Gripped By Drought

by Arthur W. Upfield

  On arriving above the great hole at the foot of the tree bearing the Seat of Atlas, he urged his mount down the steep, evenly graded river-bank, and for a little distance rode along the dry, sandy river-bed, turning eventually up the bed of the creek, passing under the bridge, and then, riding up the less steep creek bank, came to level ground before the huge shearing shed of Atlas.

  The man matched the horse. They made a wonderful equestrian picture against the background of vivid gum-tree foliage, and from the small crowd of men gathered outside the shearers’ kitchen, engaged in balloting for a cook, one voice reached the rider:

  “Hey! There’s the Turk. Where’s ’is ’arem?”

  The blood mounted to Cameron’s handsome face. His blue eyes gleamed with anger. Tempted as he was to ride across to the group and thrash the impertinent man, he was wisely restrained by the knowledge that neither he nor Mayne could dismiss the fellow, since he was employed by the shearing contractor, and that almost certainly violence would be countered with greater violence. Within the shed he found Mayne talking with the shearing contractor.

  “Hallo, Cameron!” Mayne said in greeting.

  “Good day, Mayne! How’s things?” Cameron drawled.

  “So-so,” Mayne responded. “I’ll be free in a minute.”

  Cameron wandered through the great iron building, nodded condescendingly to big Gus Jackson, who was oiling the overhead machinery that drove the shearing machines, and from a doorway at the far end of the shed watched Mr. Andrews and another rider moving a flock slowly toward him. After several minutes he found Mayne at his elbow.

  “How is your shearing going, Cameron?” he was asked.

  “Bad, Mayne, bad. In fact, damned bad. We are losing a lot of sheep. Thank heaven, I’m independent of sheep!”

  “Yes. You’re lucky. When are you leaving us?”

  Calmly Cameron eyed the shorter, slimmer man, noting the grey hairs at the temples, the crows’ feet flanking the eyes, the three vertical lines between the brows: lines of concentrated thought, grey hairs of ceaseless worry, crows’ feet of persistent introspection.

  “I don’t know that I shall be leaving, although I have got the old uncle’s money at last,” he replied. “Somehow this accursed country gets into one’s blood, and I may be ass enough to buy Thuringah if the drought breaks the company.”

  “Do you think it will?”

  “If it lasts another year it will bust every station in the western half of the State, don’t you think?”

  “Yes–if not all, then a big majority of them.”

  “Have

  you

  seen

  The Graziers’ Review–the latest issue?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “l read it this morning,” Cameron said seriously. “The editorial is somewhat disturbing. Says that the warehouses of the world are crammed with woollen goods: the people are either too poor or too flash to buy anything but imitation silk stuffs. It sums up by predicting a heavy fall in wool prices.”

  “H’m! Sounds bad. If we’re hit with rotten prices on top of this drought, then, as you say, many of us will be in Queer Street.”

  For some few minutes they discussed the outlook, and then, since Mayne had several important matters to attend to, he urged Cameron to go along to Ethel for some tea, saying that he would follow in half an hour.

  That really was what Cameron had come for. With average good fortune it would be his first opportunity for having Ethel Mayne to himself, or, rather, his second opportunity. That other opportunity had been very brief. It had permitted him only one bare minute to draw her into his arms and smother her face with kisses–

  some of which she had returned after a brief and half-hearted attempt at resistance.

  With a, “Thanks, old man!” a nod, and a covert smile of satisfaction, he left Frank Mayne in the shed, led his horse across the bridge, slipped a scent cachou into his mouth whilst passing Feng’s bungalow, and finally passed the end of the bridle reins over the top of a fence picket near the main gate. Nodding coolly to Feng, then walking from store to office, he went through the gateway, stepped on the veranda, and knocked at the open door of the house.

  “Is your mistress at home?” he asked the maid conventionally.

  Inviting him into the hall, she left him waiting there whilst she sought out her mistress, returning presently in confusion, and ushering him into the drawing-room. Cameron’s pulses began to stir.

  This room was so exquisitely feminine, the little things in it so characteristic of the woman whom he so much adored, the loveliest manifestation of his one and only god–Woman! Sudden stabs of electricity flickered through his heart muscles, sparking that organ into faster beating. And then he saw Ethel Mayne standing in the doorway, her eyes living black gems in a perfect cream-complexioned face, her lips slightly parted. So soon as she had closed the door he was standing near her, his arms stretched wide to her, his powerful chest inflated, his face tilted a little upward, the well-practised slow-breaking smile making him irresistible. He was a master of the art of rousing feminine passion.

  “I can stand it no longer,” he said with just the right degree of hoarseness in his voice. “Why continue to deny that you love me, you wonder woman? I know you do, while I worship all the inanimate things you touch.”

  “Not here!” she warned him sharply, when he would have swept his arms round her. Masterfully this strong silent man advanced, but she was no easy victim. She knew her strength because she knew her weakness. Until the moment he touched her she would be strong.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” she asked him. “You know I am not free. There are hundreds of women who would love you if you let them.”

  “I love none but you,” he told her vibrantly. “If I may not touch you–and all my being screams for the touch of your lips–at least sit here in this chair where the light will fall on your dear face. We have but a minute or so, and then, I suppose, the maid will bring in the tea-things, and your husband will come in to–er–entertain us. Gad! How lovely you are!”

  Seeing the adoration in his eyes, realizing her power, Ethel Mayne for two seconds felt intoxicated. The splendour in which once lay a Cleopatra flashed across her mind in brilliant colours. She knew, and was thrilled by the knowledge, that she could make this big, godlike man do anything she wished.

  “Why have you come?” she asked, her voice now less clear and firm. “Why do you persist in tormenting me? Why do you not go away, to England, now that you are independent?”

  Seated opposite her, he leaned forward so that he could have touched her face. His eyes were blazing.

  “I have come here because I could not stay away one more split second,” he said, his voice a growl, affectation and poise vanquished by his real passion for her. “I do not persist in tormenting you. If you are tormented, it is due to your hesitancy to accept what I offer. I offer you myself and all that I have, which now is not an inconsiderable sum. I offer you escape from this horrible country, from this flat, loveless life you are living; I offer to take you to Europe, to England, where it rains sometimes and the grass is always green and cool.” With quick roughness he demanded: “Answer me a question, if you can. How much is Atlas behind this year?”

  “Feng says over thirty thousand pounds,” she replied, not realizing at the moment that she was betraying Feng’s confidence.

  “Oh! Thirty thousand, eh? And wool prices going down. And sheep dying in their hundreds. The drought and the coming drop in wool prices will reduce the value of this property by fifty per cent. Is Mayne offering you a trip round the world?”

  “How could he do that?”

  “Of course he could not do it, dear. What is more, he cannot offer to take you round the world for years and years to come. You adorable little fool! You are imprisoned here behind the bars of poverty, and you will not accept the key to your prison which I offer you. The key of gold is yours for the acceptance. You may step from your prison, and fly with me t
o the bright crowded world of luxury, gaiety, and–and love. Why, in heaven’s name, why do you hesitate?”

  For her life Ethel could not have told him. If he had picked her up in his arms and carried her away, if he had abducted her, she would have made no slightest struggle to escape. But when it came to putting the he-man’s theory of feminine subjugation into practice, Cameron’s nerve failed. He offered her all things but relief from responsibility for a fatal decision.

  Ethel Mayne knew that she could herself never make that decision. She could not cast from her those scruples based on her love for Little Frankie and her regard for the white-haired ascetic moralist and prelate, her father. Whilst she struggled to conquer those scruples, to throw aside her hesitation and rush into those two strong arms, she knew that she never could abandon her child and strike down her father in shame.

  She was saved the difficult task of confessing to her lover more than she would have wished by the entry of the maid pushing a tea-trolley, and by the time that the maid withdrew she was again mistress of herself.

  “Your wisest plan is to leave Australia at once,” she said quickly. “Travel! Undertake a world tour. Constant meeting with beautiful women will cause my image to fade out of your memory.”

  “Never! Never, I tell you.”

  “Mr. Cameron, in wordly wisdom I am a century old. Your trouble is that you have been in the Australian bush too long. You have met so few women, and so when you do meet a passably good-looking woman you fall in love with her. Travel, and you will meet really beautiful women.”

  “I shall not travel,” Cameron said fiercely. “I am not a callow youth whose fancy is swayed by every pretty face.” Hang it! why did he think of his uncle with his reference to wine and swill? “I shall stay at Thuringah, where I shall worship you and send to you my constant call of love until you can resist no longer, but come to me, and with me fly away to real life and supreme happiness. That is my determination, dear. You will lose your futile little fight. I shall win.”

  Later, when he was leaving the homestead, he met Eva coming through that belt of lantana called the Poison Belt. His resultant action became inexplicable even to himself, unless he really was like that connoisseur of wine who, as related by his uncle, when cast into prison avidly drank the coloured alcohol smuggled in to him. Cameron held Eva in his arms and kissed her again and again as though he suffered a great thirst.

  2

  Once again the great corrugated-iron shearing shed beyond the creek roared with machinery and hummed with human activity. Once again Todd Gray started working before day broke to cease only after night fell; now wearing easy boots on his wife’s strict orders, for the habitual wearing of slippers had been the cause of his sore feet. This time for Feng Ching-wei it was a period of treble his routine work, and with his friend he spared not himself, the hours of his daily work sometimes totalling seventeen. Ten Pot Dick was imbued with extra energy, his duty being to feed all sheep in-coming to the shed, and to see that they were fed again before leaving for the long journey back to their barren paddocks.

  The first eight days of the shearing offered no difficulties. The sheep that passed through the shed during this period were fairly robust, being the rams and the breeding ewes which had been handfed since early in February. Then began the shearing of all those sheep–the wether sheep, the hoggets, and the flocks of culled ewes–which in normal years would have been sold. The culminating horrors of the drought now began.

  Knowing that this year but fifty per cent. of the sheep lived to be shorn, the shearers worked strenuously to shear individually as many sheep as they could; for, comparatively, this year’s shearing cheques would be small. A shearer working to maintain a high daily average tally seized a sheep from the pen of sheep feeding his stand, then dragged it on the “board” beneath the gear from which a flex depended to his shearing machine. He pulled a cord, thereby putting his machine into gear, when the comb buzzed with speed, and, bending over the animal, began to strip the belly wool. It was then that the sheep shuddered and died.

  Muttering an oath, the man went on removing the fleece, the carcass now relaxed and difficult to maintain in the desired position. When the fleece lay on the “board” as a patch of driven snow tinged with yellow, the shearer heaved the dead sheep through the chute into the pen that received his shorn sheep.

  “’Ow do you like ’em dead, Jake?” inquired his neighbour.

  Jake was an immense man who knew nothing of nerves, and thought of little else in life than piling up a shearing cheque.

  “Me brother’s an undertaker,” he said calmly, walking to his feed pen. ’E got me to give ’im a ’and once sliding a corpse inter a coffin about a foot too small all round.” From the pen Jake dragged another sheep. Then: “I reckoned when we boxed that stiff I was kinda out of me depth. Corpses, ’uman or sheep, I don’t like. Hey, boss! what the hell are you giving us?”

  He let fall the sheep he held, which was now dead, and glared indignantly at the boss of the “board”, who answered his shout. “Hey! wot’s this they’re givin’ us? This is a shearing shed, not a ruddy morgue.”

  “Stretcher bear–ers!” yelled a shearer further along the shed.

  “Hi, boss! Call in the ‘Buryin’ Party’!” yelled another–a man as big as Jake. He held up the full-grown dead sheep by a hind leg as a man might hold on high a rabbit. “Hey! Tell ’em to draft in sheep. I ain’t used to shearing bags of rattling bones.”

  One sheep in every eight died in the shearers’ hands. One in ten died in the feed pens before ever the shearers could handle them. One in nine died in the receiving pens for shorn sheep. Their weakened constitutions were unable to withstand the shock of fright occasioned by the handling, or the noise of the machinery..

  The nights were cold, a bitter south wind sweeping through the sheltered night paddock in which every evening Ten Pot Dick scattered maize for the sheep put there which had been shorn during the day. The exposure to the first night after their fleeces had been removed killed sheep as though the paddock had been swept with shrapnel.

  The “Burying Party” visited Feng in the office. Mayne was away on the run. The long, black, bedraggled moustache incessantly shivered as though a wind swept through it. There was rebellion in the black eyes.

  “I wants six more ’orses and six more drays, and six more men to lend me a ’and carting away the dead ’uns,” he said. “This ain’t a shearing. This is a blooming slaughter.”

  “How many dead in the night paddock this morning?” Feng asked.

  “Four hundred and seventeen out of eighteen ’undred, It’s getting a bit thick.”

  “All right, Ned. I’ll see about it. You carry on.”

  When the “Burying Party” had gone Feng’s face was grave.

  3

  When Mayne came to the homestead the next day he engaged a man owning a ton truck to transport the dead sheep five miles west of the river and there dump them. That man and the “Burying Party” worked hard for the remainder of this shearing.

  “God! It’s terrible, Feng,” Mayne said, slumping into a chair in the office. “I have never known conditions to be so bad. The darned sheep simply won’t travel. They lie down and refuse to get up. They kind of cussedly resign themselves to death, and make no effort to save their eyes from the crows or their innards from the eagles. To muster them into the shed is enough to break a strong man’s heart. The shearers are growling, but they’re a good gang, and know it’s no man’s fault. It is getting to be a nightmare.”

  “What sheep are they shearing now?” Feng asked.

  Mayne stared across the table at his friend with eyes dulled by desperate misery. His face was lined by intense fatigue. Feng saw that for a long time he had had no proper sleep.

  “What sheep?” Mayne echoed, and laughed unpleasantly. “Why, those nine thousand wethers–or rather what’s left of them–that I should have let the buyers take at seven shillings a head.”

  “And that I should ha
ve let go at twenty-one shillings,” Feng put in quietly.

  “I’m not blaming you, Feng, as I have told you twenty times; I’m not blaming myself either. I gambled on rain and lost. And in the same circumstances I’d gamble again.”

  “Well, old man, we must accept the loss in a gambling spirit, and continue to play for a future win.” Feng leaned over the table toward his friend, and when he spoke after a slight pause he marked his points by softly slapping the desk-top with his open hand. “That you will not be able to do if you don’t look after yourself. You look like a man who hasn’t slept for a week. Stay home for a couple of days and take things easy.”

  “And hear nothing but English meadows with knee-high green grass, and running streams with trout jumping for flies, and busy streets lined by hurrying people, and unbroken clouds from which the rain falls for hours, and cultured society, and lords and bishops and deans and rectors, and old magnificent buildings–and–and–oh, hell!”

  For a full minute the two men stared at each other, the brilliant sunlight falling athwart the desk, the rumble of machinery in their ears, with the sound now and then of men’s varied voices and dogs barking. Then Mayne fell to rolling a cigarette, a simple common task giving sufficient proof to the observant Chinaman that his friend was at last revolting from the habits of English society imposed on him by his wife. Since his marriage he had smoked “tailor-made” cigarettes in an ebony holder, and never had smoked his pipe inside the walls of Government House.

  “You know, Feng,” Mayne said at last, “It is being borne in on me that I am the greatest fool in the back country. I fell deep. No man could fall deeper. I expected that oil and water would mix in the test-tube of love. Well, oil and water won’t mix! Had I been a lord or something, or had Ethel been a housemaid, the result would have been all water or all oil.”

  “You always were impulsive, Frank; but, as Old Man Mayne liked to say: ‘You’ve made the bed you must lie on.’ You must go on trying to mix the oil and the water for your son’s sake.