Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  Cabell got a grip on words again. “You fathead, James. D'you think I'd give a unionist the value of a scabby sheep!”

  “On second thoughts I'm sure you'll agree that it would be a very good scheme, Father. We'll talk about it another time. And that reminds me—sheep. . .”

  “You'll not say another word or I'll. . .” He felt over the empty table. “Anyhow, you'll not say another word. And what about sheep?”

  “That's a trifle. I had a government expert up to look over the pastures and he agrees the country is wasted on sheep. The fine grasses are all eaten out and. . . in short, I propose that we put the studs up for auction and get rid of the rest of the stock and try out what we can do breeding horses and stud cattle. Of course we wouldn't need all the land. We could sell some perhaps. But that's another thing to discuss later. Sometime I'd like to have a word with you about the new house, too. I don't ask anything for myself, Father, but one has to think of Julia. She's giving up a lot to let me stay here and carry on your work. Oh, I'm not saying that to ask for any special thanks from you. It's only my duty. . .”

  The old man listened to the toneless, wooden, eloquent, righteous voice. It stopped at last and he raised his face to James and whispered confidentially, “I wish I could see for a minute, James. Just for one short minute. I'D CHOKE YOU.”

  James looked down at his father's blind eye. It did not look blind, flashing up into his with a concentration of all the room's light. Inwardly, for a minute, he shuddered at the memory of the power that was in that eye once. Broken by the breadth of a pin's point—but broken for ever! He shook his head compassionately. Poor Father. Poor old Dad. He put a hand out to press the fist lying on the table, but thought better of it, sighed, and left the room.

  Chapter Six: Husband and Wife

  Needless to say these things were not done all at once, but time was on James's side. The old man was like the great ant-eaten tree which has ridden gales for a century, stunting everything that grows in its shade, sucking all the blood of the earth to itself with its long, greedy roots till one night comes a little wind which hits it just in the right place and down it goes, and everybody sees with wonder how frail a tree it really was.

  Having delivered his ultimatum James was alarmed at his own temerity. Surely that shattered stump of a giant would put forth new limbs, new choking and ineradicable roots. The old man stayed in his room for a week, taking his tray of food from Ah Lung at the door. One night as James was walking along the veranda, wondering nervously what schemes the old man was hatching in his dark lair, he heard the harsh, ugly, ridiculous and most moving of all sounds, a man crying. He stopped, unable to believe his ears, then tiptoed to the door and listened. Yes, his father was crying.

  He opened the door and entered, struck a match. The old man was sitting on his bunk with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, his face twisted in that funny grimace which makes grief seem most terrible. Around him on the dirty and rumpled bed-clothes Harriet's jewels were scattered. In the brief splutter of the match they sparkled with cold, hectic gaiety, repudiating the old man's sorrow and his effort to draw from them some warm comfort of memory, some odour of the personality they had decorated. They were like pitiless eyes turning from the boredom of his tale with coquettish interest in a new-comer, like an old man's weary and derisive whores.

  James's first emotion was of jealousy, then of Spartan disgust at the sight of a man's beard wet with tears and a face which had seemed dead to feeling so helplessly contorted by its grief, and then amazement at the discovery that all these days his father had not been gathering his forces for a struggle but brooding childishly—like an old woman rather than a man, James thought—over these bits of jewellery.

  “Come now, Father,” James said, “what's the matter?” He had to repeat it several times and shake him before the old man noticed that he was in the room. But he paid no attention nor tried to control himself, his broken manliness for the moment without shame.

  A second match showed James the unexpected meagreness of his halfnaked body, the ribs sticking through the white skin, the chest fallen in, the arms withered to the bone, and all the irrecoverable wastage of age; but what most astounded his mighty awe of his father was the realization that he, who kept little grudges burning for years, had forgiven Harriet. James took after his father in that; his heart was a storehouse of unforgotten injuries, too, and he felt that forgiveness was a more convincing sign of weakness in a man than even tears. James began to believe what he had been telling himself for weeks, that the old man's will was dying.

  Cabell was about the house again in two or three days, as crapulous and combative as ever, but his voice sent cold shivers of apprehension down James's spine no more. With the aid of new managers and new spies, among whom Goggs quickly insinuated himself into a high place, he set to work on his plans for reorganizing his father's affairs, hardly bothering to explain what he did but, when he became too obstreperous, letting the old man taste his impotence in an attempt to make men who took their cue from James and were no longer in awe of him do as he wished. Furiously then Cabell, guided by Sambo, the only faithful one, rode about the station cursing at overseers who listened and said, “I'll ask Mr James about it,” enjoying his futile shinnanikan after going in terror of his name for so many years, till he wore himself out and returned, with voice frayed and palms torn where the nails of his clenched fists had cut into the flesh, to sulk a week out in his room. Hard times they were for Sambo, who went back to punish them with his own enfeebled fists for the grins Cabell could not see.

  At the end of a year the valley had changed again. Surveyors cut up the lush river flats. The old shearers of Ninety-one came and listened suspiciously to James, winked at each other, and went away baffled. “A catch in it somewhere,” they opined. But some of them returned, the settlement filled, humpies and fences went up, corn and cotton and fruit plantations patched the grey landscape with alien colour. The O'Connors built a store, Mr Tomlinson, with James's help, a church and later a parsonage where Miss Montaulk became his housekeeper. Goggs, genuine old Ninety-oner, borrowed money from James and opened a pub, borrowed more and lent it at interest till he had half the struggling poor devils in his clutches. But that was still in the future. For the moment James contemplated his work with a glowing sense of feudal largess, strutted among his tenants like a true country gentleman, and delivered bad advice about experimental agriculture.

  Then there was Larry, freed after two years in prison and married to the daughter of Berry, not perhaps a very creditable connexion, as Berry was one of these Labour fellows who had got into parliament somehow and kept alive the fiction that the pioneers of This Great Free Land of Ours were men of the basest, mercenary motive, to illustrate which, James was annoyed to see, his father's name was still often cited. But it might have been worse with Larry, who had shown an inclination, on leaving jail, to tramp around the country in the lowest kind of company, refusing all James's offers to send him to America and pay him a remittance as long as he stayed there, until Berry found him and took him home. A less upright man than James would then have washed his hands of Larry, but he saw, in drafting Cabell's will, that Larry was not forgotten. “Nobody shall say I did my brother out of what he had a right to expect.”

  Cabell's opposition flared and died, flared and died, becoming weaker and weaker, but he had one victory. James did not succeed in pulling down the weather-beaten old homestead, in the fusty darkness of which he, like his father, felt the ghosts scuttle from a room as he entered it, leaving the air vibrant with their passing. James almost saw the hem of his mother's dress swish round the end of the passage, her sad face staring from the little windows, almost heard the lisping patter of her feet on the kitchen flags. Here, still alarmingly, the past spoke to him. The place smelt of rot, decay, and death. Its beams crumbled at a touch, and James had fantastic moments of forgetting about white ants and imagining that the walls were saturated with some evil virus distilled
from the deeds done here, a virus transmitted into his own blood and bones perhaps, he thought, because he was never able to forget what Cash had told him. He wanted to burn the place down, scarify with flames the earth on which it stood, dank and infested with fungoids and sickly grass. He sent to England for photographs of Owerbury House, had architects design a mansion in the same style, only bigger, to crown the slope, engaged builders, and prepared to move into the homestead at McFarlane's till the new house was ready. Cabell listened to his plans without comment, but at the last moment, when the coach was ready to carry them across the valley, he rebelled. If they wanted to burn the house down let them, but they'd burn him in it. They could rob him of his money but they weren't going to build a prison for him. He was less lonely with his ghosts than he would be in the new life James was bringing to the Reach, new snooty servants, gentlemen jackeroos, chattering hordes of “society jackanapes” who had begun to visit Julia. Short of carrying him to the coach, with the hands and servants looking on, there was nothing James could do, except smile compassionately, crack his knuckles, and say, “Why, of course, Father, it's just as you wish. I thought you'd be more comfortable, that's all.” So the luggage was unloaded and they came back into the house, its floors bereft of covering, its walls of the books and pictures and bric-a-brac James had brought from England, more repulsively hostile than ever. James could not stomach it, so he cleared away the garden on one side and built a new wing, temporarily he promised Julia. Surely time was on his side. Time would burn the old house, purge the haunted air, sweeten the smell of the past, and even, at last, bury that foul parody of a father that the other, nobler father might shine before men.

  “If you're depending on him to die we'll be in this cowshed of a place for the next fifteen years,” Julia said. Julia's voice was a sustained, shrill, metallic vibration of nerves screwed down as tight as piano wires. Her astringent elegance was turning to sharp points of bone, her wit to a waspish, spinsterish exasperation, her insouciance to a dead formalism of smiles, words, and gestures which covered her personality as frost covers a lovely flower. She was still beautiful—or rather one felt that there was beauty somewhere under the hardened face, the beauty rusting from a musical instrument which no one any longer tries to play. Looking at herself in the mirror she saw the epitome of her desolation in the spectacle of her body withering and fading from the beautiful clothes which once had husked it as harmoniously as the orange-skin the orange. When she compared the two Julias, the one which belonged to these dresses, the one which belonged to them less and less, she sometimes wept a little.

  “Good heavens,” James said, “of course I'm not depending on him to die. What an idea!”

  “What CANT.”

  James put his chin up and looked at her along the knife-edge of his nose. “I suppose I can hardly expect you to feel a jot for my father when you showed so little feeling for your own poor mother.” He eyed the dress of powder-blue foulard she was wearing and glanced at the band of black crape on his own arm.

  A few months before Aurelia had fallen down the steps of a house in Rome and ended a last fling. James had received reports of her junketings with horror, but as soon as the news of her death arrived he stretched his face, went into mourning, bought a stock of black-edged note-paper, and advertised the sad event in all the papers:

  At the Villa D'Este, Rome, on 15 March, 1897, Aurelia Considine (widow of the late Martin Augustus Considine, brother of Sir Josiah Considine, of the Oaks, near Fairlight, Sussex), and mother of Julia (Mrs James Cabell).

  A gracious friend from us is gone, A voice we loved is dead.

  Inserted by her loving Daughter and Son-in-Law.

  Julia's mirth was obscene and rather desperate. She got out her brightest clothes and wore them, flung anecdotes of her mother's most purple passages at him. He was coldly amazed. “Have you no respect for the dead, even if you had no love for the living?”

  Now she said, because she knew that nothing got through the wood so painfully, “You're a prize humbug and hypocrite.”

  A retort, hot and sour like bile, came up his throat, but he swallowed it.

  James was not a hypocrite. The suspicion of it would never torment a hypocrite as it tormented James. Which was the truth in him—this grave, equable, gentlemanly fellow whom everybody respected, whose aspirations were lofty, thoughts moral, and habits exemplary; or those dancing mad devils which made a witches' sabbath of his nights? If he was a hypocrite, the truth in him was this ugly thing which had come to him, he believed, from the past, from his mother the convict and that evil old man who had usurped his father's name. No, that could not be true. He denied his devils: they didn't exist. He denied his hatred and resentment against the old man on the veranda. He denied his unaccomplished desire. He denied the past: it was all a lie. Feverishly he clung to the forms and conventions of gentlemanliness, correct behaviour, respectable feeling, as interpreted at the heart of civilization.

  Here, on the edge of outer darkness, where devils breathed their native air, a starched shirt at the dinner-table was more than a starched shirt—a buckler behind which you fought for your soul. A gentleman could afford to walk down Piccadilly unshaven or, in the unimpeachable purity of a Carlton Terrace Club, dispute the opinions in a TIMES leading article, but put him in the middle of darkest Africa and he would sweat and suffer in the proper clothes at dinner each evening and become furiously Anglophile. . . or go to the dogs. So James, among horse-trainers and cattle-buyers, constantly reminded by his father of the changes bush life could work in a man, became, like Dr Barnett's father and many another colonial, more English than the English. But below this façade, what wretchedness, what confusion!

  Flanagan wrote to him saying that he would not be able to pay the money he owed Cabell, for which a bill was falling due within a month or two, and suggesting that James should call and see him next time he was in Brisbane.

  James went—oh, no, not in any spirit of revenge, not with hardened heart. Why should he feel that way? Flanagan had given him good advice, he had followed it, and he was very glad he had followed it—for to-day he was in a position to send Flanagan a message telling him to present himself at James's hotel within an hour and Flanagan would have to come. He could tell Flanagan that the bill must be met; he could sell Flanagan's house over his head. What would become of Flanagan then. And what would become of Jennis and of her husband, Doug Peppiott, who, as everybody knew, lived on the thin bounty of Flanagan and his father, both deeply entangled since the crisis of Ninety-three had brought them together? And what would be left of Mrs Bowen's fussy pride if he cared to pay her back for the things she had said to him in the drawing-room that day? If. . . but of course such an ignoble idea would never cross his mind.

  As he entered Flanagan's study and remembered, with the clarity of his life's sharpest experience, what had happened in this room nine years ago the idea did more than cross his mind: it possessed him in a convulsion of loathing for the fat, crafty face beaming up from the depths of an armchair.

  “Jimmy, me boy, me boy!” Flanagan cried with a joviality all the more patently hollow because he was laid out by a gouty foot. “Och! Ugh! Ow!” he interrupted his blandishing welcome, turning up the whites of his eyes with pain. “It's the devil of a thing to be old, Jimmy. Me sins are finding me out.”

  James said, in his woodenest voice, that he was sorry.

  “There now, waste no words on the shell of a man but sit down close and tell me about yeself. It's mighty wrong in ye not giving your friends a sight of ye before this.”

  “I've been busy,” James said unresponsively. “You wished to see me, I believe?”

  “Sure and I wished to see ye. Aren't I telling ye the sight of ye's worth pounds of physic. Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy, it was a sad day for me when your da cut the silken threads which bound ye to this house.”

  “I believe you wanted to talk business with me,” James insisted.

  Flanagan abandoned poetry for base matters wit
h another smile, bravely distilled from his agony. “That's generous of ye, Jimmy, saying that, because it's ye that have the right to all the talking.”

  “I received your letter of the fourteenth instant,” James said, “intimating that you would be unable to meet your obligations to my father.”

  “That's a fact, and I blush to confess it, even to an old friend like you.” “I believe the sum is thirty thousand pounds, plus current interest, which you owe him?”

  “That's the sum right enough. But of course it's only a manner of speaking to say that I owe it.”

  “I think the bill has your name on it?”

  “Sure, sure, but what's Michael Flanagan, Jimmy? Behold the man. A breathing corpse, a crayture nearly delivered from the cares of the world and responsibility for mortgages and bills of sale. It isn't him owes ye that thirty thousand, me boy, it's his poor, innocent, helpless granddaughter that must turn in the bloom of her young womanhood and pay for the mistakes and extravagances of her grandfather.” He shook his sly old head. “Ye can imagine the weight of it on me conscience, leaving that child at the mercy of heartless creditors. Och now, don't take offence. I'm not calling ye a Shylock or nothing, but it sends cold shivers up me when I think what could be done to her according to the strict letter of the pitiless law.”

  James stared into the garden, defending himself behind the memory of the day he sat in this very spot, perhaps this very chair. “Have you anything to suggest?” he said, unwilling yet to decide whether he would punish Flanagan with magnanimity or a writ of attachment.

  “What would I be suggesting to you?” Flanagan said humbly. “Whatever ye say I'll thank ye for with a gratitude that will echo through every heart in me house and make us your devoted slaves for ever.”

  “Why should it be something you'd thank me for?” James snapped.