Best Australian Short Stories

by Douglas Stewart

  My capacity as jack-of-all-trades to the district was again held manifest when, a year later, Clarry strolled across to the school and, putting the matter very reasonably, asked me to close for a few days, and search for an old prospector who had taken it into his head to go off into the bush and get lost.

  “You’ll find him either dead or mad,” concluded Clarry. “What if I find him dead?” I pleaded.

  “Just dig a hole.”

  Rad, the ex-trooper, came with me, and the school was closed for four days while we searched for the old fellow. We found him, quite mad, eating the fungus off trees. The ex-trooper K.O.’d him so that he could be brought in with as small hardship to ourselves as possible.

  Another role which I seemed to be obliged to fill was that of vestryman every Sunday evening at the place in which, the remainder of the week, I was accounted master; for on Sundays the school building, which comprised one room, was converted into a church. The conversion was effected simply. On to the classroom table went, with a bang, a soapbox and on to the soapbox, barely covering it, a red or a green cloth—whichever was available. Ike Olan, the organist, took up position in the fireplace, head and shoulders hidden up the chimney, his rump reposing on the blackened brick platform in the recess and his concertina on his knees. All his life at Melamo Ike never saw a church service. He took his cue to begin playing by word of mouth, and his timing was perfect.

  The congregation, straight from liberal drinking sessions held serially during the day at Clarry’s pub, began to arrive at seven, and from then on arrived in varying degrees of unsteadiness and hearty reverence right up till the service ended at eight, taking their seats on forms and desks scarred and pocked by years of assiduous carving by the hands of their sons and tomboy daughters. Grant McLachlan’s sermons, though kept suitably dreamy for the women, were flavoured by flashes of down-to-earthness for the men; and the lanterns shed the light of a unique creed upon all the creeds there represented.

  One night after church—just such an indelibly dark night as that in which I had first entered the Alpine country—Clarry slapped me on the back and bawled, “How about a social visit to Andy’s tonight, Tom?” It was a mark of the extent to which our friendship had progressed that Clarry no longer referred to me as “the schoolie”, but used my Christian name. I knew what Clarry’s social visit was bound to include, so I tested how much I was good for by going through my change. When we had mounted and turned out of town I asked, “How far, Clarry?”

  “Just across the paddock.”

  I felt prepared for the worst. Clarry’s computations of distance were as those of all casual bushmen who know an area like the back of their hand, and expect their misrepresentation of miles as a few paddocks away to be taken as neither truth nor prevarication.

  Andy, whom I had met at Clarry’s, lived, I knew, in a hut somewhere in the neighbouring hills; but that was all of my knowledge; and as I rode beside Clarry in the darkness I felt in no small way the fears of every novice in a new country by night, despite the presence of an experienced companion.

  As the ground began rising abruptly, Clarry broke a desultory silence with the command, “Keep close behind and follow my cigarette.”

  Afterwards I knew that I followed that jerking pinpoint of red light into terrain about which even the Man from Snowy River might have had misgivings before he “sent the flint-stones flying”. We slipped and stumbled and dipped and climbed in the thick darkness, past messmate, stringybark, and mountain-ash, above crevasses and gorges, along slopes and ridges, beside cliffs and towers of rock into what seemed the very heart of the country which had shaped the men of Melamo.

  When we arrived at the hut, shedding chinks of light on the invisibility of its clearing, Andy and Clarry and other bushmen there gathered proceeded to fleece one another at cards. I piled up IOUs right and left; but had some compensation for this extravagance when, in the profusion of talk over whisky from Andy’s own still, the history of Pilton City somehow came my way, heightened with a ghost and a mystery which Andy dared anyone in the hut, or anyone in the world at large, not to accept as authentic.

  “Ol’ Lor’ Sammy came out ’ere from England, y’know...an’ ’e foun’ gol’ down there at Pilton...an’ a buncha Jews...gol’buyers... sought ’im out an’ done ’im in ... an’ you’ve got the Ghost Stream...where ’is ghost walks...mo-o-o-o-anin’ for revenge... The Jews?...swallered hup...jis’ like Jonah in ’is whale...I’ll bet me ol’ dolly they perished there...an’ the gol’s still aroun’...ask ol’ Gid...’e knows.” Andy’s wink was a mighty one. It threatened extinction to the mouth of the glass he held close to his face.

  Two evenings later, within hearing of Gid sitting as usual like an old crone among his suspicions and secrets, alone and uncommunicative in his corner of the pub parlour, I addressed the ex-trooper.

  “Know anything about Pilton City, Rad?”

  “Used to be a big place, seven thousand odd. I don’t think anyone’s been into it for about fifty years.”

  “How far away is it?

  “Near the Choowoom, on one of its tributaries, the Ghost Stream.” “Any chance of getting to it?”

  Gid showed no interest.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “A full day at least, there and back.”

  “Would you take me to it?”

  The ex-trooper meditated over his drink. Gid wore a vacant expression.

  The following Saturday morning before sunrise, the ex-trooper nursing his rifle, and each of us carrying a small pack and a hatchet, we rode down the gap in which Melamo at that hour slept, and turned gradually to the right into the timber. On the other side of the steep ridges, rising covered in scrub and patches of loose rock before us, lay the Choowoom River. It was our intention to follow the river downstream to where the Ghost Stream met it, and then cut our way at a slight angle to the creek through the dense scrub and vine of the flat, beyond which the ghost city sprawled round its secrets.

  The journey bred wonder and unease.

  The unease began at morning-tea time when, as we boiled the billy near a grand old kurrajong in the shadow of a cliff thrusting its face down into the earth and finishing in the conelike beauty of a precipice, the ex-trooper grew detached over his pipe and abandoned talk. A whipbird slowly uncoiled its note and struck with it, quickly. The waterfall spouting from the wet slant-surface of the rock was the only sound in the ensuing silence.

  The same retirement of manner in the ex-trooper happened close on midday. We had stopped to rest our horses after fording the Choowoom at a conveniently shallow spot—almost opposite the Ghost Stream leapt into the river with a pattern of cross-currents and bubbles—and were considering the hard work to come in cutting our way through the scrub which began there when the ex- trooper announcing, “We’ll lead the horses,” went off into a faraway attitude. After minutes he arrived at the decision, “We’ll eat now.”

  It was only while we were eating as I watched him chewing slowly and at times stopping altogether with his mouth full, that I began to realize that my companion, far from day-dreaming, was listening.

  Whatever he heard, or thought he heard, seemed to be his own personal and private concern, and an hour later as we chopped at the last wall of the scrub, when he tossed me the order, “Wait here, don’t move,” in such a matter-of-fact way that it was obvious it ought not to be questioned, I waited and didn’t move. He mounted and rode back along the track we had cut. I heard him moving for a time after he had disappeared, and then there was silence, except for the undertone of the bush.

  I had time to review all kinds of discomforting theories and wear out the heel of my boot before he returned, swinging calmly back into sight on the track, a questionmark on horseback. We resumed our attack on the scrub, and I noticed that the palms of my hands were sweating. The ex-trooper seemed more spirited, less introvert than before; though not sufficiently so to offer any relief from the burden of
wild guesses that fell round me like the oppression of the scrub.

  We came upon Pilton City as if we had stumbled on something quite unexpected, and hardly knew we had reached the place until, across the rocky creek edged with tree-ferns, a but no bigger than a small ship’s cabin grew out of the ground. Vine, weed, and fungus clung to it parasitically.

  Whole streets and suburbs of the old town had completely vanished. Grass grew on the earthen and the wooden floors. The disused shafts, with their iron rollers and rotting sprags and ropes, were in the last stages of sinking into the earth under the weight of the grasses, the winds, and the rains that had piled upon them since the day when, worked out, the town had been deserted for the golden call of a new “strike”. Complete migration must have taken place overnight.

  Where the horse-walks had been, remnants of skew rail fences terminating in split or twisted cross-saplings ran from the shafts. A rawhide bucket under a lean-to that looked more like a gunyah rested, shapeless, on its side. A forsaken dolly lay buried in the grass. Centipedes squirmed away from beneath an old bark stretcher that we overturned. Climbing roses planted beside a miner’s domestic but now consumed the economical space where, among his scanty furniture, his pots and pans and shovels, his cocks and hens and his children, the digger once sat down to his meal of beef or mutton, wheaten flour and vegetables and tea; for whatever other hardships he voluntarily endured, the miner of the prosperous field generally ate well.

  The decaying houses, huts, and cottages stood so close together that the ruinous vines climbed from roof to roof. Every foot of frontage had once had its value. There appeared to have been two principal and seven or eight cross streets, and lesser thoroughfares, hardly delineable now; but the way in which the huts ran gave some evidence of the pattern they had followed. Along them the drays had trundled, horses had galloped. Expirees from the penal colony, refugees from the Old World, renegades and desperadoes had come down them seeking an El Dorado. Chinese, Yankee, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Hungarian and Pole, diggers, merchants and camp-followers had met and drunk or fought over the tavern bars. Any of up to fifty or more buildings could have been pubs, shanties, sly-grog shops. One saloon was plainly recognizable as such. The counter was still reasonably strong, and an ancient, consumptive piano, silently coughing fungi where it had once coughed out ribald music, leant perilously on three legs in a corner.

  The town had contained its churchgoing community. A stained-glass window, blind with cataracts of vine and casts of dirt and ready to fall from its socket, and a broken wooden cross marked one edifice’s origin and purpose. Gum-trees grew out of children’s graves near by, and a mildewed boot darkened its wall like a dead animal.

  The back premises of some of the larger buildings shaded off into bark and tin, where gambling had probably gone on, tense and uninterrupted; until the mounted troopers or the foot constables were announced, when, after a scramble, a vacuous innocence no doubt settled on the place, unless the traps were in it too.

  Some of these larger buildings were adorned with plateglass, as yet unbroken in a few instances, although no longer handsome as they must have been, behind which, very likely, had been displayed the usual wares of a mining town: haberdashery or groceries or fruit, perhaps books. I found myself trying to guess, since we lacked the time to explore the town thoroughly, which but had been the blacksmith’s or the baker’s or the butcher’s or the tailor’s; which building had been the bank, the pound, the police barracks; and what greater strike had, like a plague, so suddenly emptied this mushroom town that had grown and thrived in roaring decades against the background of the snow-topped mountains.

  Despite Andy’s ghost-story we encountered no ghosts and heard no moaning. At least I didn’t. The Ghost Stream, that rocky creek we had crossed, looked as clear of mystery as it was shallow. But back in Melamo I gave many a thought to the strange behaviour of the ex-trooper and noticed, without comment, as the days length ened into weeks and the weeks into months, that old Gid was absent from his surly parlour corner.

  It seemed to be tacitly assumed by all the regulars who frequented the parlour that I knew why he was absent; so in the light of this simulation I concluded that I was not entitled to ask questions. The men of Melamo had a subtle way of evading interrogation by creating the feeling that they had no need to be interrogated; no one could be off ended about their silence, merely puzzled. There was something almost mystical about the situation. I was left with a burden of guesses as wild as those which had assailed me when the ex-trooper had gone through his strange ritual during the journey to Pilton City.

  One evening, quite inadvertently, I manoeuvred tbe ex-trooper into the corner that had been so popular with the old Jew and, as we sat down, I noticed the look which passed into his face: a look which had the inscrutability of a bedroom blind when scenes not difficult to be imagined but maddeningly impossible to be sure of were happening behind it, or the inscrutability of the mountains when they were surrounded by their impenetrable darkness, although, by reaching out, one knew that they could be defined. His face, like Ike Olan’s up the school chimney was, despite its outlines before me, completely hidden, and, because of this, extremely evocative of speculation. With a small revelatory shock I had suddenly little doubt that a mind capable of turning the rather positive and compelling forehead which compassed it into a neg-ation was also capable of murder.

  Confronted with this headless trunk and stimulated by the beer to a scientific or poetic awareness, I began to put arithmetic and conjecture together. According to the ex-trooper’s own words, the ghost town had not been entered for about fifty years. It had probably been built, inhabited, and abandoned within the space of roughly ten years. Gid, as I knew him, could have been anything from seventy to a hundred years of age. I decided on the mean, and subtracted five to give my theory more credibility. He would have been a very young gold-buyer; still, if the youngest, the one more likely to have survived his companions in crime. Perhaps—and here arithmetic abdicated to conjecture—he had been the “ol’ whale” of the “bunch” who had “done in ol’ Lor’ Sammy”. With a fortune in gold and mass-slaughter on his hands, he would hardly have dared, being shrewd enough in the first instance to have become a gold-buyer, to show himself to the civilized world again. What better retreat than Melamo, where no questions were asked and none solicited—although I couldn’t devise even a conjectural equation that would be true for all values of x, x being the unknown quantity in the query: What purpose had he hoped to achieve by the heinousness?

  But I suspected that, on the Saturday morning when the ex- trooper and I rode down the gap towards a hoard of gold and secrets, a miser had found his one great love threatened for the first time for half a century. If he had been on his death-bed—as it was, he looked belligerently healthy for his age, albeit unpleasant in odour—Gid would somehow have contrived to follow us, rifle in hand. He may have trailed, unmolested and unmolesting, a less dangerous man than an ex-trooper trained to astuteness, another man might never have heard him and would have been less likely to discover skeletons of gold. The ex-trooper did hear him and had acted as unscrupulously as the old Jew would have done had we, like two Egyptologists, gone opening tombs and unearthing the “ghosts” of Pilton City.

  Somewhere near the old mining town a corpse dispatched by some quick, noiseless means—a club on the head with the butt-end of a rifle, a rope round the throat, a hatchet-edge in the brain—lay decomposing in the damp depths of a precipice or the obscurity of a covert. The thought was an eerie one, and made me want to withdraw my face as successfully as the man before me had done, into an inscrutability that was so similar to invisibility. I would never know what really happened because in all probability the men of Melamo regarded Gid’s disappearance as purely his own, the ex trooper’s, and my affair.

  That tacit assumption of theirs—that I knew—was not only mystical but significant. Very likely they silently respected me. I had been the ex-trooper’s partner in a
programme leading to the extinction of one who had always been an unsociable blot in the pub parlour. At this point, in bewilderment, I gave up conjecture, forgot about arithmetic, and ordered two more beers. The ex-trooper’s face emerged, like Ike Olan’s from its chimney, a little quaint for its sojourn there, but comforting.

  The day when, a year later, I climbed aboard the coach that had brought me to Melamo, Clarry was out cattle-duffing, the ex-trooper had gone up to the hills to help Andy in some problem respecting the still, Ike Olan was drunk over his concertina, and the man in the beard who had answered my first and only knock on the swing- doors of the homestead-hotel, was in charge of the bar and felt himself, very willingly, slave to it. So that only Grant McLachlan saw me off, with a few airy words and a not entirely irrelevant quote from Browning which I knew to be as much a sign of appreciation as had been the toast and the back-slaps all round in the pub parlour the night before.

  Let one more attest,

  I have lived, seen God’s hand thro’ a lifetime,

  and all was for best.

  My pupils, the youth of Melamo, like their fathers, felt no necessity for regrets or valedictory speeches. They were, in between their serious irresponsibilities, more honestly concerned about the new schoolie, who had been due to arrive that day. I wondered what his reactions would be to the one faint light stuttering its welcome through the trees.

  The driver of the coach, wearing the same expression that he had worn on the night he had delivered me, greeted me and took me up as if he had put me down only the day before.

  “Great mornin’.”

  It was a great morning, for good weather in that country was one of the things which made it unforgettable. The scenery, so inoppor-tunely referred to by him on that night three years ago, was lovely, I had discovered, the men of Melamo golden-hearted, and their way of life intangible.