Best Australian Short Stories

by Douglas Stewart

  It was Mr Sims’s ambition to recreate on his selection the Kentish garden of his youthful recollections, and his orchard was a picture of careful tillage. Just as the company of well-bred people gives you the feeling, “Here is gentleness”, or a library, “Here is learning”, so when you came to Mr Sims’s place you had the feeling, “Here is husbandry.” I felt it myself when first I entered the gate, though 1 had no word for it.

  The grown apple-trees to the right as you went down the lane leading to the house were as straight in their latticed rows as if they had been set out by some exact machine; and there were no ragged headlands or weedy corners; ground that couldn’t be reached with the plough was turned by the spade, right up to the fence-posts. Between the apple-trees, in their rows, gooseberry bushes were growing, two at equal distances between each tree, and between the lines of apple-trees there were rows of vegetables. On the left-hand side there were two acres of raspberry-plants, the canes supported, not, as was the local custom, by stakes driven through the crown of the plants, but by being trained on wire fencing stretched taut along the rows. The fork-dug ground was free from much as a single leaf of weed or sorrel. The lane itself was fenced from the cultivation and the strip on each side of the cart-track sown with grass—a bit of Saturday afternoon grazing for the horse.

  The house comprised three rooms in a row, light and cheap in construction, but comfortable, with a raised wooden floor, papered walls, a fireplace, a slabbed veranda with a garden strip in front of it, and a grass plot adjoining for bleaching clothes.

  The barn was built of slabs, split from vanished trees, adzed smooth and fitted close. It had an iron roof, and its supporting timbers were the straightest and soundest to be won from the bush. There was a tool-room at one end of the barn, with, behind it, a small bunk-room, which was my sleeping-quarters; adjoining both these was the wagon shelter. Through a door from that was a store-room for the products of the soil; beyond that was a stable where the horse could be warm on winter nights, and, adjoining his stall, the bail where the two cows were milked. It was a model barn and the subject of approving comment from all callers.

  To the right, below the barn, was the second year planting of young trees, standing in a catch-crop of red clover; and to the left, below the lane that led across the bottom of the raspberry patch to the bush paddock, was the third year planting of fruit trees—pronged sticks, merely—standing in a catch-crop of rye, just greening the ground.

  Mr Sims lived in two worlds, that of his present labour and that of his early recollections, and they wove in and out of his thoughts as he worked, each the inspiration of the other. He would pause sometimes in the midst of work—when a breathing spell was reasonably indicated—to speak of the past; or would be very easily stimulated by question or comment to point the differences between Old Country and local methods, even to his own disparage-ment.

  I commented once on the straightness of a furrow he had just turned in starting the winter ploughing-out in the four-year-old orchard.

  “Straight!” said he. “Oh, no boy! That’s as crooked as a dog’s hind-leg!”

  He paused to give time for this correction to sink in, staring at me the while from wide blue eyes which dared to point out that his furrow really was straight except for a very small wobble half-way along. Then followed an explanation of how ploughing was done in Kent; and not, mind you, just in a two-acre patch, but a furrow drawn the length of a twenty-acre field. The ploughman would be expected to cut his furrow as straight as a taut string and with the turned earth lying over as smooth as if it had been trowelled from end to end! He was no ploughman if he couldn’t!

  It was the same with almost everything about the place that I found reason to admire. It might be good enough in its way—and he was grateful in so far as he might accept my words as a compliment to a man who was doing his best under adverse conditions—but it was always about three jumps behind Kent. “Yuurce! Yuurce!” he would say after telling me about the thatching, the stabling, the hop-picking, or the milking byres of Kent, and stare into the distance awhile from his blue-grey eyes before turning back to his task.

  I came to regard Kent as a sort of fabled country, something to look back on much as the people of the Dark Ages must have looked back on the fabled days of Roman order, so that I was a little surprised and disconcerted to note that Harry was not always at one with his father in reverential regard for Kentish ways. I noticed it first when the winter pruning of the four-year-old apple- trees was under way. Mr Sims had not changed his ideas of prun-ing during his years away from Kent, while Harry had absorbed some of the ideas of his own country. In most things about the farm he honoured his father’s superior knowledge, but in the matter of pruning he felt that Mr Sims had something new to learn and that he must take a stand. They argued the matter while they worked, and the sound of their dispute came down from among the twiggy trees. Neither would yield, and, as they worked facing each other, one side of each row of trees was pruned in Kent, so to speak, and the other at Tommy’s Hut.

  Notwithstanding this significant clash, I continued to accept the fable—it was a happy one—and my acceptance stimulated Mr Sims in his own belief in it, even sentimentalizing it to a point that led him into a rather shattering encounter with his son. One day, following a recent talk by him on the splendid spectacle of huntsmen riding to hounds, and of the generosity of the Kentish gentry at Yuletide, he came to me with a very happy glint in his eyes—the glint of one who has inadvertently stumbled upon evidence substantiating a theme. He was carrying a folded sheet of paper, which I happened to have seen before, and which I knew had reached the farmstead wrapped round some groceries. He unfolded it and held it before me. It was from an English illustrated journal, and on the page facing me were rows of photographs of rural gentlemen in hunting garb, shooting rig-outs, and velveteen jackets.

  “Now, boy!” exclaimed Mr Sims, beaming at me over the top of the page like a benign but expectant schoolmaster, and quite evidently expecting me to recall our earlier conversations. “Now, boy! If I were to ask you which of these men was a typical dee-ar old English country gentleman, which would you say?”

  He had overlooked the nearby presence of Harry. Harry snorted as if his nostrils had exploded. “Dee-ar old English country gentleman!” he repeated in drawling mimicry. Mr Sims bent on him a look of mingled embarrassment and reproach, before thrusting the sheet into my hands and darting off.

  It was not in the mind of Mr Sims alone that thoughts of the fabled land of Kent wove in and out of the realities of the moment. His stories set up the same habit with me, and one day I asked him a question which I had been pondering for some time, and which drew an enlightening answer. We were fork-digging the raspberry plantation. You bent your back for long periods at a stretch and nothing could be heard but the sound of heavy breathing, the shifting of feet on the soil, and the occasional ring of a fork prong on a pebble. You worked like this because as soon as the raspberries were forked there would be the potatoes to hill-up in the top orchard, or the young fruit-trees to spray; or if nothing was calling for immediate attention in the orchard there were some fence-posts to be split.

  Half-way down a raspberry row Mr Sims signalled a rest, by standing up and looking about him, while rubbing his loins with the back of his hand. It was then that I put the question that had been troubling my mind.

  “Mr Sims, why did you leave Kent?”

  My question fetched from Harry a deep belly-chuckle which ended in a ringing laugh and, although it had been asked in all innocence, drew upon me a shrewd look from both men. Mr Sims seemed to feel that I had challenged him, so, while Harry listened, grinning, he explained.

  “Well, boy, seeing that you’ve asked me, I’ll tell you! And then followed an explanation from which I learnt that while Kent was a very beautiful and wonderful place—”the finest county in all England, I’ve heard say”—it was a place in which everything was owned by someone, pretty well down to the last minnow in the b
rook, and the people who owned it, and had owned it for hundreds and hundreds of yuurs”, were very jealous of their rights. If the farm steward saw me eating as much as one raspberry unbidden by him he might lay his whip about my legs; and if my father took some faggots from the woods for firing and the steward came to know of it he might be brought before the “magistete” and be turned off the place—the “magistete” being a friend of his master and a neighbouring squire.

  Tere slowly faded from Mr Sims’s face the somewhat dramatic expression with which he made me this explanation, and he looked long into the distance, while Harry lit a pipe and looked at me with an ironic smile about his mouth. Mr Sims said, “Yuurce, yuurce”, and we bent again to our digging; and to our several trains of thought.

  I was deeply shocked by this talk of whipping, entrenched proprietorship, and dear old country gentlemen who were also stern magistrates. I assumed, as an article of faith, that my own country was free from comparable harshness, and I went over to Harry’s equivocal view of the fabled land of Kent. I saw that Kent, as Mr Sims most kindly remembered it, was mainly an ideal of thorough farming which he kept in mind to help him, and, for the rest, something which had its lovable side and which he was trying to reconstruct with its worst parts left out. The more I thought about it all the more I liked him for what he was trying to do.

  From then on he spoke to me of Kent in the tone of one speaking to another who is in the know; but I think he was anxious lest I should think too badly of his home country, because a few days later, when we were hilling-up the potatoes in the top orchard, he interrupted work to tell a few yarns of the great larks they used to get up to in the Old Dart. When we reached the headland he put his hoe on his shoulder and to Harry’s amusement and my vast delight did a few steps of a village break-down.

  My mirth seemed to gratify him. “Yuurce, yuurce,” he said. “The living was hard, I suppose; but we were cheery lads!” Presently he lowered his hoe. “Well,” he said, “I s’pose we’d better be getting on with looking after these ‘taters.” And then our backs were bent to it again, our bright blades stabbing the earth and drawing it up around the growing plants.

  It was about this time that I began to understand something of the chances governing Mr Sims’s hopes of success in his enterprise. I came from the house one raw winter evening to get some wood for the stove just as he—last home from the field of toil—was stumping up from the barn. I heard his footsteps cease at the gate, and glanced up. He stood there for a while looking back through the murk at the lower cultivation, and then he spoke, half to himself and half as if he had become aware of a listener. “Yuurce, yuurce,” he said, “we’ll have the living comin’ in in a couple more yuurs.” Then he turned and stumped on towards the lighted kitchen.

  It was the first time I really became aware that the living was not yet coming in. The way he spoke, as if reassuring himself, made me wonder whether—despite the fact that it would be impossible for him, of his nature, to slum any kind of work—there was not a measure of desperation behind the fine state of cultivation in which his orchard was kept.

  People round about were not doing very well. The cold dayey soil just didn’t sean sufficiently responsive to cultivation; crops seemed, as a rule, rather uncertain, and orchard-trees seemed to run more to wood than to fruit. I had come to understand, from the tenor of Mr Sims’s observations, that the indifferent success of his neighbours was due in some part to slack methods, and that good methods would prevail over disadvantages of soil and climate. That was the farmer’s justification!

  But then there was the afternoon when I was returning by a short-cut through the bush from meeting the storekeeper’s wagon on the road, and saw Mr Sims standing on the headland below the barn, facing the crop of red clover. I climbed through the fence and joined him.

  That clover’s not doing very well,” he said

  The clover looked well enough from a distance, but when you came to look at it closely it was very sparse, with a lot of bare ground between the plants.

  He left me and walked into the middle of it and looked about him, and stood a long while in thought. I saw that he had forgotten me and was deep in a problem. When he came back he looked at me with a slight widening of the eyes that showed he had just recalled my presence. We stood together for a moment or two, looking at the clover, then he said quietly, “We’ll start to plough that in in the morning. I’ll try something else—swedes, probably.” And you could tell from his tone that in the minutes when I had watched him standing alone in the middle of his unsuccessful crop of clover one hope had been courageously abandoned and another, with equal courage, taken up in its place.

  It was about this time that I began to understand that in the affairs of the selection too much depended on too little for comfort of mind. The failure or success of this or that small cropping venture made a difference in immediate living prospects. Hard work had anxiety for its invisible team-mate. No jollity accompanied the ploughing-in of the clover and sowing of the swedes.

  Nor was there any margin to cover loss by disaster. There was the time when we were driving down the range in the wagon to the railway and Billy, the creaky old horse-of-all-work, slipped and fell and knocked the wind out of himself and couldn’t get up. Mr Sims was the first to scramble from the wagon and rush to kneel at his head. It seemed for a minute that the horse had broken his leg and would have to be destroyed. Mr Sims had great difficulty in controlling his feelings. He made a funny noise. He seemed for a moment to shrink in bodily size, and the hand that rested on Billy’s head was shaking. When we had got Billy up and were driving on again I sat very quiet, not saying anything to Mr Sims for fear talk might be unwelcome at the moment. I just sat there watching the trees move past, rather frightened at discovering that accident could rip away the surface of things and show the works underneath. It seemed to be my first glimpse of the works.

  It was all right on the drive home from the railway. Mr Sims had enjoyed the glass of beer he always drank on his rare visits to the township, and he had had some pleasant conversation with people he met in the store—as well as a day sitting in the wagon instead of working himself to death. While we were jogging back over the level road between the rail and the foot of the range he talked about things on the selection, what good growth the young apple-trees had made since the day they were planted, how healthy the raspberry-canes looked and about the fowls coming on to lay very soon. He sang a bit of “I’ll Be a Jolly Peddlar and Around The World I’ll Roam”; and when we came to the place on the mountain road where Billy had fallen down he didn’t seem to notice; he just slapped Billy’s back with the reins in a friendly way.

  Things went up and down like that, and it was not always a matter of whether they were up or down in themselves, but to some extent a matter of how you were feeling in yourself. There was the day Mr Sims came along just when I had finished cleaning out Billy’s stable and stacking the manure neatly on the heap outside the stable door. He stopped very kindly to give me a word of praise for the thorough way I did the job; which really wasn’t deserved because to me old Billy was all the grand horses in the world and I just enjoyed fixing things up comfortably for him. I was even pleased with what he left on the stable floor for me to clean up, and I said to Mr Sims, “That’s a fine lot of manure we’ve got now!”

  Mr Sims said, “Boy, that’s only a spoonful! That’ll go nowhere!” And then followed a tale of the manuring of Kentish fields. How, in addition to the manure of byre and stable, cartloads of fish would be brought from the nearby markets in time of glut and ploughed in and how, after a storm at sea, the wagons would go down to the beaches and come back loaded with seaweed to be spread on the fields.

  Mr Sims stood looking out over his own acres, and I saw that hope was at a low ebb. Perhaps he was tired and perhaps he was thinking of the clover that had failed. “That land ’ad been tilled and manured for hundreds and hundreds of yuurs,” he said And that’s just the difference!” He kicked a nea
rby clod and watched it burst into dust.

  It occurred to me to wonder if Kentish fields had not been better soil to begin with to wonder, in fact, if he had not selected unwisely. The same thought must have been running through his own head—and possibly was no newcomer—for he said, as if in answer to my speculation, “Perhaps I did wrong in coming to this part of the country.” He asked me then why I didn’t work in the city and grow up to sit at a desk and wear a coat and be a gentleman; and I had difficulty in making my preference for cleaning out stables and splitting fence-posts sound very sensible.

  The good sense of my preference was linked in a certain way with his moods, and I was reassured to notice that the moments when he seemed to wonder if his hopes were hollow didn’t last. He went on working just the same, and presently the beginning of some new job would indicate that he had forgotten his doubts. It was only a couple of days after our talk that we started digging the well he had been planning for some time I noticed later that the successful completion of one job seemed always to set his mind busy with plans for the future. When we were finishing off the well—shovelling away the spoil from around the top—he fell to talking of the nice pastures, in place of the rough grazing of the bush paddocks, he hoped to have for his livestock “by and by”.

  The swedes came up nicely, but a few months later the weather dealt Mr Sims a heavy blow. It was the only occasion on which I heard him driven by excess of feeling to lay his troubles at the door of malignant fate.

  The part of the range where the selection lay jutted to the south and was sometimes swept by unseasonable hail. One of these storms came over in early spring, just when the raspberry-blossoms were setting to fruit. I was bringing the two milking cows home from the bush one afternoon when the sky darkened, and by the time we were in the lane leading from the bush paddock to the barn the hail was dancing off the cows’ backs and was getting heavier. I made a bolt for the house with face screwed up against the stinging pellets, and arrived at the gate just in time to run into Annie and Jessie, who had been across the road to visit a neighbour. We raced pell-mell for the shelter of the veranda and reached there breathless, laughing and shouting.