Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  Sure enough, Stores went down to nineteen when the Exchange opened next morning, but the market was still weak so Monaghan put off buying a bit longer. At sixteen shillings Cabell overruled Cash and began to buy in, but unexpectedly there was hot competition. The price went back to thirty shillings, no sellers. On the way he bought five hundred. He was now five hundred short and very angry.

  Cash was puzzled. Why the rush on Stores? Nothing unusual had happened in the mine. The buckets were bringing up the usual red stone.

  “If I'm right, Monaghan was two thousand short when we started to buy. That makes two thousand five hundred on the market. Who's got them? Kyle? No, he would have sold on the way up to thirty bob. He knows there's nothing to back the rise up.”

  “I told you. Curse your schemes.”

  “Keep your hair on. Anybody'd think you'd just been ruined.”

  Cabell's eye bulged. “My—your luck must be changing.”

  “Don't worry,” Cash cheered him. “Somebody's caught somebody short. Wait till there's another big find somewhere. That'll bring Stores down.”

  Cabell clung desperately to his easy, impervious optimism. But they did not pick up the outstanding shares, and the price, instead of falling, climbed slowly on the strength of a number of puzzling, vague rumours that unexpected developments were to be looked for at the Stores and that somebody was trying to buy Sambo and Monaghan out.

  Sambo denied it. Then his eyes drooped and he confessed, “She made me promise to keep it dark, boss.”

  “She?”

  Sambo beat about the bush a bit longer, then it came out. Miss Ludmilla had offered him ten thousand pounds for his shares and he had sold them. “That bloke Shaftoe reckoned he knew where to get a roan filly'd win the Melbourne Cup if I had the dough to train it.”

  “Ten thousand pounds!” Cash and Cabell were both flabber-gasted.

  “She's off her nut,” Cash said. “That's what happens to these old tarts that don't marry. But just wait till we start crushing next month and she finds out we haven't got a lot of nuggets hid away under the mullock heap.” He rubbed his hands. “There'll be some nice short selling then.” He was wrong. Ludmilla and Larsen came to the weekly meeting of shareholders.

  “Welcome,” Cash said. “You must hold about half the shares in this concern.”

  “Yes,” Ludmilla said. “Just five thousand.”

  She was a big woman of middle age, with big pleasant eyes and a hard mouth. Her body was gaunt mannish, her complexion weather-beaten, but she had tiny hands and feet. Men laughed at her behind her back but they were afraid of her bitter tongue and her temper on a hair-spring. They told how she took on a new-chum to jackeroo at Ningpo years ago and married her sister Aurelia to him—at the point of the gun, they said. Observing how she bristled when Cabell was near and how, in her presence, he was fidgety, almost furtive, the knowing ones winked. There had been queer doings in the earlies.

  “Why?” she asked Cash. “Would you like to buy us out?”

  “Well—how much?”

  “Fifty thousand.”

  Kyle grabbed his whiskers in both hands. “Woman, ye're crackit.”

  “Will you sell out then?”

  “Weel and I might. What wud ye. . .”

  Monaghan jumped up. “I. . .”

  Kyle pulled him down. “Hold yer peace. It's a most palpable deceit, Mon.” Then to Ludmilla, “Wud ye let this yin and me retire to consider the matter?”

  Ludmilla nodded and they went outside.

  “If you're handing out any more charity, Miss Ludmilla. . .” Cash said.

  Cabell nudged him. “Shut your mouth.”

  Ludmilla smiled sourly. “I've bought things from Mr Cabell before. Sheep.”

  Cabell licked his lips.

  “Yes, he'll tell you about it. I suppose he's told you already,” she said, challenging them.

  “No, no, Ludmilla,” Cabell said hastily, “not a word.”

  She laughed. “Oh, it wouldn't trouble me.” But her eyes shifted timidly between them as if she expected to catch them laughing.

  The door opened and their attention turned to Monaghan and Kyle who came back looking pleased. Monaghan picked up his hat from the table and went out again. When the door had closed Kyle said, “Noo I control three thousand shares. Will ye gi'e a price for the lot?”

  “Ja,” Larsen said, “eighteen t'ousand.”

  Kyle's mouth came open, then set tight. “I'll no sell them,” he said and sat down.

  “Very well,” Ludmilla said. “If you won't you won't. And you?” She looked at Cabell.

  “Not at any price.”

  “Good. Now listen. Mr Larsen here has made a discovery which may cause this company to change its plans. He has found that your battery of stampers will be quite unsuitable for treating the stone in the mine, which is much richer than you suppose. He has been able to have specimens treated in the laboratory by a method of his own and believes that if this method is tried out on a big scale it will bring you six ounces to every ton of rock. Isn't that so?”

  Larsen nodded his white head.

  She silenced their incredulous outcry with a wave of her hand and went on, “Mr Larsen and I, as joint shareholders of all rights in this process and of the largest number of shares in the company, want to have a new company formed with at least half a million shares. We will take two hundred and fifty thousand and each of you will get ten shares for every share you hold. The rest will go on the market. We'll need every penny we can get. The plant will be expensive.”

  They were silent for a while, then Cash asked, “What's to prove this?”

  Larsen brought out a paper and handed it to Ludmilla. She unfolded it and laid it on the table.

  Kyle and Cabell read over Cash's shoulder:

  This is to certify that treatment of the stone, submitted by Lars Larsen, in the modified Wheeler pans resulted as follows:

  1. Brown haematite 3 oz. 6 dwt. 2. Red ditto 6 oz. 16 dwt. 3. Aluminous sinter 3 oz. 15 dwt. 4. Stalactite brown haematite 6 oz. 11 dwt. 5. Silicious sinter veined with quartz 4 oz. 5 dwt. 6. Mixed mass of ironstone and silica 6 oz. 3 dwt. 7. Ironstone silicious sinter 10 oz 14 dwt. AVERAGE 6 oz 1 dwt.

  A specially selected mass of silicious red stone yielded up to 20 oz. when treated separately.

  “It's a trick,” Kyle said.

  “Well, sell and get out,” Ludmilla said.

  Cabell grabbed Kyle by the shoulder. “I'll give you twenty thousand.”

  Kyle walked around the table two or three times, then sat down again.

  “Nae, I'll abide and consider.”

  Ludmilla drew her gloves on. “Consider well then. We'll see you tomorrow.” It was hard to keep a secret in that rumour-stricken place. That Sambo had been paid four pounds each for his shares and that Monaghan had sold out to Kyle was soon common gossip. Stores leapt to six, seven, eight pounds and stopped there, with nobody selling. The whisper went round that Larsen and Ludmilla had found a way to extract fabulous quantities of gold from the red stone. Some of the other claims, particularly those along the same ridge as the Lost Stores, had red stone, too, but not so much. They sent specimens to Brisbane and found that it did contain gold in unsuspected alloy, but that the process of extracting this gold would be complicated and expensive.

  But Kyle had found that out for himself. He returned from a visit to Brisbane in a hurry to sell before the news broke. He got thirty thousand pounds from Cabell for his three thousand shares, and when he had the money safely in his pocket showed Cabell the letter in which the experts reported that by no process known to metallurgy could more than thirty per cent of the gold be profitably recovered.

  Reassured by Cabell's look of dismay, he could not forbear selling a thousand shares forward to Liam and Danny O'Connor, certain that Cabell would have to sell as soon as he made public what he knew and Stores collapsed.

  They did collapse for a day or two, but Cabell did not sell. He was in so deep that he could only cling
hopefully to his link with Cash's fortunate destiny and Cash said, “Don't sell. Ludmilla wasn't spinning a yarn. Larsen's got the goods.”

  This miscalculation led to a rapid, dramatic change in Kyle's affairs. As he could not meet his obligations to the O'Connors he was utterly at their mercy. They held a family conference which resulted in Kyle's repaying nine thousand pounds plus interest to Liam and Danny and taking a trip to Pyke's Crossing. Three weeks later he returned with a wagonload of furniture and Maggie O'Connor. The wedding breakfast lasted a week and suspended all operations on the field, because Liam O'Connor filled the water-tank with rum and each morning the guests, staggering out to drink themselves sober on water, renewed their intoxication until the tank ran dry.

  Cabell now held five thousand of the ten thousand Stores and had laid out fifteen thousand pounds in buying up shares in all the claims along the ridge where there was any show of the precious red stone. His plan was to offset his bargaining disadvantage with Ludmilla and Larsen by offering these shares as the basis of a new amalgamation when the time came to float the company. But when that time arrived, after nearly twelve months' haggling and intrigue and backing and filling, he found that Ludmilla and Larsen held a controlling interest in these companies.

  In the winter of 1887 Waterfall Amalgamated issued its prospectus. It was capitalized at seven hundred and fifty thousand, in one-pound shares, one hundred and fifty thousand held by Ludmilla, one hundred thousand by Larsen, one hundred and twenty-five thousand by Cabell, seventy-five thousand by Cash. Three hundred thousand went on the market. It was the height of the boom and they sold at a premium.

  Cabell extended the mortgage on the Reach and bought ten thousand more shares. He had now cleaned out every penny he had saved and owed twenty thousand pounds beside, but he owned a station worth a hundred and fifty thousand pounds at a moderate estimate and one hundred and thirty-five thousand shares. He was scared, never had a full night's rest, but extravagant dreams of power and affluence never lifted from his brain. Why shouldn't he drive out Larsen and Ludmilla, put in his own men, Cash as manager, James, Custard, people he could trust or dominate? They said there were millions of pounds' worth of gold in the ridge. With that behind him he could become as rich as Carnegie—beyond all reproach and contempt. Why, already they were beginning to bow and scrape, “that mob in Brisbane.”

  Chapter Eight: Father and Son

  They detested him, but they bowed and scraped just the same. Even the big men, politicians and bankers, thought it was worth while cringing to placate his arrogance and unfriendliness. Indeed that hard, ugly front only deepened their respect for him as a man of ruthless power, a popular view of his character confirmed by an incident which happened at the Reach about this time and was talked of throughout the country.

  Three years had passed since Cabell's quarrel with Berry. In those years the big national groups of shearers and miners had become more and more aware of their solidarity, more and more annoyed by the tight grip the squatters kept on the land and the tremendous prosperity of men like Cabell. There had been small strikes in mines and shearing-sheds. Newspapers were born to sharpen and define the men's hatred, which was as old as the first convict and the first migrant who came out under hatches because they had no choice and knew that whatever of the good things of life they were to have they must get from the soil of the new land. Not many of the old lags were left, but their sons were there, the Coyles and Goggses and Larrys, heirs to their parents' hatred, disgrace, or hopes of a new and freer life, of their parents' stories about the ugliness, injustice, poverty, and despair of life at home. This generation had grown up in the bush and saw its stark and graceless beauty against no memory of English lanes. All they knew about the Old Country was that it had famines, poorly paid workers, slums, unconquerably vested powers, hanging judges, and an aristocracy with a “birthright to look down its nose.” Australia seemed a fine, free place beside this, and they were determined to keep it so. In the prosperity of these years they thought they saw the earthly paradise dawning which their fathers had hoped for and not lived to enjoy. But at the same time it was borne in upon them more clearly than ever that all this wealth was enriching not themselves but men like Cabell who, because of HIS memories, would always be alien to Australia, and therefore hostile to what they wanted the country to be—an Englishman at heart however the land had changed him, however crude and un-English he had become on the surface, an Englishman in the intimate, secret chambers of imagination where alone a man lives his life. And this was the difference between the two states of mind—one was orientated towards Australia and the other towards England, one impatiently towards the future, the other regretfully towards the past. The difference had become very clear in the last few years. The squatters were sending their children Home to schools and universities or even themselves going to live there, like the Jardines of Narrow Gut who left a manager on the property and reappeared at rare intervals, astoundingly white of skin and immaculate of dress, to stay awhile till the mosquitoes and boredom drove them back to England. But the sons of the lags and the immigrants were a hardbitten proletarian stock raised in mining-camps and shepherds' huts and the homesteads of poverty-stricken selectors, and had no use for “these Nancy English ways.” Their genius was for using their hands and enduring heat, thirst, and bullocking graft, a sardonic contempt for anybody unlike themselves, and a strange gift for mateship, which Coyle said was their legacy from the jailyard and men sticking together in the bush. They were dug into the country, and their struggle with the bosses was taking on the grand outlines of a nationalistic crusade.

  True, a part of Cabell, too, was well and truly dug into the Australian soil. The bush was no longer repulsive to him as once it had been. When business took him away to Brisbane he was always restless to get back to the Reach. The first glimpse of the homestead roof among the orange and peach-trees never failed to give him a pleasant sense of home-coming. Against the crudities of an ungracious life he had grown a crude hide to protect himself. Equally as any native-born he was impatient with newchums “who can't work, can't ride, and can't stand in the sun without getting sunstroke.” And finally no old lag had been more utterly shut out of England than he. But these changes in his character had not touched the inner life of his fantasy, which everything he did must somehow serve before he could get the energy to do it. Himself in a mirror was another man—a disreputable fellow whose life he did not want to think about. All he cared for was planning Harriet's future and how she should go back to England and marry a handsome young man and become a great lady—“just to show them what a 'voluntary jailbird' could do.” He thought of that with a joyous expectation, as though it was himself who was to inherit, after so many years, the fruits of his hard work and tribulation. Out of these thoughts and expectations came his resolve to be rich and powerful, the meaning of life, the very urge to live.

  Only one obstacle frightened him—Emma. For thirty-seven years she had been fighting him with a cunning, conscienceless obstinacy as effective as his own—more effective since everything she wanted (though he didn't like to admit this) had come to pass: he had married her, provided for her brother, bought land, had not returned to England, and had given her children. “HER brats.” And now through one of these brats she was trying to overreach him again. She was determined that Larry should be master of the Reach.

  He did not understand that thereby she sought to fulfil a fantasy of her own which gave HER the power to go on living and lighted a little torch of warm light in the darkness of HER life. To see Larry a great man, looked up to—her son, Emma Surface's son—would wipe out her humiliations, but if she failed what would her life have been but just humiliations? Watching Larry grow up she looked out anxiously for a sign that the old leaven of Surface recklessness was still at work—the recklessness she had had to fight in her father, in Dirk, her brother, in her cousin, Black Jem, which she felt in her own passionate heart. And sure enough, there it was—making him risk hi
s neck on wild horses, making him go out of his way to anger his father, making him sullen and restless under her strong hand, less and less like a solid, respectable flock-master every day and more and more the friend of Coyle and “that trash.”

  Larry was thirty-seven years old now. He looked the dead image of Black Jem as she had last seen him, despite his Cabell nose and mouth. Like Black Jem he drank for hours without getting drunk, merely staring at the floor with puffy, sulky face. If you asked him what he was thinking about he didn't know, really didn't know, but suddenly he would go out and pick a fight and either be half-killed defending himself against a barful of men or have to have his fingers prised off some poor devil's throat. The only time his face lighted up was when the shearers were around.

  But Emma remonstrated angrily. “You keep away from the shearers' hut. It's no place for you.”

  “Why, what's wrong with it?”

  “The trash inside—that's what. You keep away.”

  “They're my mates.”

  “They're trash. You keep away or they'll get you in trouble.”

  “They're my mates. They're not trash. >HE'S the trash and it's him the trouble's coming to, one day. . .”

  “That's none of your business, all that nonsense they talk. You don't listen to it. You're not a shearer—a lousy good-for-nothing set of tramps.”

  “I'm just the same as one. I'm not a boss.”

  “But you WILL be.”

  “I don't want to be. I'd rather hump my drum. And I will too one of these days.” He looked at her. “It's no good rousing. I'm going. There are places I want to see and—things.”

  “You want a wife,” Emma coaxed him. “Some nice girl like Florrie Heffernan, the manager's daughter over at Black Rock.”