Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  Remembering the fat inertia of Flanagan, the oily piety of Peppiott, James grasped at a hope that Cash would understand how to help him and not be afraid. “What CAN I do?”

  Cash shifted the cigar across his mouth. “One thing I'd like you to do right away, is hold my coat while I hammer that sixpenny bludger, but I wouldn't like to mess up Queenie's bar. You can do this though—you can take Sambo back to the Reach when I lay hands on him and get him sobered up to-morrow. I'd do it myself but I got business for your old man.”

  He watched James closely as he said this and through the long silence before James blurted out, “I'm not going back to the Reach.”

  “No? Oh, of course, you're on your way to Sydney.”

  “I'm not going to Sydney either.” James frowned at the bar. “He wants to make me an engineer so that he can use me to make money for. . . Oh, whatever he wants it for. And I'm not going to.”

  “What d'you aim to do then? You're not going to hang round here like your brother?”

  “I don't know what I'm going to do.”

  “Maybe you got a job fixed up, eh? With one of your swell friends?” “What friends?”

  “Flanagan. I heard you were thick.”

  “I wouldn't take anything from him. I'll make my own way. I'll go out west. I'll take up land. And—and I'll show HIM.” Tears shone in James's eyes.

  Cash whistled, then slapped James heartily on the back. “That's the way to talk. To hell with the lot of them.” He winked. “Now I'll tell you something. Coming up to-night from the wharf I ran into your cobber, Peppiott, and he told me you'd had a barney with the old man and cleared out and gone to Flanagan's. I'm glad you didn't let that old welsher pull the wool over your eyes. He's only using you to get in with your old man. But you saw through that.”

  “I suppose he was,” James said with a long face.

  Cash rubbed his hands. “I thought for a minute—fact is, I planned to get you out of town by sending you back home with Sambo before your old man found out where you was and come after you with a gun. I ought've known you better. You were always a game chicken by all accounts, with too much spunk for knuckling down at the Reach.”

  “But what am I to do?” James repeated. “He'll stop my allowance.”

  “You'll find plenty. You've got two hands. You don't need an allowance.”

  “But I want to get married. Not now—in a few years' time.”

  “It'll cost you a quid for a parson.”

  “But—she's a lady, don't you see?”

  “Aw, a lady. I don't know much about ladies,” Cash admitted.

  The doubt in his voice pleased James—he did not know why. All at once a light broke on his troubled mind. “You see it's not so much the mine I object to. It's because he doesn't want me to marry Jennis Bowen. But perhaps if I went west I couldn't marry her either, whereas if I stayed here I could—well I could go on arguing with him and he might give in. You see, I couldn't take a girl like that into the bush, could I? She's never done a hand's turn in her life. Oh, she'd go all right but—it would be sort of selfish, wouldn't it? That's what's worrying me. If I'd only got myself to think of it would be different.” This point of view, though new, was yet so plausible that James decided at once that it really was the core of his problem and that he had been thinking about it all the time. But Cash understood and smiled. “Now, Jimmy, don't let it get you scared at the start. The world makes a big noise but it's nothing to be scared of. A bit like Shaftoe—a hell of a thing if you don't crack it at the start to show who's boss. Let it get you on the run and you're done for. That young Peppiott, now he'll be on the run all his life. No guts—a proper sheep. Take your sister—a different proposition. Got enough spunk for two, that one. You can see it in her eye. And a regular little lady, eh? If it was her you were for marrying you'd have nothing to worry about. She'd see you through. I reckon a regular lady might have white hands but as much gumption as the next one if you happened to be her fancy.”

  Suddenly, irrationally, James felt annoyed with Cash. The fellow was supposed to be his father's closest friend, and here he was urging him to disobey his father, backing him up anyhow. If he was a true friend he'd tell him to go to Sydney and no nonsense which, James admitted, not explicitly, but with a prevision of the enormous relief he would feel if someone were to FORCE that decision upon him, would be one way out. Cash lighted the stub of his cigar and puffed at it. “Take your old man. He's different again. He's got guts—one kind of guts. He can fight all right, ain't scared of anything or anybody, but there's another kind of courage and he hasn't got it.” He studied the end of his cigar, framing a difficult exposition. “The way I figure it, a bloke's got to make a clean break and tell everybody to go to hell. He's got to do that often, and not only just say it, like perhaps your old man done, but mean it. Because there are things you can and things you can't have, and the quicker you get over feeling sorry for yourself the better. It's up to a man. You don't live at all, hankering. You're in one place and your brains in another, 'whoring after strange tarts,' as the parson says. Well, strange tarts are all right, but so's all tarts. Now your old man, he never made a clean break. Them brothers of his for example: he never got over them living on the fat of the land while he was grafting here. Of course he reckons he hates his brothers, but hate and envy is pretty close and if he could've been like one of them he would. So all the time here he's been ashamed of himself as if there was a part of himself still in England watching the part of him here. And that's real bad—being ashamed. It gets you on the run. You've got to have a special kind of courage to accept what you are and not care what anybody says about it, not try to buy them off with money or make up to yourself for feeling ashamed by thinking how rich you are and how blokes bellycrawl to you. Most men ain't got that kind of courage. They're sheep. They belong to a mob. Well, maybe you've got it.” He held James off at arm's length again and examined him doubtfully. “You've certainly got a lot of the old man in you. Yes, you must be the dead rink of what he was. But maybe you've got something from your ma too.”

  James scowled. “I'm not like him a bit. Anyway, I couldn't do the things he's done.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, you know. Look at him. He must have done—well. . . terrible things.”

  “He done what he had to so as to live,” Cash said. “You'd do the same.”

  James was indignant. “That's rot. I'd never become like him. Never.” Cash spread his hands. “Oh, yes you might. But I was saying—maybe you've got both kinds of courage. Maybe you've got his courage to do anything and maybe you've got something from your ma, something that pulled her through what she had to put up with when. . .” He gestured apologetically. “Say, something that a woman gets when she's been on the outer. Besides, she was half a gipsy, wasn't she? There's a lot more wolf than sheep in gipsies. She was a reckless one they reckon, Emma Surface was.”

  “I—I—that's all a lie,” James exploded, blushing to the ears and glancing about nervously to see if anybody had heard what Cash said. “Aw, it's nothing to be ashamed of,” Cash told him. “Your ma's a fine woman. You ought to be mighty glad if you take after her.” James was not mighty glad. The suggestion outraged him so that he could not speak for the moment. With horror he thought of Mrs Bowen. What would she say if she heard that her prospective son-in-law had the qualities of a gipsy in him? What would Doug Peppiott say? What would everybody say? James shuddered inwardly and tried to put the hideous proposition aside, but it was a possibility he had never considered before and its novelty overwhelmed him. Good God, could he really have inherited something from his mother, something low and disgraceful which allied him with a tribe of pilferers and fortune-tellers? The crowd stirred around them. James looked up and saw Shaftoe and Geoffrey and their friends going out. Shaftoe was singing, arm in arm with the squatter now hopelessly drunk. Good God, James thought, that's what makes Geoffrey hang around with touts like Shaftoe. It's the gipsy blood in him. Good God, and
that's what makes Larry hang around with shearers.

  Cash, oblivious to the train of thought he had started in James, completed the idea. “If you have the guts to want to make a break it's your ma you've got to thank for it, Jimmy. It's her give you what young Peppiott hasn't got, I bet—the courage to chuck up something solid for, well, for a tart say, or because you like the sound of a name like Cartagena, or because a good-looking ship is leaving port, or mostly because you know somewhere under your belt that you won't be a man if you don't.” He stretched his arms and took a deep breath. “Reckon I'll be getting a move on myself again soon. Only it's something I've never tried before, wearing these flash duds and giving ten-quid notes to barmaids. When that's worn out I'll hop it. Saw a bit of a schooner down in Sydney. She set me thinking.”

  James stamped circles on the wet bar top with Cash's glass. “Who said anything about going to Cartagena?” he mumbled. “I'm not a tramp and vagabond.”

  “A man's a poor stick that hasn't got a bit of the tramp in him,” Cash said, “like a woman who hasn't got a bit of the whore.” Still unaware of the devastating effect his words had had on James, he slapped the boy's back cheerfully and pulled out a roll of notes. “Now how much dough do you want?”

  “No, no, I don't want any.”

  “That's all right. I'll be around in the morning first thing. You'll need plenty if you're going off on your own. We'll talk about it.” He stripped a note from the wad, called Queenie, and pushed it down the low neck of her dress. “So long, darling, I'll be seeing you. Till to-morrow, Jimmy.” He made a straight line to the door, followed by the mutter of drunks he disturbed.

  Queenie, watching him, sighed.

  James's annoyance spurted again. “Arrogant beast. Thinks he's no end of a fellow when he's no better than a tramp. Probably worse.” Yet in his heart he envied Cash's swaggering confidence that nothing in the world could harm, or thwart, or deny him. If only HE could tell them to go to hell. . . Then he thought of Doug Peppiott becoming a wealthy and distinguished citizen, Harriet enjoying all his father's money, while he. . . “Good God, if it was true what Cash said I might go to the dogs like Larry and Geoffrey.”

  He went out into the streets and walked about, thinking: “If I go back to Sydney I'll be giving into him for ever. I'll lose Jennis. If I don't go I'll lose—something solid. Yes, it is solid. Cash is right there. See how Flanagan and Peppiott were this afternoon. 'You can't turn your back on money. . . It'll buy you anything,' Flanagan said. Yes, if I was rich nobody would dare to talk to me like Mrs Bowen did or like Cash.” But far down in James's heart a voice protested that nothing could be bought and much could be sold. It was a fading voice, its taunts, its battle-cries, its reckless urges suffocated by an old shame and fear which the day's events had sharpened afresh.

  He arrived back at the hotel in the early hours, so weary that his mind accepted without more protest the assurance, “After all, if I do go to Sydney for another year, I'll still have time to fight it out. Jennis will wait. And, who knows, Flanagan MIGHT make it up with him. If he tries to stop me then—I'll show him!”

  The hotel was in an uproar. The drunken squatter, nearly sober now, was clutching his trousers and waving his belt and shouting: “I've been robbed. I had three thousand pounds in my belt last night.” Geoffrey and Shaftoe and a crowd of guests in night-shirts were standing around asking questions. He did not remember anything, it seemed. He had slept with some woman. . .

  Shaftoe shook his head waggishly. “A woman—aha! Was she worth three thousand?”

  Everybody laughed and went back to bed, leaving the squatter to go on searching in his belt.

  Geoffrey saw James and retreated hastily behind Shaftoe. He looked frightened in contrast to his perky self-assurance earlier in the night. So James thought, and himself became frightened. But he told himself firmly that Cash was making him imagine things. Ignoring a breezy greeting from Shaftoe he hurried past to his room.

  “Does your mother know you're out?” Shaftoe called after him, and Geoffrey squeaked, but forlornly, “Does your mother know you're out?” From Sydney James wrote a long letter to Harriet. “. . . I WILL marry Jennis. He jolly well can't bully me. I'll show him. . .”

  Chapter Four: Wanted—A St George

  Harriet did not reply. She was angry with James and busy with the changes in her own life. Cabell had kept his promise and brought her to Brisbane, where conspiratorial conferences with lawyers and bankers and brokers kept him busy.

  They lived in an old half-stone, half-timber house on the bank of the river at New Farm, with an army of servants though no one except Cash or Geoffrey ever entered the place, and Harriet was as much a prisoner as before under the vigilant eyes of Miss Montaulk and her father. Some ladies called and left their cards, under orders from their husbands no doubt, for every one was anxious to catch Cabell's eye with some project or other, but none of them saw Harriet except when her father paraded her in the streets and the Botanic Gardens of a late afternoon behind two high-stepping horses. So she remained as friendless as ever.

  At first she did not mind, new sights and sounds bewildered and thrilled her so much. She was content to wander all day in the big garden, laid out half a century before by the convict servants of the military officer who built the house, discovering the incredible beauty of magnolias and crepe myrtle and English violets and the hyacinth which packed the river for miles after rain, to lie on the grassy bank and watch ships come in with sides rusty from long voyages, to drive in the streets and see the traffic, three story buildings, shop windows, crowds on the pavements, to admire from afar the men and women, more splendidly dressed than she could ever have imagined, driving and promenading in the cool of the afternoon.

  The boom was at its peak. Everywhere new buildings, new houses, new streets, and the delighted bustle of prosperity. To Harriet, fresh from the sleepy life of the valley, the vitality of the busy little town was like a gust of fresh, cold wind. Crowds of immigrants arriving at the Depot, crowds fighting on the steps of the General Post Office when the English mail came in, crowds getting into a theatre, crowds on a bus going home at night, crowds in the Gardens on Sunday, crowds outside an auction room. . . “Don't stare, child,” Miss Montaulk was saying every minute they were out. And then the crush in the streets—exciting but terrifying. A dozen times she shut her eyes so as not to see somebody mangled under the spanking hoofs of bus horses. How could any one live in such a torrent of wheels—slow bullock drays, bright-painted advertising vans heralding a concert or a new brand of bath soap, dog-carts bowling along as fast as the wind with drivers in kid gloves, a smart curricle with a footman in silk stockings and a coat of arms on the side. A lady leant out and bowed to her but Cabell whipped up his horses and dashed on.

  “Who was that, Father?”

  “A woman called Peppiott.”

  “What does the coat of arms on the side mean?”

  “Don't ask me. When her father bought a carriage years ago, the first time he went out in it he got up behind by force of habit.”

  As they drove on up Queen Street men on the pavement raised their hats but Cabell paid no attention. “That's the Town Hall,” he said. “Holds three thousand people. When I came here gum-trees were growing there. And that's where I was sitting the day I saw Flanagan's wife waiting for her husband to be flogged. There were all convicts and soldiers here then—no place for nincompoops in billycock hats I can tell you.” Harriet, watching the lady in the curricle as it drew up beside them again and passed, and the young man, very good-looking, who sat beside her, was not listening.

  Cabell glanced round and grunted.

  “Oh, were you speaking to me, Father?”

  “Never mind,” he grumbled. “It's time we went home.”

  “Oh, but it's early yet.”

  “Now, Harriet, you mustn't contradict your father.”

  Cabell turned the horses and they went home.

  Harriet began to feel discontented again. The
seethe and swirl of the place, crude, vital, intoxicating, which had amused her at first, now made her loneliness harder to bear. As the night came on she heard the whisper of gay doings—a band in the house across the river, a steamer decorated with Chinese lanterns going down to the Bay, a housemaid struggling with one of the grooms in the shadow of the stables. . . Harriet looked enviously at the buxom servant girl, swinging confident hips, when she came to wait on the table at dinner-time, and was so rude to her that Cabell stared and asked her if she was not well? After dinner she wept a little in her room, then sent for the girl and gave her one of her new dresses. The girl looked startled, especially when Harriet threw her arms round her and kissed her.

  For an hour she sat on the bed looking at her wardrobes stuffed with new clothes, silks and velvets which rustled excitingly to the touch. When she put one on and swayed its flounced skirt before the mirror her blood burned with eagerness to show herself off.

  Miss Montaulk came in. “Why, Harriet, whatever are you doing?”

  “Leave me alone, you old cat.”

  Miss Montaulk smirked. “Vanity and bad-temper, they are both terrible sins, Harriet. You should struggle against them. Your father is waiting in the drawing-room for you.”

  “I'm not going down.”

  “Ingratitude is even worse than vanity and bad-temper.”

  Harriet went down. There was nowhere else to go. Through a long, dull evening she played the piano, now carelessly and without interest, now angrily, taking her feelings out on the keyboard till the flowers on the lid shed their petals and the candles spilled hot wax on to her hands; then, tired, she drifted into a melancholy fragment of Chopin and played it well because it suited her mood, played it over and over, while her father sat on the veranda and smoked and hatched his schemes, and Miss Montaulk's eyes glittered like the swift crochet-needle in her hand. So it was every evening, unless Geoffrey came in to wheedle some money out of Cabell, who never seemed to notice that he was half-tight and either gave him a handful of money without counting it and told him to get to the devil, or clouted him and refused to give him a penny until he did some work. But Geoffrey knew that he only had to wheedle long enough and take enough clouts to get what he wanted. Sooner or later Cabell would get tired of clouting and growling and give him the money to get rid of him.