Over the Blue Mountains

by Mary Burchell

  “I’d much rather come down. Unless you want to have one evening to yourselves.”

  “Oh, no. You’ll fit in all right,” Carol said cryptically. “I just thought you might not want to be with strangers when you felt badly.”

  “You don’t seem like a stranger,” Juliet told her simply.

  “I’m glad,” Carol said. And, if she noticed the unconscious distinction drawn between herself and her brother, she did not remark on it. “Just come down when you’re ready. I think I hear Max bringing your luggage.”

  “Oh, I could have brought it myself...” Juliet began.

  But Carol said, “Not at all. Here he is.” And Max came in with a couple of suitcases, which did not seem to be giving him much trouble.

  “Juliet has explained everything to me,” Carol informed him comprehensively, “and—”

  “What—in ten minutes?” her brother asked incredulously.

  “Of course, Essentials never take more than a matter of minutes,” Carol assured him, with some truth. “It’s details that fill up the hours. Anyway she is going to have a wash and tidy up then she is joining us for a good meal, and we’ll talk over practical plans for her future later.”

  Max gave her an amused glance of mingled admiration and protest.

  “Did I tell you that my sister is a very unusual young woman, Juliet?” he said, with a slight lift of one eyebrow.

  “You probably thought I would find that out for myself without being told,” Juliet replied with a smile.

  “I don’t know what you two are talking about,” declared Carol, with an air of genuine surprise.

  At this her brother laughed and, putting an arm around her, took her off with him, leaving Juliet to her own thoughts, which, if they were inevitably melancholy, at least were tinged now with gleams of new hope and interest.

  It was impossible to be in this house and be despairing. And with this cheering reflection she began to change for her first dinner at home with Max Ormathon and his sister.

  When she came downstairs, Juliet found that, apart from what were obviously the kitchen regions at the back of the house, two large rooms led off from either side of the hall. In one of these there was a light and, when she went in, Juliet found that it was a dining room, with a table all ready set for a meal, in a charming if informal style. No one was there, however.

  But from another room beyond she could hear the quick, eager voice of Carol, punctuating the deeper, more considered tones of her brother.

  She hesitated for a moment to go in and break up the first tete-a-tete that brother and sister had had together, and as she did so, she heard Max say, “Of course I’m fond of her, my dear. I wouldn’t have asked her to marry me otherwise—”

  “But you’re so cool about it!” came Carol’s protest.

  Max laughed—a lazy, unperturbed, teasing laugh.

  “I tell you—I don’t tear myself to ribbons about these things, the way you do. Or that poor girl upstairs,” he added reflectively.

  “Oh, Max! Was she terribly upset?”

  “I’m afraid so. And the awkward thing is—”

  At this point, Juliet became aware of the fact that she was eavesdropping and, returning quietly to the hall, she made a fresh entry into the dining room, taking care to clear her throat very audibly as she came.

  Carol appeared immediately in the doorway of the other room and said, “Come on in, Juliet! It’s nice and warm here. And Max will fix you a drink.”

  Juliet thought she had never seen a pleasanter room. Books in white painted shelves covered the whole of one wall, and before a big wood fire, low, comfortable chairs were drawn up. As she sat down in one of these, Max brought her a glass of pale, dry sherry, with the remark “Home produced. But don’t dismiss it for that. The best Australian wines don’t usually travel well enough to find their way overseas. Tell me how you like that.”

  Juliet sipped the sherry with enjoyment and, though no connoisseur, pronounced it excellent.

  “We were talking about you just before you came in,” Carol announced, and when Juliet looked slightly taken aback, she added, “Oh, we weren’t being nasty and gossipy. I mean that we were just discussing future plans for you.”

  “ ‘Plans’ is altogether too definite a word,” Max protested. “I was explaining, Juliet, that I doubted if you would want to go back to England right away. But, of course, I may be quite wrong.”

  “I couldn’t go back yet,” Juliet explained quite simply. “Not until I’ve earned and saved up enough for my fare back.”

  “Oh...” Carol looked understanding. “It’s like that, is it?”

  “Very much so.”

  “I imagine that your uncle would advance the money for your return if you very much wanted to go,” Max said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t let him do that!” Juliet’s cry of protest showed her feelings more eloquently then the words. “They are almost ... strangers to me, really, you know. I have no claim on them. And, anyway, I had the impression—I’m not quite sure why—that my uncle had enough worries of his own, without being asked to provide a large sum for an over-impulsive, little-known niece.”

  Max Ormathon looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Financial worries, do you mean?”

  “I ... don’t know. I hadn’t really worked that out. I only felt that—” she groped for words “—he was, in some way, at the end of his tether.”

  “Funny you should say that. I thought—” Max Ormathon stopped suddenly and evidently decided not to develop that subject. Instead, he took Juliet’s breath away by asking calmly. “Would you have any objection to my advancing the money for your fare? Always supposing, of course, that you do want to go home.”

  “You advance it?” Juliet looked incredulous. “But I—you couldn’t possibly mean that. It’s a very big sum.”

  “My bank balance will stand it,” he assured her with a smile.

  “Yes, I know—I mean, I’m sure. But—thank you very much—but I couldn’t dream of accepting such a thing from someone I hardly know.”

  “That really isn’t the point,” Max assured her amusedly. “Do you want to go home?”

  When he put it, quite simply like that, she wanted so terribly to go home that she almost choked. The thought of being back among the dear and safe and familiar surroundings, with life in manageable proportions again, seemed so achingly desirable that she thought she must snatch at this fantastically generous offer without pause or thought.

  But then, before she could do so, all that was best and most self-respecting in Juliet came rushing to the surface. By her own impulsive foolishness she had landed herself in this dilemma. Unless she were to own herself a poor, spineless, self-pitying creature, it was by her own efforts that she must get out of it.

  “Thank you very, very much, Mr. Ormathon.” She managed to smile at Max, even though the thought of what she was refusing made her mouth tremble. “But I’d rather stay here and work and find my own way out of this business. I’d never be on good terms with myself again, if I didn’t. It was silly and ill-judged of me to come rushing out here—I know that now—but I’ll make the best of what I have done. When I go back to England, I’ll do so by my own efforts.”

  “Good girl!” Max Ormathon said, and that was all. But he looked at Juliet as though, in some way, he saw her for the first time.

  “I’m sure you won’t regret that,” Carol exclaimed. “I know just what you mean by saying that you couldn’t be on good terms with yourself again if you let this beat you.”

  “Well—” Juliet’s smile was more certain that time “—I’ve got to change fine words into deeds before they mean much, I know. But I can’t believe that I shall not be able to earn my own living here.”

  “Of course you will,” Carol declared.

  “There’ll probably be some formalities,” Max told her, “before you can rank as a wage earner, since you came out here more or less as a visitor, I take it. But I’ll see you through those.”
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  “Thank you.” She looked at him that time rather as though she saw him for the first time, and they exchanged a smile of mutual respect and liking, which greatly astonished Juliet when she thought about it afterward.

  “Well, if you’ve both finished your drinks, let’s go and have dinner,” Carol said, rising in one quick, graceful movement from her position on a stool by the fire. “Food always stimulates my ingenuity, and I daresay we shall think up some good ideas between us while we eat.”

  The other two laughed, and together they went into the neighboring dining room.

  As they did so, a gust of wind, shaking the windows, reminded Juliet for a moment of the outside world. Thousands and thousands of miles of unknown country lay outside those windows, and in all this great continent there was hardly a soul she knew—still less one who cared about her. She was alone in a sense she had never before imagined, even in the most frightening dreams of her childhood.

  In spite of her brave words, the most heart-shaking terror seized upon her, and she seemed to see herself lost in an infinity of space—insignificant beyond expression and yet feeling instinctively the primitive terror of the utterly alone.

  For a moment she saw nothing but the wastes of plain and mountain, forest and scrubland which lay outside this house. Then suddenly Max was smiling at her and saying, “Will you sit here—opposite me.”

  Incredibly, six words reached out to her in the isolation of her terror and loneliness, and, at their sound, the world took on its right proportions again and the chilling tremors left her.

  In the midst of the great vacuum she had visualized there was this little cell—this oasis—of friendliness and hope. By no planning of her own, she had been brought to it—and from here she would go out boldly to face whatever the future might bring.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The following morning, almost before breakfast was over, Carol offered to take Juliet on an informal tour of the place. Max had already ridden off on some affairs of his own, and the two girls—with the children for company—were lingering over a second cup of coffee.

  “Thank you. I would love it,” Juliet said. “But first of all, can I have some real idea of where I am? I mean—names don’t convey much to me, of course, but—am I still in New South Wales, for one thing?”

  Carol laughed a good deal at this.

  “Dear me, yes! How big did you think New South Wales was? You would have to go quite a long way farther before you tumbled over the edge of it, believe me.”

  “It hasn’t got an edge,” announced Isobel, who had been following this conversation with great attention. “At least, not the sort you fall over. It’s flat. You can see it on my map.”

  “A map!” exclaimed Juliet. “That the thing. Will someone show me where I am, on the map?”

  “I will! I will!” cried Isobel, and rushed away in search of a map, closely followed by Peter, who panted in the rear, crying, “I’ll show her, too,” though he had only the vaguest idea of what he wanted to show to whom.

  Both children returned in a few minutes with a somewhat tattered map of Australia, which Isobel proceeded to spread out on the table in front of Juliet. Then, kneeling on a chair, she hung over it, breathing loudly, while Peter climbed onto Juliet’s knee, saying, “I want to see, too,” and then, belatedly, “please.”

  Juliet bent her head over the map.

  “Here is Sydney.” She put a finger on the familiar spot, while Isobel poised an anxious pencil over the map, ready to pounce on the place she sought, as soon as she spied it. “And here is Katoomba.” Juliet bit her lip at the momentary recollection of the high hopes she had entertained while she lunched there. But she went on resolutely. “I’m not sure which direction we took after that. Across the mountains in some way...”

  “Here we are!” shrieked Isobel triumphantly, and in her anxiety to point out the place she made a pencil mark that must have covered about eighty square miles. “Daddy says we’re just there, near that tri-tri-tributary of the river. That’s where our house is—just there, isn’t it, mommy?”

  Laughing, Carol leaned over Juliet’s shoulder familiarly, so that she was deliciously conscious of being very much a part of a family group.

  “Let me see. Ye-es. Near enough. Not more than a hundred miles out anyway. Here is Bathurst to the north, Juliet.” Taking Isobel’s pencil, she used it as a pointer, but without making the marks that her excited little daughter seemed unable to avoid. “And here we are—on the edge of the sheep country.”

  “And is yours a sheep farm?” Juliet inquired.

  “Station,” Carol amended, smiling. “Yes. Though we do a certain amount of mixed farming near the house itself. It’s rather unusual for the family to live on such a big station, but I was not prepared to live in town while Henry slaved away here.”

  “I should think not!”

  “Well, living here has it problems, of course, apart from the actual loneliness,” Carol said. “But fortunately, we have all been wonderfully well—” she lightly touched the table and smiled over her own small concession to superstition “—and we are within one circuit of the flying-doctor service. Isobel will be going to boarding school next year, but she is looking forward to that, aren’t you, pet?”

  Isobel looked up from her map and nodded absently. It was obvious that she had long been used to the idea of boarding school and that it held no terrors for her.

  “Anyway, whatever the disadvantages of such an isolated existence, I felt the main thing was for us to be all together,” Carol said. “And that’s why we built a house that was very much a home. I’ve never been to England, but I wanted something that was like an English country house.”

  “It’s a beautiful house,” Juliet assured her warmly.

  “It’s more unusual here than you realize,” Carol assured her with a smile. “You didn’t know, did you, that when you went upstairs to bed last night you were doing something few Australians do?”

  “No. What was that?”

  “Just the sheer going upstairs,” Carol said, and laughed. “A two-story house is quite unusual here, you know. Nearly all domestic building is of the bungalow type. That’s because we have so much space in which to expand, of course. We build outward because it’s unnecessary to go in for the more complicated building upward. But Max and I were brought up in a two-story house, and somehow I’ve always liked going upstairs to bed. So when Henry and I came to build our own place, he agreed to let me have it this way.”

  “It’s very pleasant, anyway,” Juliet assured her.

  For once—though Juliet gathered that this was a rare concession—Isobel was let off the morning lessons that she did with her mother, and the two children were allowed to accompany their mother and the visitor around the station.

  Bakandi—for so the station was called, after the name of one of the native tribes that once inhabited that part of the country—was not unlike a big English farm in its nearby essentials. But in the tremendous sweep of its uncultivated extent it was like nothing else Juliet had ever seen.

  “Oh, there’s no question of cultivating an area of this size,” Carol explained, in answer to Juliet’s questions. “There’s a certain amount of what one calls ‘pasture improvement’ to be done, and, of course, you take precautions to see that your merinos and other first-class sheep are not allowed to wander too far to be supervised and kept in vigorous condition. But, beyond that, distances are so great that I imagine our problems are very different from those in a small sheep farm at home.”

  “Ye-es,” agreed Juliet, whose experience of sheep farms at home was extremely limited.

  In company with Carol, however, and the two pleased and excited children, she enjoyed inspecting the shearing sheds and the stockyards, and she paused to admire, at a distance, the pretty bungalow houses and cottages that housed the rest of the station community: the overseer, the boundary riders, the rouseabouts and the jackeroos.

  Delighted to find how much there was to tell th
is new visitor, Isobel—and even Peter, too, from time to time—offered odd bits of information, until Juliet laughed and declared she had never realized how much there was to know about sheep and sheep farming.

  “Oh, the whole place revolves around the creatures,” Carol declared with a good-humored shrug. “Food supplies, water supplies, salt always available to keep them healthy—there’s no end to their care. But, of course, it’s like anything else. If you work hard at it, the results are good. If you leave them largely to pick up their own living, so to speak, they go all poor and peaky on you, and before you know where you are, you’ve lost half of them.”

  “And the lambs are so sweet,” Isobel offered sentimental.

  Peter said “I’d like a lamb. Can I have a lamb, please, mommy?”

  Carol explained reasonably that it was rather too early for lambs yet, and Juliet said, “I’ll never get used to the seasons being all the wrong way around here!”

  They all laughed then, and turned homeward again, pausing only when Juliet stopped, fascinated, to listen to the strange laughing call of a kookaburra from a nearby clump of trees. Then there was a flash of brilliant color against the dull green of the gum trees, and the bird was gone.

  “You’ll hear and see plenty of them,” Carol promised her.

  Now that there was not so much left to show the visitor, the children ran on ahead and, as they strolled along together, Juliet and Carol reverted once more to the rough plan for the future, which they had discussed the previous evening.

  It had been Carol’s suggestion that Juliet should stay with her for the time being. As she said, it would be a relief to her to have someone to take on the simple, primary lessons that were necessary in Isobel’s case and also to help with the general management of the house and the children.

  “Of course, the salary we could pay wouldn’t be the kind on which you would soon save your fare home, if that’s the principal consideration,” she had admitted frankly. “But in about ten days’ time, Max will be going to Melbourne, and he will find out for you just how free you are to take work in this country and what offers the best possibilities.”