Gripped By Drought

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “Just for a moment, dear, and then, well, forget him. You wrote him the note I suggested, and left it in the rack?”

  “Ye-es,” with just the faintest hint of regret, which vanished in adding: “I explained how impossible it was to go on. I was quite truthful. I said only Little Frankie stopped me from running away with you long ago. I told him we were going to Adelaide, and that we would send him the evidence for a divorce, for which I hoped he would sue so that we both could start afresh. That was right, wasn’t it?”

  “Quite right, darling,’“ he said, squeezing her arm. “We will send him the name of the hotel. You should get your divorce in three months. We can then go to England legally married, and without a shadow to dim our happiness.”

  “Alldyce!” She uttered the name in a voice that thrilled him as never before had done the voice of a woman. “Alldyce, you will always be happy with me? You will look after me and love me–always–always?”

  “I shall love you always, dear,” he told her, really meaning it.

  “You must, you know”–pleadingly. “You must make me forget Atlas and the horrors I have seen in this dreadful country. You must love me so fiercely that I shall even forget poor Little Frankie. Oh, Alldyce! I loved the baby.”

  “Perhaps, some day, you will grow to love another,” he whispered, and watched her dark eyes open and shine, and her creamy face glow pink.

  And so did Ethel Mayne burn her boats, deliberately burn them, for of the two hairs that bound her to her husband and convention by far the stronger of the two had broken with the death of her boy; the weaker, her regard for her father, then having snapped before the onslaught of Alldyce Cameron.

  This morning she was not sorry that there was now no possibility of going back. She was experiencing a lightness of spirit, a jocund buoyancy as though for long she had lived in a grey-lit prison and now was free in brilliant sunlight. Already Atlas, with which were associated that sober old-young man, her husband, and that passionless spider-man who sat and schemed in the office or his bungalow, was being pushed rapidly into obscurity by this new life, a life that would so wonderfully realize her happiest dreams.

  The first night from Atlas they spent on the train travelling from Broken Hill to Adelaide. They were unaware of the inquiry agent who followed their taxi to the North Australian Hotel, Cameron’s car being brought on after them.

  Ethel Mayne experienced the joys of the bride that should have been hers when she married Frank Mayne. Now clothes and money were subordinate to love. She would have found joy in living with Cameron in a workman’s cottage. His embraces were fresh and supremely delicious to her soul. Yet her passion for this man was restrained; unfathomed and deep in her heart was the knowledge that she would not reach the heights of abandon until she could rid herself of the haunting face of Little Frankie. Memories of the gladsome child were as links of the cable that anchored her to the past.

  2

  Three days of bliss had gone. It was the morning of the fourth day, when she sat in the hotel lounge whilst Cameron paid a visit to his bank, that from far-away Atlas Feng Ching-wei struck.

  A well-dressed stranger approached her. Looking up, she saw him doff his hat and offer her his card, and whilst she read the superscription he coolly drew a chair close to her and sat down.

  “Madam, as my card states, I am a private inquiry agent,” he said. “I have been instructed by Mr. Feng Ching-wei, of Atlas Station, to secure evidence for divorce on behalf of Mr. Frank Mayne. I think I may say that I have secured that evidence.”

  The dark brows lifted just a fraction. Then the pale lids dropped and veiled the woman’s eyes. At first she felt a qualm of fear, but this was followed quickly by relief. For would not this man’s spying simplify affairs, and hurry them to the conclusion she so ardently desired? She replied quite coolly:

  “Mr. Feng Ching-wei need not have troubled. Yesterday I posted to Mr. Mayne particulars to be found in the register of this hotel.”

  “Your action will corroborate my evidence, madam,” calmly stated the inquiry agent. “However, I have been instructed further. I am to place in your hands these papers and photograph in a sequence dictated by Mr. Feng Ching-wei. First, this short newspaper cutting.”

  It was a report of a maintenance case taken from The Barrier Miner, Broken Hill, in which Olive Clive sued Alldyce Cameron.

  Judgment had been given in favour of the girl.

  Having read this, Ethel Mayne gazed at the tips of her shoes. So Alldyce was not entirely spotless! But what man was? One could hardly expect so splendid a man not to be tempted and fall to the blandishments of a hussy. If Feng thought such a thing as this would destroy her faith in her lover, then he would find out his mistake.

  “Mr. Ching-wei need not have troubled,” she repeated coldly.

  The agent offered no comment. He placed in her hand a photographic print. Watching her profile, he felt admiration of her self-control, for Ethel Mayne revealed no outward sign of the shock given her by this photograph of Eva lying in Cameron’s arms.

  The light in the lounge appeared to grow dull, as though outside a cloud had masked the sun. So, after all, her splendid lover was weak. She had thought him so strong, so true, and here was Feng drawing aside the curtain of deception. Had the agent looked into her eyes he would have seen their hardening, the determination to keep Alldyce from tempting hussies in the future.

  “And this certified copy of a statement, signed by Eva Jennings, witnessed by Mary O’Doyle and Feng Ching-wei,” murmured the agent, expecting hopefully that now this cold, haughty woman would show dismay.

  Slowly Ethel Mayne read through Eva’s confession. Yet again, more slowly, she read it through. The heat of her body appeared to die away, leaving her deathly cold. Extraneous sounds became emphasized, beat on her ears, forming a world to which no longer did she belong. Feng’s revenge was complete. The subtlety of his Oriental mind had dictated the manner of it. First she was to provide the evidence for divorce proceedings. And then, at the height of her happiness with Cameron–this!

  When she rose to her feet the agent rose too. Ignoring him, she passed to the lift and was deposited on the first floor, where was their suite. Locking herself in the bedroom, she almost collapsed on a chesterfield, and again read and re-read one paragraph of Eva’s confession:

  You see, Mr. Feng, don’t you, how it was? While Little Frankie was running about crying for his mummy, while I was rushing to the homestead for help, Alldyce was slinking back to his home. If he had stopped to search he might have found Little Frankie. Don’t you think so?

  Gently Ethel Mayne’s head fell back on the cushion behind her. Her lips began to tremble. Her poor brain was stunned by the roaring clamour of the crashing walls of her castle of joy. The confession was not a forgery. Of that she was convinced. She knew Feng well enough to understand that he was too clever to strike with a faulty weapon.

  She shut her eyes to banish those living sentences of Eva’s confession. She saw then the tear-stained, dusty little face of the child she so passionately had loved. A child cried in the next suite. It had cried during the night, but its cries in that delirious night she had forgotten. Now the child’s cries appeared to be those of Little Frankie frantically screaming for her, with the fearful, shadowy aboriginal conception of the bush spirit racing at his heels. And almost in reach of him the man in whose arms Eva had lain, stealing away that he might not face his responsibilities.

  To her it seemed that the little boy was just beyond a black curtain that had only to be pulled aside to admit her to be with him and to comfort him. A strong-willed woman, Ethel Mayne decided to pass through that curtain.

  • • • • •

  Alldyce Cameron was delayed overlong with his bank business. On his hotel-bound way he met a friend who delayed him yet further, and in his heart Cameron cursed his friend for coming between him, if only for a few minutes, and his god. Woman….

  Assisted by the liftman, he broke open the door
of his suite. They found Ethel lying on her bed. Fastidious to the last, her right arm hung over the edge of the bed, the hand deep in the interior of a water-ewer not now containing water. She had cut the main arteries of her wrist with one of Cameron’s safety-razor blades.

  Eva’s confession, the photograph, and the clipping he found on Ethel’s dressing-table. For a little while he was puzzled, for a little while he suspected Feng of having sent them and meditated vengeance. For a little while he grieved at Ethel’s death. She was so lovely, and she was beginning to open to his ardour as a bud breaking open into a glorious flower. Finally, he considered himself unjustly treated.

  But there! The girl clerk in the hotel office was a stunner. He would––!

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THE NEW LIFE

  I

  MR. ROWLAND SMYTHE paid his next visit to Atlas at the end of January, just one month after Alldyce Cameron lost his greatest and most magnificent catch. Smythe came in his big car, driven by his chauffeur, accompanied by his dispatch-cases, which now held the fate of several huge properties. With one of these dispatch-eases between his feet he faced Feng Ching-wei from his chair on the veranda of Feng’s bungalow.

  “About four miles this side of Tin Tin we met a madman driving a truck,” he said in his cheerful non-business tones. “Did he pass through here?”

  “No, he started from here, Smythe. It was Tom Mace going to see his sweetheart. After the tragedy of Little Frankie I sent Eva, the nursemaid, to Ann Shelley. Ann rang up yesterday to say that she had at last banished Cameron’s influence from her mind, and thought it an opportune time for her former sweetheart to win her back. This morning Mace came in with a load of carcass wool, and it took two hours of my time to get him to see that the girl was more sinned against than he was. When, finally, he did make up his mind to woo his Eva, he lost no time getting away.”

  “What is he going to do when he gets Sir John’s money?”

  “He hasn’t decided,” Feng said slowly. “But they are going to be married soon–according to Mace. And they are coming to live at Atlas–according to Frank.”

  “Hum! Where’s Frank?”

  “Out with Boynton and Reynolds’s sheep.”

  “Any idea how many left?”

  “Frank estimates about fourteen thousand,,”

  “I suppose Frank can’t pay anything off that loan? Over fifty thousand, you know. My people are not pleased about it, and I fear that if they get a good offer for Atlas they might accept it.”

  “What would happen then?” Smythe sighed and his face expressed anxiety. He said deliberately:

  “The value of Atlas and all station properties to-day is what they will fetch. My firm, as you know, controls hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in pastoral propositions. This world depression, with the consequent slump in wool, is putting the wind up them. If they got an offer of fifty thousand for Atlas, they’d send Frank packing with a bonus of five hundred pounds.”

  “They could foreclose on Atlas?”

  “They could, and they would,” replied Smythe. “They most certainly will if Frank falls down on the payment of interest. How much money has he got?”

  “He told me he has now about fifteen hundred pounds. Against my advice he paid a further thousand off Westmacott’s selection to Mrs. Westmacott. Your beastly firm can’t run him off Westmacott’s place.”

  “I am pleased to hear it, Feng; indeed I am. But how the devil is he going to keep Atlas? The interest will very quickly eat up his fifteen hundred, and he has expenses to pay as well.”

  “He is going to keep Atlas, Smythe. And you are going to help him.”

  “Well, I am doing what I can. I should be really saddened to see him lose it.”

  “I believe you would. You maintain that your firm would accept fifty thousand pounds for the Atlas indebtedness to them. If I paid forty-four thousand of that money, would you yourself find six thousand at five per cent?”

  Smythe looked long and steadily at his host.

  “I did not think you had so much money. But the interest on your forty-four thousand, plus that on my six thousand, wouldn’t make the position of Atlas any better. It would be buying out one set of creditors and taking on another set.”

  “Listen!” Feng urged intensely. “When Old Man Mayne died he left me two thousand pounds he said my father lent him in a drought period. He also left me a further sum of twenty-five thousand, as you well know. That was eleven years ago. I have never touched that principal, which has been earning good interest. To it I have added most of my earnings from Atlas, and twelve months ago I realized all my securities, and placed a few hundreds over forty-four thousand in my bank. All that money has come out of Atlas–a free gift to me. It shall go back into Atlas–a free gift.”

  From the pale round face and the black, now blazing, eyes Rowland Smythe gazed across the empty Gutter of Australia. His life had been crammed with experience of human foibles, among which was nothing like this. Surely with such a guiding spirit Atlas never could sink into bankruptcy!

  “Smythe, now that that woman has gone from Atlas, she will soon fade from Frank’s mind,” Feng continued. “Dead, I bear her no animosity. There is much I can now forgive her. We did not understand her, nor she us. It is a fact that already Frank’s spirit is recovering from that strange indecision produced by the slavish desire to please her. He is becoming his old shrewd, far-seeing self.

  He is like a man long chained to a stake and now set free. The drought won’t last for ever. He’ll pull Atlas through it and raise Atlas from the dust.”

  “It is a pity he never married Ann Shelley.”

  “He will, presently.” “Oh!”

  “I shall will it.”

  “And you think you will succeed?”

  “I am sure.”

  For a moment Smythe regarded Feng Ching-wei pensively. Then:

  “Very well,” he said. “I’ll pay in six thousand pounds to your bank account on the first of February. On that date post your cheque to my principals. You’ll want money with which to carry on. I’ll find another ten thousand by the fifteenth of next month, making fifteen thousand in all. Atlas can pay me a four per cent. interest. Hang it! No money could be safer or in safer hands.”

  “Thanks! In three years after the drought Atlas will have paid back that money. Excuse me for a minute. I must go along to the office and ring up Ann Shelley.”

  When Feng had gone, Mr. Rowland Smythe sat with narrowed eyelids. If only that fool of a nephew had applied himself to business instead of aping the writings of those damned Russians, he might have become as admirable as this Chinaman.

  2

  In the chair before occupied by Mr. Rowland Smythe now sat Ann Shelley. It was the day following the financier’s visit, and she drank tea with Feng on the latter’s veranda.

  “We have been good friends, Ann, haven’t we?” he was saying. “I think I prefer the word ‘pal’ to ‘friend’ in describing the relationship that has existed between us for so many years. Perhaps the strongest strand of the rope which binds us in palship is our love for Frank. You do love him, don’t you–in the way I do?”

  “Yes, of course, old boy,” she said with conviction.

  “Then I will first tell you what I have done for him, and next will point out to you what you can do for him,” Feng said. “When he brought home Ethel Dyson I met her in a hostile spirit. I could not help that, because for several years before he went to England I had counted on your future marriage to him. However, when he did marry Ethel Dyson, although I was hostile, I determined to be fair. When able, I counselled Frank on the way to retain her affection, but when I saw that her ideas of financial economy were–well, peculiar; when I saw that she never would regard Atlas as we do; when I saw that her love of social excitement and her ambition of social power far transcended her regard for her husband; I knew that even had this drought not happened Atlas eventually would have been ruined. Ethel Dyson was the kind of woman who ruins ev
erything and everybody she comes across.

  “When she eloped with Cameron I foresaw what would have happened had she not died. I believe that Cameron would have tired of her quickly, and that he would not have married her had she secured a divorce. Assuming that she had lived, I think Frank would have divorced her because she asked for it. But when Cameron refused to marry her, she would have been disinclined to go back to her people, and would have asked Frank to re-marry her. And I believe he would have done so.”

  “And you sent her the copy of Eva’s confession so that she would cast off Cameron and seek re-marriage with Frank the quicker?” Ann asked, with a touch of sarcasm.

  “I sent her the confession in the first place to strike at them for what they had done to Frank; and in the second place to make her see the impossibility of coming back to Atlas. I considered that when she knew that the man to whom she had given herself was directly responsible for the death of Little Frankie, she would realize that the barrier she herself had erected would be too strong to allow her to regain her former life here. Evidently, at the last, she recognized that.”

  He saw her gaze fixed on him and blandly looked into her grey eyes, now perplexed and troubled. She heard him say:

  “Ever since that day I saw her in Cameron’s arms in the garden-house, I have been governed by one ambition, which was to remove her from Atlas and put you in her place. My ambition has been partly realized, Ann. The remaining part has yet to be fulfilled.

  “Smythe came the other day to say that his firm was troubled about their financial advances. We agreed that it was only a matter of time, drought or no drought, when Frank would lose Atlas. Smythe said his people would take fifty thousand pounds for Atlas, which was in their hands. We agreed to buy them out. He is to advance privately six thousand pounds at four per cent., and I am giving back to Atlas forty-four thousand pounds which Atlas has given me. On February the first Atlas will belong to Frank, with but a small mortgage of fifteen thousand on it.”