Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  Larry would have liked to have a say, but he was too shy and could only nod, even when he did not agree. He was deeply impressed by what Budge had said. He did not know why, but the theory that everything could be made to work out happily without any fighting appealed to him strongly just now, as he began to realize what an irrevocable leap he had taken. Coyle caught his arm and beckoned him away. Turning from Budge to Coyle Larry felt his heart sink, as though the blue, dimmed eyes, like a drunk's eyes in their truncated gazing upon a void, reminded him of some unpleasant thing he had forgotten he must do.

  “Don't waste time listening to them,” Coyle said. “They're all talk.”

  “They reckon it will be settled without any shooting,” Larry said anxiously. “D'you reckon?”

  “That's what THEY think.”

  Larry looked at him questioningly. He did not answer, but led the way through the camp, in the designless muddle of its tents, brush shelters, and bark lean-tos revealing once more the bushman's undisciplinable anarchism. Outside each tent was a neat pile of the shearers' goods, saddle and bridle, folded blue blanket, billy, tin plate, pannikin, knife, and a few books. In the middle of the camp they had built a big cairn of red rocks to support a gum sapling from which fluttered a red flag with the Southern Cross in white stars. In the shade of the cairn Goggs and some of his mates were settling down to play away their strike pay at euchre.

  Larry and Coyle saddled up to go out and relieve the picket. When they were away from the camp Coyle took a letter from his pocket and handed it to Larry. It was from the Central Strike Committee, addressed to the Committee of the Queensland Shearers' Union Strike Camp at Cabell's Reach, per Jerry Coyle, Organizer, and read:

  COMRADES, You will not be surprised to hear that the squatters are engaging scabs from the sweepings of Bourke Street and the various well-known resorts of thugs, touts, bludgers, and larrikins in Sydney to come and break your strike. The first batch is due in Brisbane within a couple of weeks, and part of it will be sent to your district. The squatters hired bullies, the police, will escort them from the railhead with orders to get them to work, dead or alive—meaning you, comrades. We need not teach you your duty to your thousands of union mates whose fight will be jeopardized if these scabs get through. . .

  “Have you told them?” Larry asked.

  “What d'you take me for? The camp'd be half-empty now and your old man's shearing in full blast. They'll find out soon enough—and then you see whether there'll be any shooting.”

  Chapter Four: End of Waiting

  The men stayed in a good holiday mood for another four weeks. They spent the time gambling away their strike pay, getting drunk, arguing about the form and quality of their Utopia, picketing the roads, and assuring each other, “We got the sod beat.” Coyle did not interfere.

  These were the last hot lazy days of the dry season when the clear air makes visible the hard edges of things from miles away, giving men a fictitious belief in the world's unduplicity, their power to see and foresee. Even moonless nights were lighted by the blue, summer starshine. To imagine a break in the procession of perfect days was impossible under their spell. Optimism was as irresistible as sleep. Languor took away their bitterness. “Rusty'll come round in a day or two,” they said. “The seed's getting in his wool bad.”

  But Larry knew better than they the obstinacy of his father, that each day brought them nearer not to peaceful victory but to a fight. He had Coyle's assurance for that, too. “Just wait,” Coyle said, “till the scabs come.”

  The long empty days had sapped Larry's courage. Coyle's promise of a short, sharp, irresistible rising had swept him off his feet, but now that he had to wait he began brooding over his mother's warning, “It won't be him licks his wounds. He's dealt with harder men than you.” So when Coyle talked to him about the fight that was to come he found himself wishing that it would never come and that it would come quickly. Fear swelled his hatred, and hatred, inspiring long reveries of violence which always petered out in some memory of his father triumphing, fermented his fear. The men left him alone. He was moody and savage, given to bursts of bad temper and sudden pig-headed recklessness.

  One night he startled everybody by raiding the homestead vegetable garden under the window of Cabell's room. Hugging an armful of carrots and worm-eaten cabbages he crouched under the flame-tree and stared through the window into the lighted room where his father sat at his table writing. “A man could put a blue pill right through his head from here.” The beat of his heart thundered on the quiet night.

  Suddenly Cabell raised his head and looked straight into Larry's eyes, slipped his hand under the papers on the table, and drew out a revolver. Larry stopped breathing as he watched his father rise, cock the revolver, and walk quickly to the window. For several minutes then they were within an arm's length of each other as Cabell, leaning out, sniffed suspiciously and turned his head from side to side, searching the darkness. Larry felt in his hand the long butcher's knife he had brought to cut the cabbages. “A man could cut his head off.” He worked his hand free and braced himself against the wall. As though offering his throat to the knife, tempting Larry to some fatal foolishness, Cabell leant farther out. But Larry began to shiver. He saw the light on the barrel of the gun as it turned slowly with Cabell's eye, and before he knew what he was doing he was thrashing wildly through the garden and down the slope. A shot and a shout followed him, which started the dogs and brought the shearers from their blankets to the fireside, where they were crowding nervously when Larry ran in with the cabbages.

  Berry was angry. “Wonder he didn't plug you, you fool.”

  His reaction from that mad enterprise was to saddle his horse as soon as the camp was asleep and ride off towards Pyke's Crossing. “A man needn't see any of them again.” A hundred yards from the camp he looked back at the fitful light of the fire on tents and sleeping men. It seemed to him that the vast hall of the night was uninhabited except for these few men and untroubled except for their sorrows, that if he was to ride out of the valley he would leave all worry and danger behind. Already his heart was lighter. He sank his spurs and cantered towards the hills, but as the road began to climb that rampart behind which he had lived for forty years, his chin fell, the reins loosened, and the horse dawdled. What would his mates say? They'd think he was funked. “I'm not funked.” He repeated it over and over, but rode on. As the dawn was breaking he crossed the last spur of the range, whence he could see the valley on one side and on the other the white, winding road which lost itself in mysterious blue distance—the world outside the valley. Pieced together from the gaudy anecdotes of Sambo and other travellers this world presented itself to his imagination as a tableau of bold, urgent women, dishonest men, and hostile city folk expert in laying traps for the bushmen—inviting but forbiddingly immense as he saw it now in the cold light of the morning beside the compact, familiar landscape of the valley. HIS valley. “Yes, by rights it should belong to me, but he's cheating me out of it—me and Ma.” His horse turned back towards the Reach and whinnied for home, and feeling no pull on the bit began to descend the hills.

  Coyle grinned when he rode in. “So you tried to run?”

  “Who said?”

  “Oh, yes, you did. But you couldn't, could you?”

  “I ain't funked,” Larry flared, “if that's what you mean.”

  “Ain't you?”

  Larry took him by the shoulder and shook him till he had shaken some of the exasperation out of himself, then went and sulked alone down by the horselines. In the afternoon he disappeared again and returned at sunset with half a dozen of Cabell's primest fat wethers for the cook.

  Berry gloomed over this latest recklessness. “That's not right, Larry, pinching sheep in daylight. It's suicide, that's what it is.”

  And seeing the frightened looks on their faces Larry was frightened again, too. So he passed those weeks between terror and impatience, between looking for danger and dreaming frightened nightmares of his fa
ther, between longing to serve his mates with some sacrificial deed and loathing them for having brought their struggle into his peaceful life.

  Then the atmosphere of the camp changed. “What's it matter to him if he loses his wool?” they said. “He's got plenty to fall back on.” The short season when they earned most of their money was more than half gone. The weak ones began to waver and talk about their wives and kids and their selections on which payments would soon be due. The strong determined ones said nothing but eyed the sky twitching with the reflection of distant lightning. The rains were coming.

  Budge tried to inspire them. “We can't lose, mates, unless men turn round and go back to monkeys. What we stand for is right and justice and a better world, and life has been moving towards that for a long time.”

  “Meaning,” Coyle said, “that in two thousand years yous'll be looked on as they look on the Christian martyrs now.”

  “We are martyrs. If we leave our bones at the gate it's we who win.”

  “I know a better lay.”

  They looked at him.

  “To leave HIS bones.”

  “No, no,” Berry said. “We're honest men. Right is might, as Budge said.”

  His obstinate conviction of it roused them. They cheered. But Coyle's moment was ripe. He held up his hand. “Before you break into hymns led by Brother Budge, I got a telegram from Brisbane here.” He read it while they clustered round him in an anxious mob with the flag stretched out above them on the wind that was daily bringing the rains nearer. “Seventy scabs leaving for Cabell Reach with police escort. Expect them early next week.”

  “That's NOW—to-day or to-morrow,” Coyle said. “By this time next week he'll be shearing unless. . .”

  Budge's voice, protesting the invincibility of a just cause, was drowned in their gabble. He continued to shriek and wave his arms till Goggs took hold of him and knocked him down. The mob closed blindly over him and drew nearer to Coyle.

  “It's no use pulling the wool over your eyes, mates,” Coyle said. “The strike's up the spout. While you've been sitting on your behinds listening to Berry and Budge the squatters' banks have been buying scabs by the shipload from Sydney and Melbourne—city thugs who will soon drive you bushmen out of your own country. Now they're calling up the militia and sending Gatling guns to turn on you. You wouldn't listen to me before. Will you wait till it's too late?”

  “We'll lynch the cows.”

  The spirit of the camp changed again. The prospect of a fight with police and strike-breakers refreshed their dying resolve. Even Berry said, “No city scab will take the bread out of my kid's mouth while I got two fists.”

  “Fists?” Coyle said. “Haven't you got a rifle?”

  But here another interminable argument began. Some were for ambushing the scabs in the hills and shooting them down or stringing them up to the nearest trees. They were the real footloose bushmen, halfsavage nomads like Goggs and Coyle, children of old lags born in little outstation or bush slum and turned adrift to fight a traditional enemy as cattle-duffers or bushrangers or unionists. Others thought the scabs should be kidnapped and brought to camp and restrained from working and reasoned with. They were a new kind of bushman, like Berry and Budge, who had families and selections and less hate than Coyle and Goggs. On their argument that night turned the future of a movement, perhaps the future of a nation.

  Larry, sitting apart at the camp-fire, listened, frowning as his slow brain tried to cope with their talk. In all his life he had not heard so much talk as in these past five weeks—philosophy, economics, tales of injustice, schemes for reforming the world, the guttersnipe rage of Goggs against “them bloody toffs your sister and brothers,” Budge's semimystical maunderings about the soil and how the sword should not sleep in a man's hand until he had rebuilt Jerusalem, Coyle's ironic confidences which tangled him deeper and deeper in an undefined, perilous, but agreeable conspiracy. All this confused and at times exalted him, made him feel that whatever he did in the cause of these men would be right and promised, in some vague way, a fulfilment of the hollow pain of frustration which had tormented him since long ago when he learnt the impotence of his anger against his father's hard will and hard fists.

  To-night their talk, wilder than usual because of the coming fight, made his blood burn, and the firelight flickering on his face was like a flame within him.

  “What about you?” Coyle said.

  “I'll fight. By Jesus, yes.”

  “Everything depends on you,” Coyle said.

  “Me?”

  “On you and me and half a dozen. Because none of the selectors will fight. But if we fight and something serious happens everybody's in it and they'll have to fight for their lives, and that'll light a brand that will set the whole country on fire, because every unionist on strike is waiting and none of them is game to start. They want somebody like Stelkski to show them that their tyrants ain't invulnerable, like he did by murdering the biggest and strongest tyrant of the lot. And who's the biggest and strongest tyrant here, eh? Your old man.”

  The light sprang into Larry's eyes as he raised his head, then his head dropped and his eyes were dull.

  “What of it?” Coyle said. “You ain't put off by a word? Murder and fire's the way of revolution. Robespierre and Marat didn't get rid of tyrants by twiddling their thumbs. Once we start we'll go through the country like fire in dry thistle, and there won't be any left to call it murder and arson.” For an instant the light glowed in his own dead, dim, unfocused eyes, like a mysterious will-o'-the-wisp in the windows of a house over which the shadow of some mad deed has fallen, confirming people's fear that evil and hatred do not die. “We got a lot to be conscience stricken about, ain't we? A hell of a tender-hearted bloke your old man was when he had life and death power over people like my old man—and your ma.” He spoke with a harsh and exigent impetuosity as though not he, whose voice was always gentle, was speaking but some imprisoned tenant of his heart who fought to get free. The muscles of his guarded face relaxed and his jaw came loose, giving him the flaccidly imbecile expression of a drunk which, since he had no liquor in, was very unpleasant to see. “It's all lawful in a revolution. Let these smarmy women in silk dresses like your sister get a taste of what your old woman had when she was hired out to drunken squatters.” He grinned into the fire, shuddered, then wiped his hand roughly across his face. When he spoke again it was with his usual quietness, his eyes gone dead. “Anyway, who said it was murder—it's self-defence. We're fighting for our rights, ain't we? We're fighting for posterity.”

  Larry spent a restless night in his blanket under the stars listening to the curlews and trying to sort out the ideas which buzzed so noisily in his brain that once or twice he thought he was still sitting at the fire with the shearers arguing around him. He thought of his father and the scabs and of Berry and Budge and all the rest with whom he shared this new religion of mateship—it was no less than a religion to them in those days—and the idea that his father would win and rob them of the simple rights they demanded made him stiff with anger. Falling off to sleep he dreamt that he was fighting James. Huddled in the corner of the room was a naked woman—Molly Heffernan from Black Rock. He was just about to kill James when his father came in with policemen. They took him outside and he saw himself hanging there on a gallows with a lax grinning jaw and dull, dispersed eyes. He awoke trembling, and thought at once of his mother with a choking sense of wretchedness and guilt. He remembered what she had planned for him, and how differently it had turned out! “It will kill her,” he kept repeating.

  Then he tried to tell himself that maybe it wasn't true about the scabs. Maybe there wouldn't be a fight. Perhaps the strike would end soon and his father go back to Brisbane and not say anything if he returned to the Reach. . . But the idea that some final conflict between his father and himself was unavoidable now became so strong that he gave up struggling against it at last, and even found a kind of torpid, fatalistic peace in resigning himself. Till the
dawn broke on the valley, with an instantaneous white blaze of heat, he lay thinking over the events of his life—Gursey's harangues, the injustices done to Berry, the talk he had heard in the shearers' hut, the fight with his father, the estrangement between himself and his brothers, his disinheritance—which had brought him to this point where he must either go docilely off and let his father have it all his own way or fight it out once for all. He thought of these things without emotion, except perhaps a little self-pity and a certain naïve amazement at the discovery that a process of destiny had been at work within him for so many years unsuspected. Even the thought, “It won't be him licks his wounds,” which ran across all other thoughts, awoke only a queer feeling of relief that this day would put an end to the knot of pain in his belly.

  Chapter Five: No Escape

  The camp awakened early and went on with its argument. Just before noon an excited picked galloped in to say that a crowd of mounted troopers were coming up the road, and soon afterwards two men came out of the scrub on tired horses—one a trooper with a carbine in the saddle holster and a sword at his belt, the other Cash, who waved to the men as he passed and got their hoots and catcalls in reply.

  Half an hour later they rode out of the Reach with Cabell and James. The men ran from the camp and hooted again. Cabell was carrying a stock-whip. He cracked it low over the shearers' heads, and for a while their arguing ceased and they were thoughtful. In that mood Coyle got them out on to the road, a silent, surly rabble, a few on horseback, some with rifles, some with sticks, but most on foot with only their bare, clenched fists. In Larry's belt was a revolver which Coyle had given him. With Coyle he rode in front of the mob. Behind the horsemen came Budge running backwards with his arms outstretched, trying to make the mob stop and listen.

  Suddenly Goggs pulled his horse in. “Look. There they are.” About three miles away a cloud of dust rose over the scrub. “There must be a coupla hundred traps,” Goggs said anxiously, looking round at the men. They seemed a tiny mob bunched together on the side of the road, and Goggs began to turn yellow under his sunburn. “I reckon they ain't got orders to shoot over our heads neither.”