Gripped By Drought

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “You will give back all the money Old Man Mayne left you, and more besides?” she exclaimed.

  “Yes, dear. I am giving my all, save, perhaps, two or three hundred pounds. Wait! Come with me.”

  With wonder in her heart Ann Shelley followed him through the french windows to his studio-drawing-room. He led her to the curtained alcove in which she had seen that amazing picture of herself. And there he switched on the alcove lights and then drew aside the curtains.

  And Ann Shelley cried out.

  The picture of herself, with her face flushed, her lips parted, and the lovelight in her eyes, was slashed to ribbons.

  “Ann, dear,” Feng said softly, “I painted that picture after Frank had given you up to marry Ethel Dyson. When I heard that Frank’s wife was dead, and that he was again free to marry, I–did–that. Whilst you were promised to no man I dared to love you, although I saw the impossibility of marriage with you. I sinned against none, against neither you nor Frank. But when he became free again, you became his and he became yours. And, as I have torn and slashed the picture, so I have torn out and slashed my man’s love of you from my heart.”

  Turning to her, he placed his hands gently on her shoulders.

  The light from the alcove fell on their faces. Her lips were trembling, her eyes were dimmed with unshed tears. He was smiling in that inscrutable way of his. His voice was low but steady when he said:

  “I have nothing else to give. For Frank’s sake I have given all I have. He’s my pal. He’s your pal. You follow my example, Ann, and give him all you have–yourself when he is ready to ask and to accept.”

  “You know I shall do that, Feng,” she assured him, the tears now falling from her unhidden eyes.

  3

  “Hey! Wake up, Mr. Mayne, and listen!”

  Frank Mayne was shaken into wakefulness in the living-hut at White Well, where he and Todd Gray now lived, directing the battle against the horrific drought. It was one o’clock in the morning. A low, persistent hum reached him.

  “What is it, Todd? Wind?”

  “Come outside and have a look.”

  Together they passed out into the cool night air. A full moon hung in the clear sky above their heads. Its brilliant light shone directly on the southern edge of the one vast cloud in the north. Its base appeared to rest on the horizon. Upward from the earth a huge black column, and above the column in sprouting mushroom shape tier upon tier of ice and snow, a glittering aerial mass, a celestial arctic field. And from the north came that persistent hum.

  “Rain!” Todd said, his unshaven face lit with joy.

  “That cloud is dropping water on Westmacott’s old place,”

  Mayne declared. “Tons and tons of water, Mr. Mayne. Gawd! I wish I was over there in it. Do you know where that cloud is going?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It is travelling directly west. It’s the pilot-cloud that heralds the breaking of the drought. When was the last time we see a cloud moving from east to west? Years and years ago! That cloud is gonna go half-way across Australia to meet the east-coming rain-clouds. It will come back with ’em and the drought will be over.”

  “Hope so, Todd. We must take a run over to Westmacott’s old place to-morrow, and find out how many points of rain have fallen.”

  “Of course. And I’m goin’ to paddle in the puddle.

  They watched the single great cloud pass over the western horizon, when all the sky became brilliantly clear. Almost as soon as it was light they drove across to the selection, now belonging to Mayne. They had penetrated some three miles when they reached the almost knife-edge of the country on which the rain had fallen. Beyond, as far as they could see. the clay-pans were covered with sheets of water lying on the barren land, gleaming diamond-like in the sunlight. The natural water gutters were still running water. A surface tank that had been bone-dry was now half-filled, and water was still pouring into it along the feed channels in racing brown torrents.

  “Two inches fell about here if a point,” Mayne said, and laughed for very gladness. “Ten inches is gonna fall over all Atlas in a day or so,” Todd said, laughing too.

  “It doesn’t look like it by the sky and the wind direction to-day, Todd.”

  “All right. I’ll bet you. I’ll bet you a quid it rains before Sunday.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  And, when they arrived back at White Well:

  “Here, Mr. Mayne, look here! See these ants carrying their eggs from their groud nest up into this tree.”

  “You confounded optimist! They’ve been doing that for years.”

  “Have they? They haven’t done it for three years. I’ll bet you a fiver it rains before Sunday, anyhow.”

  “I’ll take you. That’ll be six pounds you will owe me, Todd.”

  That afternoon Mayne overhauled the windmill at White Well, and Todd Gray worked in the kitchen cooking enough food to last three days, as was their practice now, for the eternal scrub-cutting was kept going. Without the efforts of those two men the Atlas flocks would have dwindled to a few scattered mobs.

  Standing on the staging at the top of the mill, Frank Mayne whistled whilst he replaced a broken cog-wheel. Light-heartedly he whistled, despite the scene of barren desolation his elevation revealed. Far away over the sand waste a line of slow-rising dust marked the passage of a flock coming to water, tiny white dots dancing in the mirage.

  For lately Mayne had been returning from that world of despair and despondency which had held him for three long years. He was coming back to real life, conducted by the figure of hope which is at the side of every man. He whistled because his heart was lightened of the terrible fear of losing Atlas, the fear that had been banished by Feng’s magnificent gift and Smythe’s ready assistance. If Todd won his bets, then Atlas would start afresh with about ten thousand sheep. From sixty-six thousand to ten thousand in three years!

  The lines of anguish about his tanned face were almost erased by Time. No longer did he regret Ethel Dyson. If he had ceased to love her when she fled with Cameron, he had never been able to hate her. After all, she had come to Atlas in a bad period, had seen it at its worst. The jealous bush, in avenging herself on him, had vented its spite on her. Still, thoughts of Little Frankie saddened him, yet the past was coming to appear to him as a tranquil memory.

  The sun of hope blazed warmly in his soul this day in early March. When once the drought broke–and after the terrible rainless period there would be no false breaks–he would show the world how to run a sheep-station. The old prosperous days were bound to return. Rain would quicken this dead land into a surging upward rush of new life. Why, in two weeks’ time that, country where the rain had fallen would be covered with a green carpet, and in a month grass would be growing six inches high. Green grass, grass with the wonderful greenness of emeralds. It seemed but a foolish dream, but one that would come true.

  Yes, those old days would return, those far-off days of content and happiness, when he and Feng and Ann–Ann! Dear, comradely, lovable Ann! What an ass he had been, what an ass! Perhaps, when he had pulled Atlas out of––

  “Hey, Mr. Mayne! I’ll bet you another fiver it’ll rain before Sunday,” shouted Todd Gray from the ground below.

  “I’ll take you!” returned Mayne, and he deliberately dropped grease on Todd’s spotless white trousers worn when cooking. “That will be eleven pounds you owe me, Todd. Must have a lot of money, eh?”

  Wonderfully enough, Todd’s quick anger was not roused by the black grease-drops. He shouted up at Mayne:

  “Come down out of that, a-laughing up there like a young gal wantin’ to be kissed. Look wot’s coming! Look behind you!”

  What Frank Mayne did see when, turning, he looked to the north and west, drove him to the ground with the agility of an old-time powder-monkey. From due north to south of west the horizon was blotted out by a rapidly rising wall of dark-brown sand.

  Standing at the foot of the mill, they watched the sand-wall risin
g with incredible speed toward the zenith. Reaching the sun, the sand yellowed it, reddened it, finally dimmed it to greyness and wiped it away.

  “It is going to be dusty,” Todd observed dryly. “I’m for home and beauty to shut the winders, and bury me ’ead in a blanket, so’s I shan’t eat abut seventeen millions of atoms.”

  “So’m I,” Mayne responded, and together they raced for the shelter of the hut.

  Mayne lingered outside the twin huts whilst Todd within slammed shut and fastened securely the trap-door, glassless windows. Earthward from the zenith towered the approaching wall, a vast billowing curtain that threatened to fall on the huts, on all Atlas, and bury their world beneath countless tons of sand. An alternately rising and falling hum, as of some monstrous top, reverberated on Mayne’s ear-drums. The face of the sand-wall was ever changing in a short range of colour tints, from the red of those masses pushed outward to catch the light of the eastern clear sky, to the black of vast caverns and orifices made by portions sucked back into the mass. The humming sound grew louder and higher in pitch. Behind the sand-wall lurked the cyclone devil.

  Whilst he looked the scrub about a mile distant vanished, eaten up by the racing horror. He saw the dun-coloured specks of sheep half a mile distant overwhelmed, eaten up. Glancing upward, the wall, which now had no summit, seemed to be falling outward and downward upon them. At its base countless little columns of dust rose from the plain to stagger drunkenly into it, as though in ludicrous futile effort to beat it back. Till the last three seconds Mayne stayed, rooted to the spot by the wonder of it. He found Todd Gray seated on his bunk, a blanket beside him.

  “She’s gonna be a hum-dinger,” he said with perverse glee. “She’s gonna bring rain.”

  “Not it! We must have had fifty of these storms since last it rained, Todd,” said Mayne chidingly.

  “Not this sort. Remember that cloud coming from the east and going to the west. A pilot-cloud that was. Going out across the continent to pilot back the rain. Anyway, if you don’t believe me, I’ll bet you another––”

  The sand-wall struck White Well with a sound of w-wo-woo-woof-ff. The dimly seen interior of the hut vanished. Within five seconds it was utterly dark. The air was filled with sand. The roof-iron rattled and strained for a short space, and then followed a silence. The darkness continued, perhaps for ten minutes. The silence became oppressive. Todd spluttered and coughed.

  “I told you it’s gonna rain. A sand-storm without wind is as abnormal as an astronomer without a telescope. If they could capture and store all the static created by this sand, they’d have enough power to drive all the machinery in the world for a hundred years.

  Hark! It’s gonna rain!”

  With a towel now pressed to his mouth and nostrils, Mayne listened. As though he stood on a beach listening to the countless water-bubbles exploding after a wave had spent itself, so now he heard the hiss of sand falling on the iron roof, sand that had been lifted high in the air from somewhere in the heart of Australia, and carried thus far by a mighty wind that now had died, permitting the sand to fall. The light began to return. Vibrations stirred the air–

  strange vibrations as though caught by imagination rather than by physical nerves. It was as though, at some vast distance, a cosmic bombardment was in progress.

  “She’s coming,” Todd said. “Hark at ’er!”

  “But she’s going–has gone, almost,” Mayne objected, thinking of the sand-storm.

  “Oh, that! I’m talking of the break in the drouth. Let’s go outside. That’s thunder, for a million.”

  “Wind most likely,” was Mayne’s pessimistic view.

  The air quickly was clearing. To the south-west the sand-wall hung from the sky as the train from the dress of Satan’s bride. Above them the sun appeared, a grey disk rapidly becoming a dirty brown. Streaks of blue lay over the north-western horizon, and whilst it widened they saw huge blotches of white. The hut roofs, the fowl-house roof, the crossbars of the gate to the fowl-run, the dog-kennel, the branches and the twigs of the pepper tree, everything was covered with sand, loaded as a snowstorm would have loaded every object on which it fell.

  The sun became blood-red and set without growing in brightness. From the thinning sand to the north and west masses of white came out as though on a developing photographic plate. The white blotches were clouds. A wind rustled through the pepper tree, and from it fell sand as though from a sieve; from roofs and gate-rails it blew a cloud of sand. The air was filled with strange rumbling noises. The wind freshened, and quickly the thinning sand veil was wafted eastward and they could see the sky clearly. Masses of clouds were growing from nothingness, were forming in the sky before the eyes of the two drought-shrivelled men. Masses of clouds, seemingly miles deep, were rushing together, propelled by high atmospheric whirlwinds. Jove and his army were mobilizing with ever louder thunderclaps and ever more brilliant lightning bolts.

  “She’s coming! I told you so! Look at ’er!” shouted Todd Gray. “You owe me sixteen quid.”

  Water-drops fell on the fine sand laid smoothly over all the land by the storm. They made dull circular marks as large as florins. The heated earth turned the water splashes into vapour that rose to the nostrils of the entranced men, smelling of newly turned, sweetened earth, of an alchemist’s mixture of the scents of every herb and flower and young grass-shoot on all the surface of a luscious earth.

  The landscape of barren sand and blackened, dying scrub was fading behind a wall-this time a wall of falling water. Lightning sizzled as water on a red-hot stove, so close was it at times. Thunder beat on their ear-drums with terrific force, and shook the ground on which they stood. And above it–or below–to Mayne and Gray dwarfing the roaring elements, another sound, the gug-guggling of water running away along the sand-choked gutters.

  They discarded all restraint. Why do horses gallop, and steers buck, and sheep playfully bunt at the approach of rain? urged by the same irresistible force, these two who had fought drought to the last ditch tore off their clothes and capered in the puddles with the rain thudding upon them, streaming down their bodies. They laughed and shouted as men made mad, threw back their heads to allow the pelting rain to fall into their open mouths.

  “She’s come! She’s come!” screamed Todd.

  “She’s over! She’s over!” yelled Mayne, and, seizing the fierce-eyed little cook, he whirled him round and round in the nudest and maddest of lunatic dances. It was over–Drought!

  THE END