Best Australian Short Stories

by Douglas Stewart

  I asked Jeans how many children he thought he had. He didn’t seem certain, but after due deliberation said there might be thirteen in all. He had probably lost count, for I am certain I tallied fifteen—seven sets and one odd one.

  When the washing-up was done, and half of the family were bedded down, Larry dragged a tangle of old harness from the other room, and sat for two hours painfully piecing it up with cord, and his wife sat opposite him, silent and blank of face, mending one set of rags with another—I perched upon a stool watching the pair, studying one face after the other, irritated at length by the sheep-like immobility of both, thinking it would be a relief if Jeans would suddenly break out and do something desperate, something to show that he had not, in spite of appearances, got beyond the possibility of sanguinary revolt, but he worked on steadily, uncomplainingly, till the boy with the unique freckles came hurrying in with the intelligence that the old horse was “havin’ a fit’r somethin’”. Jeans did not swear. He said, Is he but?” and put aside his harness, and went out, like a man for whom life has no surprises.

  The selector was over an hour struggling with his hypochondriac horse, whilst I exchanged fragments of conversation with Mrs jeans, and went upon various mental excursions after that spare room. It appeared that the Jeanses had neighbours. There was another family settled seven miles up the gully, but Mrs Jeans informed me that the Dicksons, being quiet and sort of down-hearted, were not very good company, consequently she and Jeans rarely visited them. I was indulging in a mental prospect of the jubilation at a reunion of the down-hearted Dicksons and the gay and frivolous Jeanses when Larry returned from his struggle with the horse. He resumed his work upon the harness without any complaint. His remark that “Them skewball horses is alwis onreasonable” was not spoken in a carping spirit, it was given as conveying valuable information to a stranger.

  At eleven o’clock my host “s’sposed that p’r’aps maybe” I was ready to turn in. I was, and we went forth together in quest of the spare room. The room in question proved to be a hastily-constructed lean-to on the far corner of the house, at the back. Inside, one wall was six feet high and the other was merely a tree-butt. My bunk was built against the butt, and between the bunk and the roof were about eighteen inches of space. That bunk had not been run up for a fat man. After establishing me in the spare room Jeans turned to go.

  “Best bar the door with a log, case o’ the cow,” he said. “If she comes bumpin’ round in the night, don’t mind. She walks in her sleep moonlight nights.”

  It only needed this to convince me that I was usurping the customary domicile of the meditative cow. The room had been carefully furbished up and deep carpeted with scrub ferns. But the cow was not to be denied.

  Weary as I was, I got little sleep that night. I had fallen off comfortably about half an hour after turning in, when I was awakened again by some commotion in the house. Half a dozen of the children were blubbering, and I could hear the heavy tread of Larry, and the equally heavy tread of his wife, moving about the house. Presently both passed by the lean-to, and away in the direction of the range. For another half-hour or so there was silence, and then the one-horned cow came along and tried my door. Failing to open it, she tried the walls and the roof, but could not break her way in, so she camped under the lee of the structure, and lowed dismally at intervals till daybreak.

  When I arose a scantily-attired small boy generously provided me with a pint pannikin three-parts full of water. The water was for my morning bath, and the small boy was careful to warn me not to throw it away when I was through with it. This youngster told me that “Dad an’ mum, an’ Jimmy” had been out all night hunting Steve. Steve, I gathered, was the one enterprising child in the household, and was in the habit of going alone upon voyages of exploration along the range, where, being a very little fellow, he usually lost himself, and provided his parents with a night’s entertainment searching for him in the barren gorges and about the boulder-strewn spurs of the range. How it happened that he was not missed till nearly midnight on this occasion I cannot say, unless the father and mother were really as ignorant of the extent and character of their family as they appeared to be. Mrs Jeans was the first to return, and she brought Steve with her. The dear child had not been lost, after all. Incensed by some indignity that had been put upon him during the afternoon, he had “run away from home”, he said, and slept all night in a wombat’s hole about two hundred yards from the house. There his mother found him, returning from her long, weary search. The incident did not appear to have affected her in any way; she looked as tired and as heart-sick as the previous evening, but not more so.

  “You know we lost one little one there”—she extended her hand towards the low, rambling, repellent hills—”an’ found him dead a week after.”

  Larry returned half an hour later, and his apathy under the circumstances was simply appalling.

  We had fried onions and bread and tea for breakfast, and immediately the meal was over Larry, who I imagined would be going to bed for a few hours, appeared in front of the house leading his deplorable horse. He was bound for the mine, he said. I put in that day exploring the tunnel, examining the immovable mill, hunting for specimens in the quartz-tip, and listening to Leen’s cheerful weather prophecies; and Jeans and his soured quadruped dragged logs to the mine from a patch of timber about a mile off, which patch the men alluded to largely as The Gum Forest.

  Returning to the homestead at sundown we found the children fighting in the dust and the one-horned cow meditating at the door as on the previous evening. I fancied I detected in the eye of the cow a look of pathetic reproach as I passed her. Tea that evening consisted mainly of roast onions. Jeans felt called upon to apologize because the boys had been unable to trap a rabbit for my benefit.

  “Now’n agen, after a rainy spell, we’re ’most afraid the rabbits is a-goin’ to eat us, an’ then when we’d like a rabbit-stoo there ain’t a rabbit to be found within twenty mile,” said the settler impassively. “When there is rabbits, there ain’t onions,” he added as a further contribution to the curiosities of natural history.

  The second night at Scrubby Gully was painfully like the first: Mrs Jeans stitched, Mr Jeans laboured over his tangle of harness, and the brood rolled and tumbled about the room, raising much dust and creating a deafening noise, to which Larry and Mary his wife gave little heed. When a section of the family had been parcelled up and put to sleep, I was tempted to ask Jeans why he continued to live in that unhallowed, out-a-the-way corner, and to waste his energies upon a parched and blasted holding instead of settling somewhere within reach of a market and beyond the blight of tangible and visible despair that hung over Scrubby Gully and its vicinity.

  “Dunno,” said Jeans, without interest, “’pears t’me t’be pretty much as bad in other places. Evans is the same, so’s Calder.”

  I did not know either Evans or Calder, but I pitied both from the bottom of my heart. Jeans admitted that he had given up hope of getting the timber off his land, though he “suspected” he might be able to handle it somehow “when the boys grew up”. He further admitted that he didn’t know “as the land was good for anythin’ much” when it was cleared; but his pessimism was proof against all arguments, and I went sadly to bunk, leaving the man and his wife working with slow, animal perseverance, apparently unconscious of the fact that they had not slept a wink for over thirty hours.

  The cow raided my room shortly after midnight. She managed to break down the door this time, but as her intentions were peaceful, and as it was preferable rather to have her for a roommate than to be kept awake by her pathetic complaints, I made no attempt to evict her, and we both passed an easy night.

  I was up early next morning, but Mr and Mrs Jeans were before me. They were standing together down by the aimless dogleg fence, and the hypochondriacal horse lay between them. I walked across, suspecting further “unreasonableness” on the part of the horse. The animal was dead.

  “Old man, how
’ll you manage to haul those logs in now?” As Mrs Jeans said this I fancied I saw flicker in her face for a moment a look of spiritual agony, a hint of revolt that might manifest itself in tears and bitter complainings, but it passed in the instant.

  Jeans merely shook his head, and answered something indicative of the complete destruction of his faith in “them skewbald horses”. We had bread and onions for breakfast.

  When I last saw Jeans, as I was leaving Scrubby Gully that day, he was coming down the hill from the direction of the gum forest, struggling in the blinding heat, with a rope over his shoulder, towing a nine-foot sluice log.

  We had a letter from Leen yesterday; he says the working shareholders are hurrying to get the sluice fixed over the wheel, and he (Leen) anticipates a heavy downfall of rain during the night.

  James Edmond

  THE DEEPLY POETIC ACCOUNT OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S IDYLL

  IT was a dejected-looking little tropical town situated some forty miles or more up a hot muddy river that wound back and forward, and back again, and round about as no river ever wound and serpentined before. For eleven weary hours we had been crawling in a steamboat over the surface of this stream until even the shadow of it in the darkness became a weariness to the eye, and as we went along I had tramped monotonously about the deck, and wondered whether my legs would not presently get worn off right up to my chest through sheer exertion and disgust. There was nothing to be heard except the gurgle and swish of the thick, turbid water and the asthmatic snort of the steampipe, and nothing to be seen except now and then the dusky image of a bald and naked stump on the bank, and nothing to speculate about except the chance of climbing safely over the next snag, and the dim probability of crowding successfully round the next corner, for the river was low, and, as a consequence, it was even a shade more angular than usual. Even a bird flying across it would be likely to lose its way and find itself back on the shore it started from, and whether there was only one shore altogether, or whether there were two, and both of them were the other one, I never knew. Generally, we seemed to be plunging with a sough and a groan into the very middle of a dense black shadow that rose up like a wall in front of us, and then just as we touched it the vessel would fly off at a tangent and make a sudden burst for the bank, and when it got there the bank would somehow prove to be absent, and we would puff unconcernedly over a stretch of dead black water until it was time to make another break and bolt madly for a tree standing out on the extreme end of a low headland. But the tree would also melt away mysteriously, and the headland would vanish, and after that all would go well till we started to perform some more callisthenics, and make a fresh jump for destruction. Then we would steer uneasily round some more corners, and the escape-pipe would blow forth a note of shrill derision, and next we would graze a ketch loaded with pumpkins, and the captain would blaspheme from the deck and ask us, with an anguished cry, where we supposed we were going to. No one took any notice of him, however; the captain of a ketch doesn’t amount to anything.

  The steamer was old and slow. The saloon was small, and the cabins were stuffly. The bath-house was on deck, but for some unexplained reason when the crew started to wash the deck the water-supply in the bath immediately gave out, and the crew washed the deck incessantly. I had only one fellow-passenger, and she was a stout lady with a dog attached to a short string. Unfortunately, I trod on the dog early in the voyage, and from that moment the fount of sympathy dried up, and I found myself alone, and my only remaining amusement consisted in gazing at the monotonous bank, and getting out of the path of the cook when that artizan in boiled mutton fled along the deck with a large dish in his hand. But there was no thrill in either of these dissipations, and so a feeling of deep and holy joy filled my soul when our vessel coughed up to a wharf, and I scrambled ashore.

  There was a steep clay bank behind the wharf, and on top of it the last earthly possibility in the way of a hotel loomed up against the stars. It seemed to have been built mainly of old boards and disused gin-cases, but the materials could not be very well defined in the darkness—there was merely a prevailing aspect of jaggedness that belonged to no recognized order of architecture, and beyond it there was a hazy and undefined street which appeared to have fallen down dead while only half grown. The street ran parallel to the river, and consequently there was mud at one side and real estate at the other—the mud being much the more numerous of the two. As for the population, it had only one visible representative—a small, fat, old man, who stood at the door of the hotel with a candle, awaiting the course of events. He was a confidential old man, too, and when he had conducted me into a bedroom with two windows and one solitary chair and a stuffed cat in it, he leaned up against the wall and conversed affably, while I hung my hat on the bedpost and listened, with one boot in my hand and my senses buried in partial oblivion.

  His daughter had eloped that morning, it appeared, with a gentleman in the paving-stone and road-repairing industry, and his wife had been upset in her finer feelings and had gone to bed. She had remained there all day, and it had been found necessary to apply stimulants to keep her up, and in consequence of this disaster he had been compelled to run the hotel himself, and wash up the dishes, and perform other menial duties. For his own part, he had never looked, with a favourable eye on the gentleman who repaired roads, and he was inclined to think that, as a son-in-law, he would prove a failure. He had a dull far-away sound as he related these circumstances, and a thick haze seemed to gather round him, and by and by his sentences appeared to fall to pieces and I fell asleep in a sitting position and dreamed that his voice was a rushing river somewhere—and then I awoke with a sudden wrench which seemed to tear all my joints asunder, and found him still talking. The candle had burnt low and the grease was guttering on the floor, and he had evidently got to the end of the original subject, for he was relating the incidents connected with a gold rush, or a shearing riot, or something of the sort. I suggested briefly that I was going to bed, and he faded out of the door, and came back with a fresh candle, and faded again, and came back once more to supply some further information, and then he faded away for the third time, and I rushed at the door and locked it to keep him out. After a while he returned and made a frantic struggle to get into the room, but, failing in this, he retired with a heavy sigh and went to bed.

  The little town was unutterably still. There was a ripple on the water, but it was merely the impalpable ghost of an absent sound, and was hardly more definite than the, footsteps of the moonlight as it began to steal softly through the window. But despite the stillness and my own weariness I could only lament inwardly, and accumulate cramps. Sleep had left me. By and by, however, I began to drift into that undefinable condition when a man is always doing something and never getting it done, or perpetually falling down somewhere and never reaching the bottom, or is filled with the tail-end of a thousand brilliant ideas and loses them all the next instant. Probably I might have dropped off, only the afflicted landlady suddenly went into hysterics over her lost daughter and filled the building with shouts and disjointed observations.

  Probably her husband emptied a water-jug over her, for she dropped screaming and took to scolding instead. She was evidently in the next room, and it was also evident that she was a large female, for I heard her come out of bed with a thud, and then there came a series of hollow reverberations as she plunged and gambolled about on the floor. The next moment a window opened, and a long white figure galloped along the unsafe and treacherous-looking balcony which fronted the building. Another figure, a short, fat one, appeared in the moonlight a second later and went by at a resolute trot carrying its pants in one hand and a hat in the other, and presently a wild-looking object also flew by, throwing its limbs out in great, loose strides, and uttering Irish ejaculations of surprise. There was an excited argument at the other end of the balcony, and the hysterical female seemed to make several efforts to throw herself over into the street, but at length she became pacified, and retuned in
a faint and limp condition—in other words, her husband trailed her along in a series of short jumps, and puffed a good deal under the exertion. He wore his hat over one ear this time, and carried his pants in his teeth. The third individual did not assist, but as the landlord jumped his insensible prey back through the window that fainting lady partially woke up and gave her follower notice to quit the house in the morning.

  The place grew quiet again after this—all except a dog-and-goat fight in the street below. One of the combatants gave away most of his ear in the course of the difficulty, and the other had his tail wrecked. Finally, they both departed in a cloud of dust, and escaped over the horizon, and left silence behind them, and I resolved to go back to bed again, and fall asleep.

  The bed was not favourable. It seemed to be stuffed with bricks and coal, and it described such an angle to the horizon that I had to brace my feet against the lower end of it in order to keep my position. This is a hard world, and if my feet slipped it was evident I would fall on to one of the hardest parts of it. When I realized this fact I sat up and made a remark—a long infuriated remark which was unfit to print, and while I was making it the bedclothes slipped on to the floor and when I hauled them up they were tied in a hard knot, so that when I tried to get into them I merely came out again at the other end. Then I looked for the candle, with a view to putting things right once for all, and I found it so suddenly that I filled my eye with grease and wick, and in my anguish I prayed that the eleven devils which howl for ever round Judas Iscariot might trample on the person who made the bed and on all his or her descendants till they became extinct.

  It was just at this moment that I noticed someone pounding at the front door, and when I listened intently I became aware that there was an individual in tears on the footpath below. I opened the window and implored her in a loud voice to go home— to go and sleep on the fence—to go to bed—to go to Palestine if she preferred it, but, anyhow, to keep quiet and go, but as she still wept and pounded I went out on the balcony and considered the situation with my ungreased eye.