Best Australian Short Stories

by Douglas Stewart

  “What was?” asks the brand-new Mrs Hardcastle. “Three pounds just for that box of groceries.”

  “Ten bob of it was for the breakfasts,” says Mr Hardcastle. “But I paid them for the breakfasts!”

  “Damn it, I did!”

  “We both paid!” Mrs Hardcastle is aghast. “We’ve paid them twice for it. Oh!”

  “Ha!” laughs Mr Hardcastle, placing his hand on her knee as, doubtless in error for the gearlever, he so often does. “Diddled us, diddled us properly.”

  “We’ll put the police on to them!” says Mrs Hardcastle.

  “No,” her big husband scorns her. “I can afford it. Let ’em go.”

  “I think you should drive straight back to that shop and demand your money back. You must have gone absolutely mad to take it so calmly. Laughing.”

  “I like to see it!” Mr Hardcastle shouts with his bark of laughter. “The old fox and the vixen! They’ll do all right, that pair. They’ll make money. I’d like to have that old fox on my sales staff.”

  “You’re a bit of a fox yourself,” says Mrs Hardcastle softly. She looks at him archly, over the rims of her glasses. “But you want to look out, you know. More than one old fox has put his foot right into a rabbit-trap. And that was the end of him.” Her wedding-bells peal and peal.

  Mr Hardcastle begins to laugh, then does not. He stares at his brand-new wife. There is something strangely steel-like in Mrs Hardcastle’s appearance. Bones, wires, those hornrimmed, glasses, that frizz of springs on her head, those enormous teeth. And the old fox in a trap. He stamps his foot on the accelerator.

  Dal Stivens

  THE PEPPER-TREE

  MY father often spoke about the pepper-tree when we were kids and it was clear it had meant a lot to him. It stood for something— like the Rolls Royce he was always going to buy. It wasn’t what he said about the pepper-tree—my father had no great gift for words—but how he said it that counted. When he spoke of the pepper-tree at Tullama where he had been brought up you saw it very clearly, with its giant branches draped with their long shawls of olive-green leaves in the backyard of my father’s boyhood home. “A big, large backyard—none of your city pocket-handkerchief lots,” my father said. There were berries on the tree that turned from green to pink with waxlike covers that you could unpick and get the sticky smell of them all over your fingers. In this spanking giant of a tree in its generous country backyard there was always, too, a noisy traffic of sparrows and starlings fluttering and hopping from branch to branch.

  When we were living at Newtown I used to look for pepper-trees when my father took me for a walk on Sunday afternoons. “Look, there’s a pepper-tree,” I’d say to him when I saw one with its herringbone leaves.

  “By golly, boy, that’s only a little runt of a tree,” my old man would say. “They don’t do well in the city. Too much smoke, by golly. You ought to see them out west where I come from.”

  My father was a tall thin man with melancholy brown eyes and the soul of a poet. It was the poet in him that wanted to own a Rolls Royce one day.

  “First our own house and then some day when my ship comes home I’ll buy a Rolls Royce,” he’d say.

  Some of his friends thought my old man was a little crazy to have such an ambition.

  “What would you do with one of those flash cars, Peter?” they’d tease him. “Go and live among the swells?”

  My father would stroke his long brown moustache, which had only a few bits of white in it, and try to explain, but he couldn’t make them understand. He couldn’t even get his ideas across to my mother. Only now do I think I understand what a Rolls Royce meant to him.

  “I don’t want to swank it as you put it, Emily,” he’d say to my mother. “No, by golly. I want to own a Rolls Royce because it is the most perfect piece of machinery made in this world. Why, a Rolls Royce—”

  And then he’d stop and you could feel him groping for the right words to describe what he felt, and then go on blunderingly with the caress of a lover in his voice, talking about how beautiful the engine was...

  “What would a garage mechanic do with a Rolls Royce, I ask you?” my mother would say. “I’d feel silly sitting up in it.” At such times my mother would give the wood stove in the kitchen a good shove with the poker or swish her broom vigorously. My mother was a small plump woman with brown hair which she wore drawn tight back from her forehead.

  Like the pepper-tree, the Rolls Royce symbolized something for my father. He had been born in Tullama in the mallee. His father was a bricklayer and wanted his son to follow him. But my father had had his mind set on becoming an engineer. When he was eighteen he had left Tullama and come to the city and got himself apprenticed to a mechanical engineer. He went to technical classes in the evening. After two years his eyes had given out on him.

  “If I had had some money things might have been different, by golly,” my father told me once. “I could have gone to the University and learnt things properly. I could have become a real engineer. I didn’t give my eyes a fair go—I went to classes five nights a week and studied after I came home.”

  After his eyes went my father had to take unskilled jobs but always near machinery. “I liked tinkering but I had no proper schooling,” he said once.

  He knew a lot and in spite of his eyes he could only have learnt most of it from books. He knew all about rocks and how they were formed. He could talk for hours, if you got him started, about fossils and the story of evolution. My mother didn’t like to hear him talking about such things because she thought such talk was irreligious. Looking back now I’d say that in spite of his lack of orthodox schooling my father was a learned man. He taught me more than all the teachers I ever had at high school. He was a keen naturalist, too.

  Just before the depression came when we were living at Newtown my father had paid one hundred pounds off the house. He was forty-seven years old then. I was twelve.

  “By golly, we’ll own the house before we know where we are,” he said.

  “Will we?” said my mother. “At a pound a week we have twelve years to go—unless we win Tatts.”

  “You never know what may turn up,” said my old man cheerfully.

  “I have a good idea, what with people losing their jobs every day.”

  “I haven’t lost mine,” my father said, “and what’s more, I have a way of making some money if I do.”

  “I suppose it’s another of your inventions, Peter? What is it this time, I ask you?”

  “Never you mind,” said my father. But he said it gently.

  One of my mother’s complaints was that my father was always losing money on the things he tried to invent. Another was that he was always filling the backyard up with junk.

  “What can you do with these pocket-handkerchief lots?” my father would say. “Now, when I was a nipper at Tullama we had a decent backyard—why it was immense—it was as big—”

  He’d stop there, not being able to get the right word.

  Auction sales, according to my mother, were one of my father’s weaknesses. He could never resist anything if it looked cheap, even if he had no use for it, she’d say. Soon after my old man had told my mother he had something in mind to make some money he went away early one Sunday morning. He came back about lunch-time in a motor lorry. On the back of the Ford was a two-stroke kerosene engine. I came running out.

  “I’ve bought it, Joe, by golly,” he told me.

  He had, too. Both engine and lorry.

  “Dirt cheap. Forty quid the lot,” he said. “Ten quid down boy, and ten bob a week.”

  My mother cut up when she heard.

  “Wasting money when it could have gone into the house, Peter.”

  “This’ll pay the house off in no time, by golly,” my father said. “And buy a lot of other things, too.”

  I knew by the way he looked up and over my mother’s head he was thinking of the Rolls Royce which to him was like a fine poem or a great symphony of Beethoven.

&nbs
p; All that day he was very excited, walking round the engine, standing back to admire it, and then peering closely at it. He started it running and stopped it continually all the afternoon. Every night when he came home from the garage during the next weeks he’d go first thing and look at the engine. He had some plan in his mind but wouldn’t say what it was at first.

  “Wait and see, Joe,” he’d say. “You’ll see all right.”

  He didn’t let me into his secret for over a week though I knew he was bursting to tell someone. In the end, he drew me aside mysteriously in the kitchen one night, when my mother was in the bedroom, and whispered, “It’s an invention for cleaning out underground wells, boy.”

  “For cleaning out wells ?”

  “Underground wells.”

  He listened to hear if my mother was coming back.

  “I’m rigging a light out there tonight, boy,” he whispered. “Come out later and I’ll show you.”

  My father’s idea, he explained later, was to clean underground wells in country towns by suction. You pushed a stiff brush on the end of the pipe down the sides and along the bottom of underground wells. The pipe sucked up the silt and you didn’t lose much water from the well.

  “Every country town has half a dozen underground wells, boy,” he said. “The banks and one or two of the wealthier blokes in the town. Just like it was in Tullama. There’s money in it because you can clean the well out without losing too much water. It’s a goldmine.” It sounded good to me.

  “When do you start ?” I asked.

  “Soon, by golly,” he said. “The job at the garage won’t spin out much longer.”

  He was right about that, but until the day she died my mother always had a sneaking idea that the old man had helped to give himself the sack. It was early in 1930 when the old man set out in the lorry, heading out west.

  “You’ve got to go to the low rainfall districts,” he said.

  “Like Tullama?” I said.

  “Yes, like Tullama, by golly.”

  I started thinking of the pepper-tree then.

  “Will you go to Tullama and see the pepper-tree?”

  My father stroked his long straggling moustache. Into his eyes came that look like when he was thinking or talking about the Rolls. He didn’t answer me for a bit.

  “By golly, yes, boy, if I go there.”

  Soon after this he started off. Every week brought a letter from him. He did well, too. He was heading almost due west from Sydney and I followed the towns he spoke of in my school atlas. It took him nearly a day on a well so in the larger towns he might stay over a week, in the smaller a day or a day and a half.

  After he had been away for two months he still had a good few wells to go before he reached Tullama. You could see he was heading that way.

  “Him and that silly pepper-tree!” said my mother, but she didn’t say it angrily. My father was sending her as much money as he used to bring home when he worked at the garage.

  But in spite of what my mother said about the pepper-tree she became a bit keen as my father got only two weeks off Tullama. She made a small pin-flag for me to stick on the map. About this time a change came in the old man’s letters home. At first they had been elated but now they were quieter. He didn’t boast so much about the money he was making or say anything about the Rolls. Perhaps excitement was making him quieter as he got nearer to the pepper-tree, I thought.

  “I know what it is,” my mother said. “He’s not getting his proper meals. He’s too old to be gallivanting off on his own. I bet he’s not cooking proper meals for himself. And without a decent bed to sleep in—only the back of that lorry.”

  I thought the day would never come but soon enough my dad had only one town to do before he would reach Tullama. His letters usually arrived on a Tuesday—he wrote home on Sundays—but round this time I watched for the mail every day and was late for school three mornings running. When a letter did come I grabbed it from the postman’s hand and hurried inside with it, reading the postmark on the run. It was from Tullama.

  “All right, all right, don’t rush me, Joe,” my mother said. “You and your pepper-tree.”

  I read over her elbow. There was only one page. There was nothing about the pepper-tree. Dad was well and making money but he was thinking of returning soon. Only a few lines.

  I couldn’t understand it.

  On the next Tuesday there was no letter. Nor on the Wednesday. On the Thursday my father came home. He turned up at breakfast-time. He gave us a surprise walking in like that. He said that he had sold the truck and engine and come home by train. He looked tired and shamefaced and somehow a lot older. I saw a lot more white in his mo.

  “The engine was no good,” he said. “It kept breaking down. It cost me nearly all I earned and it was hungry on petrol. I had to sell it to pay back what I borrowed and get my fare home.”

  “Oh, Peter,” my mother said, putting her arms round him. “You poor dear. I knew something was wrong.”

  “Mother reckoned it was the food,” I said. “She reckoned you weren’t getting your proper meals.”

  “I’ll make you a cup of tea, Peter,” my mother said bustling over to the stove and pushing another piece of wood into it. “Then I’ll get you some breakfast.”

  “By golly, that sounds a bit of all right,” my father said then. This was the first time since he had walked in that he had sounded like his old self.

  My mother hurried about the kitchen and my father talked a bit more. “I thought I was going to do well at first,” he said. “But the engine was too old. It was always spare parts. It ate up all I earned.”

  He talked on about the trip. I had got over my surprise at seeing him walk in and now wanted to know all about the pepper-tree. “Did you see the pepper-tree, dad?” I asked quickly.

  He didn’t seem to hear so I asked him again. I was standing right in front of him and then to my surprise I saw that he was not looking at me but at something far away.

  “Yes, boy, I saw it all right.” His voice was not like I knew it with little hills and hollows in it, but flat and sad. My father didn’t say any more for what seemed a long time.

  “It was a little runt of a tree, boy—and a little backyard.”

  He didn’t say any more then and he never spoke of the pepper-tree—or the Rolls again.

  Judith Wright

  THE ANT-LION

  “HE can’t get out; he can’t get a hold of it,” Morvenna cried. She thrust suddenly with the end of a twig, trying to push the ant up the shifting sand-slope of the pit. But her brother, lying opposite her, filled his cheeks with air and blew hard. The ant fell back to the pit-bottom, and in a moment the little fury of jaws burst out at it, seized it, vanished again. Only a flurry of sand in the bottom of the little pit marked for a few seconds the ant’s last struggle.

  The two children sat up slowly, breathing again. They looked at each other with a kind of guilt. Max’s face was quite red; Morvenna’s mouth was open.

  “How many would he kill, I wonder?” Max said. “That’s three we’ve given him, but they were all little ones. I’ll get a meat-ant and see what he does.”

  “Oh, no, Max, don’t, don’t. I don’t want you to.” Morvenna clenched her hands, but she could not help looking round in the grass for the meat-ant track that led to the ant-hill farther up the slope. Max went across to it, holding his twig, and bent down. Morvenna gave a scream. “If you do, Maxie, I’ll kill the lion. I will, truly.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Max said. “It’s the first ant-lion we’ve ever seen and we might never find another. I want to show it to everyone.” He came back, holding his twig gingerly and turning it from end to end as the red ant rushed along it. Meat-ants could bite.

  “Now I’ll put it in,” he said. “Look, Morv.” He shook the twig hard over the little pit, but the ant was obstinate and clung. Angry, intent, he finally dislodged it with a blade of grass.

  Morvenna sat with her hands over her eyes. “No, I won�
�t look,” she said. “It’s awful of you.”

  But the ant was in the pit. She peered through the crack between her fingers and saw it. It looked big and strong, frenziedly pulling down the sand of the slope in its struggle to escape. Perhaps it might get away. She took down her hands and leant forward.

  In their minds the ant and its arena of battle enlarged, filled the whole world. Under the sand at the pit-bottom crouched the lion, big as a real lion, waiting for the ant to slide down a little farther. But this one was so big, bigger than the ant-lion itself. Max said, “Now we’ll see some sport.”

  The ant was puzzled at the sand that slipped so treacherously and persistently away as it climbed. It stopped, slid, went down almost to the bottom. For a moment there was a stir in the sand there, and Morvenna jumped. The ant might have seen it, too; at any rate it gathered all its strength and made a rush at the slope. The sand slid quickly, but the ant was determined; he had almost reached the top. “Good ant, good ant,” Morvenna cried; but Max pushed with his twig, and down went the ant to the bottom.

  For a moment nothing happened. “It’s too big,” Max said, and his lips pursed. The two children stared down, lying on their stomachs, heads almost together. The ant hesitated, and began to struggle up against the slope.

  But now the ant-lion moved. Quick, dextrous, it thrust its stumpy forelegs from the sand and began to jerk its head, heavy and tool- like. Sand flew up, hindering the big ant, setting the walls slipping down. “Ah,” Max breathed. “Look at that now.”

  The ant slipped and slipped, staying in the one place. It was growing tired, but it was clearly in a panic; its legs worked frantically. The hot shadows of the tree above moved across and across; the cicadas filled the afternoon with their monotonous shrill. The battle swayed. Morvenna moved aside; her rib was against a knotted root of the tree; and as she moved Max gave a shout of triumph. “Oh, what happened?” She thrust him aside and peered down.