remarkably quiet fellow for a colonial, people thought. A bit TOO dry maybe, but a thorough gentleman.
Imperialism was in the bud. Cecil Rhodes, Jameson Raids, Kipling, and Our Splendid Empire! James found himself regarded as a distinguished visitor—son of one of Australia's greatest living pioneers, the chap who ran the Waterfall goldmine. Invitations to dinner-parties, house-parties, tea-parties, week-ends, hunts, shoots, drives, and whatnot caught him into the rhythm of a social life where his blindness, deafness, and woodenness passed for good breeding.
Politicians, journalists, investors, and the merely polite encouraged him to talk of his father and the way empires were founded. He complied, hesitantly at first. He told them of younger sons of good families leaving England like the old CONQUISTADORES with noble and romantic aspirations, of heroic fights with blacks, the ideal of a new British land shining before them like St James on his white horse at the battle of Otumba, and convinced his hearers
That nothing in the ages old
In song or story written yet,
On Grecian vase or Roman arch,
Though it should ring with clash of steel,
Could braver histories unfold
Than this bush story yet untold,
The story of their westward march.
In the process he convinced himself. A new conception of his father took root in his brain when he had been telling the story for two years, in fact a new father—a pioneer, a nationbuilder, a bearer of the precious torch to the earth's dark places, a selfless forerunner of progress, glorious sacrifice on the altar of England's mission to civilize the world. . .
Resigned? What an idea? He was grateful and content. Except just now and then at the end of a wet, bleak day in the company of wooden people. But he would surely get over that despair which gutted him like a blunt knife and left him hollow. Given time surely his devils would suffocate themselves and he, too, become as wooden within as he was without. It was his grand ideal and would be, if you like, his tragedy.
Chapter Six: Larry's Wander Years
AS for Larry, Harriet's other encouraging example. . . When he left the Travellers' Rest he rode to the crossing in the middle of the town and gazed north where the road to the Reach crawled over the downs. Then he spat and turned away. This simple act strengthened him, seemed to cut ties which tug-tug-tugged at him all the time. Let him have the Reach, let them fight—there was a continent waiting for him, as Berry said. Riding towards the hazy, western horizon, with the rise and fall of the road visible for miles ahead, Larry had that common feeling of Australians that no custom or loyalty binds them to any spot on the earth's surface, that all the wide country, from Leeuwin to the Gulf, and all its possibilities are theirs. A spacious feeling, an optimistic feeling which gave Larry the illusion that he was on the threshold of a new life and that the old, with all its disappointments and torments, was dead.
For two weeks he rode into an unknown land, a land of unrecognizable birds and flowers and trees, the flat, red land of the Inside. Its newness excited him and wiped away the lines of painful thought on his face, as though he really had sloughed a skin and left it behind with the past. The valley was a settled place with a busy road, well-beaten tracks, and water never more than a couple of miles away. Here, for tens of miles, there was no sign of man or beast or waterholes, only the silent, flat landscape which opened, day after day, upon silent flat landscapes, like the images in duplicated mirrors. The grass was white and the stunted trees were bluish-grey with delicate leaves. Over the clay the sand was only a few inches deep, precarious foothold for pastures and men. For miles, where fires had burnt out the scrub or the stupid greed of early settlers had cut it down, the sand had blown away and exposed the red clay like a great scalded wound. The sunlight scorched as though it came through a burning-glass and sparkled with the diamond clarity of a crisp winter's day. The stars were enormous and lurid with a steely light. The sky was bleach-white, like a roof of bone. There were rivers, dry beds of sand and waterworn stones with pools of slime every twenty or thirty miles. The strip of black earth lining the banks for two hundred yards on each side was the tidal mark of the rains. An unsubduable country, where men fought a truceless war with the sun, constantly advancing or retreating as the drought was broken or broke them. Some years the rain came and men made fortunes. Sometimes the rain did not come for years and they lost fortunes and their lives. Larry passed dried-up waterholes where the bones of cattle and sheep were feet deep. At the homesteads he found children who had never seen rain. One day he took a wrong turn at a crossing of two tracks and about sundown, when his tongue was beginning to taste like a piece of hot felt, he came on the naked skeleton of a man. The rags of the man's clothes were scattered about the track. He had gone mad with thirst and torn them to pieces. To shorten his agony he had climbed a tree, tied his belt to a branch, and tried to hang himself, but the branc
h had broken and the skeleton lay under the tree with the branch across its chest and the belt around its neck. Near-by was the man's wallet, stuffed with banknotes. Larry was superstitious and threw it down beside the skeleton. He knew that he was on a waterless track, within a few hours of his own end unless he could get back to the crossing and find a hole. At dawn next morning he reached a boundaryrider's hut. He did not see the man standing in the doorway: he saw only a trough of dirty brown water and plunged his head in beside his horse's.
Larry found work in the Never-Never, the land which stretches westward through the ancient, dead, inhuman heart of Australia and never ends. He stayed there a year. The obsessing struggle for life turned his thoughts outwards and encouraged the idea that the past and the thoughts which had tormented it were dead and done for. The past was not a favourite topic among the tough characters who supported life in these outposts—“every man-jack with a warrant out against him somewhere,” the overseer told Larry. They measured a man by his ability to ride, drink, use his fists, and hold his tongue. Larry passed muster.
Still, they were curious about him. They watched him. There were two of them in the hut where Larry lived out on the boundary, fifty miles from the head station. One of them was a bit off his head. Every night he used to walk a mile into the paddock, take off his clothes, leave them there and walk back naked to his bunk—“to trick the fleas.” The other one was a little man of prodigious strength, as though he had been a big man and the sun had shrunk him. He could kneel with his hands on the ground and rise with two men standing on his wrists. He was quite sane, only vague with that vagueness of men who have lived too long under the open sky with no roof to press their eyes down on the earth. His name was Chivers. He tried to talk to Larry, but before he got to the point he was trying to make, his mind wandered and he fell into silent, fierce thought. After a while he would jump up and grab his lead pencil and scribble furiously on the galvanized-iron wall, “Rome wasn't built in a day,” or “The proper study of mankind is man,” or “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.” The walls were covered with thousands of these tags, scraps of Greek and Latin, Euclidean diagrams, algebraic equations—straws of a drowning mind. Every time he met Larry he buttonholed him as if he had something important to say but he could never quite get at it. He peered into Larry's face and muttered, “Ah. Umn. Ah. Umn. Another time, another time.”
Then one day the ration-cart brought some old newspapers. A couple of nights later he looked up from studying them and said, “What'd you say your second name was?”
“Cabell,” Larry said.
“Ah.” His eyes lighted. “That's your old man then who owns the Reach where the strike was?”
Larry grunted.
“There's a bit here in the paper about him and the goldmine at Waterfall. Now I knew there was something you put me in mind of. It must've been a great strike!”
Larry grunted again.
“I read a bit there in the WORKER about you, how you stuck by the shearers and your old man give you a thrashing.”
Larry got up to go out.
“Wait a bit. There was something I wanted to get straight. Just a minute now. Let me think. Ah yes, how many blokes did you say were in the camp?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“You were there.”
“Of course I was there.”
“I read that four hundred blokes were there the night Coyle was pinched and only about half a dozen Johns. They must've been a poor lot to stand by and let a mate get taken like that. No wonder your old man thrashed them.”
Slow, suspicious thought reawakened on Larry's face and drew his brows together. “What d'you mean?”
“Just a minute. Just a minute.” Chivers waved him off. He was thinking. After a while he dashed to the wall and wrote, “There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
“What d'you mean saying about us—them blokes not rescuing Coyle?” demanded Larry.
“Another time,” Chivers said impatiently.
When everybody was asleep Larry got out of his bunk and took the papers down from the rafters to see what it was Chivers had been reading. He found it after a long search—Cabell's speech to the annual meeting of shareholders about the new developments at the mine. Memories of the valley came back irresistibly to him, its blue hills and green paddocks, its ever-flowing river, the rich scrub on its ranges, the purple lotus in its waterholes, the familiarity of its life, and he was all at once sick and tired of the sun-charred plains, the sand, the parching heat, the men he did not know, sick and tired for the sight of a hill and the men and the places he had known from childhood. But when he thought of that old life he thought of his father, of the injustices he had suffered and his shameful, cowardly defeat, and when he thought of the men, his mates, the guilt of his betrayal agitated him again. There was no stopping his mind once he let it free on this tack.
Chivers watched him speculatively for several days, scratching his head and whispering to himself. It got on Larry's nerves at last.
“Who the hell're you looking at?”
“You put me in mind of something I wanted to say,” Chivers said. “Something I wanted to ask.”
“I don't ask you no questions, do I?” Larry said angrily.
The door opened and the madman came in, stripped to the absurd nakedness of a skinny body with a black beard like a covering in the wrong place. “Tricked 'em that time,” he grinned. “Come home a new way through the scrub.”
Chivers looked at his hairless legs. “That's it. You were at the strike up Cabell's Reach, weren't you, the time they raided the hut and took the scabs off without any pants? That must've been something to see.”
Larry pushed his chair back.
“Wait a bit now—something I want to ask you. About that bloke Coyle who got three years. How come? Weren't you all his mates—four hundred of you? They must've been a pack of go-alongs!”
“There was a lot of police there,” Larry mumbled at his questioning eye.
“I read a bit about it in the papers—about half a dozen it said.” “There was more, I tell you. There was police and guns.”
“That's how it was, eh? I thought there must be something. Mates ought to stick together. Hold on. That's what I wanted to ask. I read where at the trial there was a scab who said he saw Coyle fighting with one of the shearers outside the shed and the shearer laid Coyle out and handed him over to the police.”
“That's a lie.”
“No, it ain't. I read it. A bloke named—what was his name? One of the strikers. He turned against his mate and helped the police catch him. It was in the WORKER.”
Larry twisted his soft beard, which licked sideways from twisting as though a strong wind was blowing across his face.
“I remember,” Chivers said. “Goggs was his name—that's it.”
Larry smiled shiftily. “Goggs—yes.”
“Ain't it right what I said?”
“I heard something,” Larry mumbled. “I didn't get the hang of it.”
Next morning when they woke up he was gone. He got his cheque from the homestead and rode another sixty miles to the nearest grog shanty, handed the cheque in, and came to three weeks later in a litter of empty brandy bottles. He saddled his horse, took the bottle of rum and the sovereign the pub-keeper gave him, and rode away, but half a mile down the track, as the plains opened out before him again with their urgent questioning of a destination, he turned and rode back to the shanty. He drank his saddle and bridle and after that his horse, then started on foot for Brisbane five hundred miles off. His body was bruised and his face was patched with flyhaunted scabs. He did not remember how he had fought the pub-keeper and his chucker-out when they turned him away to face the world again.
He tramped to the coast and back to the west and down to the coast once more. He could not rest anywhere for more than a week or two. He navvied on a new railway, drove a mob of cattle across the Downs, was yardman in a Brisbane hotel, broke horses, jumped
the rattler, humped his swag, joined the rush to Kalgoorlie. In Doyle's hotel in Kalgoorlie one night a miner from Waterfall recognized him. “Jesus, mates, here's Larry Cabell. His old man damn near owns Waterfall and here he is on wages.”
“Jesus, your old man owns Waterfall?”
They gathered round to hear the story of how Cabell and Larry had a fight and Cabell kicked Larry out. “He was a proper old bastard. He's got everybody dead scared.”
“Who's scared?” Larry said. “I cleared out myself.”
After that he thought he saw the doubtful look in everybody's eye. He hung back from the riotous comradeship of the camps and the pubs and was lonely. He felt no permanence, no continuity, no purpose in his life suspended over an uncompleted past. He worked a passage back to the east. In Sydney he heard of a boat preparing to take a hundred shearers to the New Australia settlement in Paraguay and grasped at the idea of going with them, but dropped it at once, remembering what Coyle had said to him about going to South America and understanding, at last, that what he wished to flee from would follow him like a shadow till it was satisfied or he died. In the same article he read that some citizens were getting up a petition to demand that the prisoners condemned during the last strike under an old English law no longer in force in England should be released. He never looked at a paper again. He hoped that Coyle would die in prison.
Wandering slowly north where the tug-tug-tugging in his breast drew him, he came to Pyke's Crossing. Outside Liam O'Connor's store a hearty voice accosted him, “If it isn't Larry.”
Berry was coming out of the store with a bag of sugar on his shoulder. He dumped it hastily into his cart and ran across the street to catch hold of Larry's arm before he could escape. “Man, wait a minute, can't you?” Then his smile went and he shook his head. “Have you been to hell and back?”
Larry had changed—much for the worse. He was dirty and ragged. His boots were coming to pieces and his hat had half a brim. A patch of hessian covered the seat of his trousers. Exposure had scarified his skin and burned it nearly black. Hard walking and short commons had taken all the flesh off his bones. Booze had reddened the rims of his eyes. And a hand to mouth life had given him the look, half-menacing, half-timid, of an outcast dog. He tried to get past with a gruff “Good day,” but Berry kept him.
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