Best Australian Short Stories

by Douglas Stewart

  “There.”

  “Yes. By the new land. Where we were going to build.” He looked at her as if she might have contradicted him. “When we were married.”

  “What will you do ?”

  His father said: “I told them to get the police.”

  “He walked away from the police last time.” For a moment his eyes met the girl’s. “And us. All right. We were no better. And the reporters came up from town. Photographers all over the place. A seven-day wonder for the suburbanites.”

  “It’s not something that happens every day,” she said. “Naturally, it was news.”

  “They’ll make it news again, if we let them. But this time it will be different. We won’t do anything until tomorrow night. That way he won’t be suspicious if he sees our tracks near the camp. Then Sunday night we’ll make a line north of the camp, and if the wind’s right we’ll burn back towards the firebreak along the paddock. He’ll have to break out through the paddock. We’ll have a chance that way.”

  “I think it’s too big a risk,” his father said. “You’ll burn the whole of that country. You can’t do it.”

  “We’re going to clear it, anyway.”

  “You can’t start a fire like that.”

  “If we try to close in on the camp he’ll hear us.” “You could still get him. There’s enough of you.”

  “He’d go between us in the bush. No matter how close we were. You know that. No one’s been able to get a sight of him in the bush. The police had trackers there last week. They found plenty of tracks. But he kept as far ahead or behind them as he liked. No,” he said, “he’s made fools of us long enough. I think we’ve got a chance now.”

  He turned suddenly towards the girl, and she stood beside him, not moving. It seemed to her that his words had a kind of defiance as if he did not himself believe them, and she thought that it was not simply that he doubted their ability to carry out the plan, but that he did not really believe in the idea of the fire himself. That if she or his father did not further pursue it he might be glad to drop it. But she could not be certain, and before she could speak, he said, as if he had intended to prevent her words:

  “Let’s forget this now, Ann. We’ll go over to Harris’s after tea. They’ve a bit of a show on there for May’s birthday.

  Almost all those she had come to know seemed to have found their way to the party. And all of them discussed the hermit, as they called him. She realized it was general knowledge that he was expected to be caught soon. She listened to the undercurrent of derision that the police with all their resources had been mocked by this man it seemed none of them had seen, as if in this they were on his side. Some of the older people she spoke to claimed to have caught glimpses of him when, some years earlier, he had taken food quite freely for a time from the farm houses. Some claimed to know his name. But it seemed to her as she mixed with them and listened to them, that none of them really cared. She felt they simply accepted the idea that he must be denied, driven from cover and killed if necessary, as they might have accepted the killing of a dingo or a fox, a creature for them without motive or reason. When she tried to turn their words, to question them, they looked at her with a kind of surprise, or the beginning of suspicion, in doubt of her as a teacher of their children.

  And she saw that quite quickly they exhausted the topic, turning to the enjoyment of the evening, as if already the whole thing was disposed of. In the end she thought it was their lack of involvement, their bland rejection of responsibility, that irritated her to the point of anger, so that she was forced to hold herself from rudeness.

  It was late when they returned, and in her room, after she had changed, she stood for a time by the window in the darkness. There was a small moon that seemed scarcely to break the dark ground shadow, and beyond the paddocks she could not see where the scrub began. Her sense of anger had given place to dejection and a kind of fear. She tried to imagine the man who in the dark-ness slept in what they had described as his camp, something she could picture only as a kind of child’s cubby house in the thick scrub. But she could form no picture of him as a physical being, only that it seemed to her he must possess imagination and sens-ibility beyond that of his pursuers, that he must be someone not difficult to talk to, someone who would understand her own feeling about these things for which he was persecuted. And who might even, she thought, be glad to know, however briefly, that they were shared. She was aware of a sense of disloyalty, but the image per-sisted, and it was suddenly monstrous that the darkness of the scrub should be swept by the glare of fire, as she would see it from the window where she stood now, the man stumbling from it in some unimaginable indignity. Whatever doubt she had of the men’s intention to carry out their plan, it seemed now in the dark-ness only too probable that in anger they might do what she, and perhaps they themselves, feared. And it was impossible. Her hands felt the cold of the sill, she was aware of the faint wind that blew in through the window, cool upon her skin, and she could hear it in the boughs of the few shade-trees behind the house.

  On Sunday, in the afternoon, Ken left to make arrangements with the other men. His parents were resting, but she knew they would not question her going out, they were used to her wandering about the farm, looking for the plants she wished to paint. She went down through the yard gate, across the paddock towards the track that led out to the belt of scrub and timber. It seemed, in the heat, further than she had expected.

  She walked along the side fence, where the brush began, feeling that it would hide her if any of the men were watching. If she met them she would say she had come to look for Ken. She could see the dam ahead, the smooth red banks rising steeply, to one side a few thin trees, motionless in the heat.

  At the dam she paused. The side track to Mackay’s had turned some distance to the left. In front of her, facing north, the scrub was thick, untouched, she was suddenly reluctant to go beyond the fence on the far side of the dam.

  She pushed the wires down and stepped through. She began to pick her way through the scrub, choosing the small, almost imperceptible pockets where the bushes were thinner. It was only after a time, when she could no longer see the dam or the trees beside it, that she realized her method of walking had led her away from a straight line. She had no clear idea how far she had come. She went on until she was certain she had covered half a mile, but as she stopped it was suddenly clear she could have deviated in any direction.

  The bushes grew upward on their thin sparse stalks to a rounded umbrella-like top, the leaves tough, elongated and spindly. They stretched away like endless replicas, rising head high, become too thick for her to go further. As she looked about it seemed improbable she had come so far. In the heat the scrub was silent. Along the reddish ground, over the fine stems, the ants moved, in places she had walked round their mud-coloured mounds. She looked down at the ground, at the hard brittle twigs and fallen leaves, some of them already cemented by the ants. In a kind of fear she began to walk.

  A short distance to the right a thin patch of trees lifted above the scrub, and though she thought it was the wrong direction she began to push her way towards it. The trees were like some sharp variation in the endless grey pattern of the brush that rose about her.

  Beneath them the bark and leaves were thick upon the ground. She stood in the patch of shade, and she tried to reason that she could not have come far, that she could find her way back if she was careful. And in the silence she thought again, as she had the night before, of the man she had come to warn. It had seemed that if she could explain to him, he must understand, and that perhaps he would go. She had relied on there being understanding between them, that at least in these things they must feel alike. So that it had seemed her words would have effect. Now, in the heat and the silence, it was a dream, holding in this place no reality. She could never have thought to do it. And it was here he had spent ten years. It was like nothing she could encompass. She felt a sharp, childish misery, as if she might have allowed herself tea
rs.

  It occurred to her that if she could climb one of the trees she might gain an idea of direction. But the trunks were slippery, with- out foothold, and at the second attempt she fell, twisting her leg. She leaned against the trunk, afraid of the pain, trying to deny it as if she would will herself to be without injury which might imprison her.

  She was not aware of movement or sound, but she looked up, and turned slightly, still holding to the smooth trunk. He was standing just at the edge of the clump of trees. He might have been there all the time. Or been attracted by the noise she had made. She said weakly:

  “I—didn’t see you—

  His face held no expression she could read. His hair was grey and short, and she was vaguely surprised as if she had imagined something different, but cut crudely, and streaked across his head by sweat. He was very thin as though all the redundant flesh had long ago been burned from him, his arms stick-like, knotted and black. His hands held a rifle, and she had a sudden fear that he would kill her, that somehow she must place words between them before he took her simply as one of his persecutors. She said quickly:

  “I came to warn you—they have found your camp—tonight they mean to drive you out towards the paddocks—”

  But they were not the words she had planned. His eyes gave her no sign. They were very dark, sharp somehow, and she knew suddenly they were like the eyes of an animal or a bird, watchful, with their own recognition and knowledge which was not hers. The stubble of beard across his face was whitish, his skin dark from the sun.

  “I—if only you would go from here,” she said. “They only want you to go—they don’t understand—”

  The words were dead in the heat and the silence. She saw the flies that crawled across his face.

  “I wanted to help you,” she said, and she despised herself in her terror. Only his hands seemed to move faintly about the rifle. His stillness was insupportable. Abruptly she began to sob, the sound loud, gulping, ridiculous, her hands lifting to her face.

  He seemed to step backwards. His movement was somehow liquid, unhuman, and then she thought of the natives she had once seen in the north, not the town natives whose movements had grown like her own. But with a strange inevitability he moved like an animal or the vibration of the thin sparse trees before the wind.

  She did not see him go. She looked at the boles of the trees where he had stood, and she could hear her own sobbing.

  Some time in the afternoon she heard the sudden sound of shots, flat, unreal, soon lost in the silence. But she walked towards where the sound had seemed to be, and after a time, without warning she came on to the track that ran towards Mackay’s place. She had gone only a short distance when she heard the voices, and called out. The men came through the scrub and she saw them on the track. She began to run towards them, but checked herself. Further down she saw a Landrover and one of the policemen. Ken said:

  “We missed you—we’ve been searching—it was only that Ted saw where you’d walked down the fence—”

  She said: “Theshots—I heard them—”

  “We were looking for you—we didn’t see him. He tried to get past us, then shot at Don—we had to shoot.”

  She did not speak and he said: “We had to do it, Ann. We sent for the police. But where were you? how did you get out here?” There was nothing she could tell him. She said:

  “I was looking for you, I think.”

  The Landrover had drawn up beside them, and the driver opened the door for her. They moved back down the dry rutted track where the thin shade had begun to stretch in from the broken scrub.

  Cecil Mann

  THE PELICAN

  IT used to be one of the familiar sights to see Mr Grigg (as he then was; he has moved up socially since) taking his regular Sunday stroll along the Twelve-mile Beach. A sight the inhabitants viewed with feelings between amusement and contempt.

  The weather made no difference to Mr Grigg. On bright and sunny Sundays he dressed what there was of him in cream flannel trousers, black blazer with white pipings, panama hat and white pipe-clayed shoes. Not sandshoes. Good leather. And stiff-collared white shirt, and black necktie.

  Or else he would give his dark-blue serge, bowler, and black shoes an airing. A high-cut white vest. A small black bow tie. Long- linked gold watch-chain. Large gold ring on a left finger. Cane.

  When rain came it fell at the Beach in a prodigious waste. It drove down in a heavy mass for days, sometimes weeks, on end. A thousandth part of it would have been more than ample for the few straggling pumpkin-vines, the occasional pie-melons and chokos that constituted the inhabitants’ gardens. It belted loudly on the red iron roofs scattered through the tea-trees and banksias. It came in from the open sea between the headlands at either end of the long curved beach like an advancing grey wall. It flogged the sea flat, belted the sloping sand smooth, filled the tea-tree swamp, swelled the weed- and swamp-stained acre of lake till sometimes it broke through the sand-silted block and emptied its brown, wine-like water and its land-locked fish for a while into the sea.

  Then Mr Grigg took his Sunday stroll in rubber knee-boots, black oilskin, black sou’wester. He leant his meagre frame against the gale, trudging the hardened sand. Hands in the oilskin pockets. Hunched like a black pigmy. The lumps of rain struck him. They bumped from his shoulders up under his neck and trickled down his chest-bone. For all his protective covering, he returned to his

  shop wet. He did so again the next Sunday, if it was raining twice as hard.

  Mr Grigg never fished on Sundays. That there was no church at the Beach made him all the more meticulous in keeping the Sabbath, in his fashion, holy. He compensated his soul with the thought that you could commune there in the Almighty’s own vast cathedral, though its roof did leak rather badly at times. As you went along communing, you might, without desecration, spot out holes and channels in the breakers that would be likely places for jewfish and bream. Next night, the Sabbath over, you could be off down the track through the tea-trees and she-oaks and along the beach to cast out at the prospected spot, marked by the gibbet silhouette of a banksia up on the sand-ridge.

  It was a local legend of Mr Grigg that one Saturday night he hooked a tremendous jewy. He had out a brand new two hundred yards of No. 12. The jewy made him use the lot of it. It drew him out into the surf up to his waist. Not so good a fisherman, stones heavier than Mr Grigg, would have had no chance with it. As it was, the struggle in the night took him four miles along the beach. With the whole of the taut line out, the fight lasted for over two hours. Then, not having landed it by midnight, Mr Grigg threw the log-like cork after it and let it go—rather than desecrate the Sabbath. Anyway, that’s how the tale went.

  It wasn’t that many of the others fished, or felt any desire to fish, on Sundays. To them, fishing was something you did if you happened to want fish to eat or, seasonally, when the big black-nose whiting or bream were in. Only an occasional one or two, apart from Mr Grigg, even went out when the huge jewfish were known to be patrolling at night close in in the breakers. Mostly, indeed practically unanimously, they just preferred not to fish. But if there was any one day of the week when they might abandon their preference, or habitual laziness, it was Sunday. Then, perhaps with some visitors down from town, a few of them might wet a line.

  They called Mr Grigg Mr Grigg. Friendly enough folk, they could have accepted Mr Grigg going to church on Sundays, and some of the women might have gone, too, and the children been forced to go. It was just that Mr Grigg’s Sabbath abstinence set him apart. It made him superior. And the gap was not lessened by the fact that if there was one thing above all others positive about Mr Grigg, it was that he was a regular crank on fishing.

  Great red-shouldered jewfish that he could hardly lift. Bronzed- silver whiting; bream and tarwhine; and brown-backed, white- bellied sand flathead by the dozen. Caught and pulled, turning and leaping through the green-and-white swirl of breakers along the beach by Mr Grigg, and by Mr Grigg given away gratis to
any of the inhabitants who would eat fish, or sent by the mail-car up to town, to the hospital. With Mr Grigg’s compliments.

  To Mr Grigg, his discovery of fishing was practically a discovery of life itself. Two other discoveries went along with it.

  One was that there were seven days in the week, instead of only one. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday—seven. Then start all over again: Monday, Tuesday—each a whole day, a whole twenty-four hours. Not a rush into the city inside the hot, screaming cylinder of an electric train. Bacon department. Put on the white apron. Sharpen the knife. Get busy; “Thank you, madam.” “A beautiful cut, madam.” “A nice piece for boiling? Yes, madam. Let me see now.” Take off the apron. Join the crushing exodus. Rush home again. Read the evening paper. Eat sausages. Put out the light in the single room. Open the window. Sleep.

  No. Complete days. Composed of time; of aged hours; of early morning, late morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night. Days and nights. Some wet, some windy, some sunny, some hot; pitch-black, moon-flooded, starlit. Curve of open beach sweeping its twelve miles from headland to headland. Gulls winging over the whitecaps. Surf breaking on the sand. Sunhaze dancing on the horizon. Pelicans floating on the acre of swamp lake. Breaths of loose sand puffed by the wind along the crests of the sandhills. Fish.

  Something to discover from the bacon department.

  The other discovery had gall in it for Mr Grigg. He read the advertisement, made the great decision, bought the grocery-and-residence shop (three unlined weatherboard rooms in all) at the Beach. The previous owner had amassed wealth there. Enough of it to go to the south that Mr Grigg came from and buy a pub in salubrious surroundings. Paddington.

  Mr Grigg did not do so well. He made less than his bacon department wages. The inhabitants did not do anything so incredible as ostracizing Mr Grigg. By no means. They did not feel that way about him at all. He could have dressed in purple tights and painted his face ultramarine. He could even have built a church. That would have been his affair. The inhabitants would have been surprised, perhaps, but would shortly have got used to it and accepted it.