The Apostle glanced round at the river-bank, a transformed river-bank with a coating of mud inches deep. Debris and dirt choked the crotches of the trees like old, untidy birds’-nests. Festoons of dead weed and hay and willow-twigs hung like garlands from the fence-posts.
Snow’s mind, he thought, must be in much the same condition — covered with a muddy anger. But, after all, from that anger, from that mud, something rich and living might yet emerge, some action good in itself. The Apostle intended to move on tomorrow, but before he went he would once more see Snow, try to talk to him, perhaps to get him to realise the wastefulness of his bitter brooding. The Apostle had stayed in Logan longer than he intended, not from any defiance of the sergeant, but because he had in charge Dick Tyrell’s cart and horse, Thirty-Bob’s sulky and stallion and Snow’s dog Bluey. Dick and Thirty-Bob would be out of gaol today and they could take back their property.
Everything this fair morning was struggling out of the prison of winter. There had been two warm, sunny days, and the wattle was coming shyly, apologetically, into bloom, fluffy as yellow wool. The peach trees had their flowers screwed into tiny pink knobs as though they wore curl-pins. The early light made promises in a language the birds and trees understood. A desperate longing in all living things commanded the air to be calm, the sunlight to be more caressing. A dumb demand thudded up the boughs with the beating of the sap, asking: ‘When? when?’ and the light wind soothed with its reply ‘Soon.’
Little black-eyed daisies flooded the fields with pale gold. The dandelions stood up to meet the Spring, and tender, new green leaves shivered against the pale washed blue of the sky.
But as the Apostle made his way over the flats towards the town, he was thinking of cruelty. It was a problem he had never really settled in his mind. Could cruelty be part of God? For there was surely nothing that was not. Or did cruelty only seem to be cruelty? The thought flashed at him startlingly that he was cruel to his wife to keep her dragging about the country with him. But how many times had he pleaded with her to go home to her brother, who disliked him so? Would it be cruel to send her back? Her presence, and that of the children, disturbed him, though he tried not to show it — hampered his movements. Women did not understand love — that dark tide that swept humanity along, holding them, embracing them, part of them. They thought of love as being close to someone, touching them, feeding them, mothering, possessing them. Surely it was possible to love someone at a distance loyally and steadily. Was it? Could a man love God if he felt He was distant instead of being close at hand? But, then, if the universe were all one medium through which consciousness flowed, what difference did it make? What was near or far, past or future?
As ever, he found these speculations beginning to excite him, as though something glowed in his head, making it feel tight about his brain. Without realising what he was doing, he leant dreamily over the fence of a farm, and stared at a large sow and her litter which were rooting there.
‘Is time the fourth dimension of space?’ the Apostle asked the sow. ‘Ah, that is the question! If only we knew just what time signifies!’
The farmer’s son came out to the kitchen door and watched the Apostle suspiciously. The Apostle’s seeming interest in the sow was something the lad could interpret in only one way. A traveller had taken an interest in the sow’s last litter, and the following morning there had been two promising piglets missing. He came strolling down towards the Apostle, who seemed not to notice that the calm of the morning was ominously charged with distrust.
‘G’day,’ the farmer’s son said, leaning over the gate.
The Apostle nodded absentmindedly. ‘You have no doubt often wondered,’ he observed, ‘that the sacred Blood should flow from the Wound. But it was not real blood, such as you or I might shed. Evil sheds the Blood. You agree’ — he fronted the young man sternly — ‘that evil we know to exist, particularly the conscious will to harm that we call cruelty, despite sophists, who tell us that evil is a misunderstanding, a mistake. We must admit the reality of evil.’
The young man’s mouth had dropped open. He retreated a pace, but the Apostle leant forward, hooking a finger in his shirt, politely but firmly, and his audience was too frightened to detach itself.
‘The heart of the universe is good and wise and loving,’ the Apostle continued, a little excitedly, ‘and the Blood of the universe, the whole stream and current of life, flows into that sacred heart, flows towards eternal Love. Evil, then, is the human will breasting against the great current. I think you agree with me?’ He fixed the young man with a glittering eye.
‘I got me work to get done,’ the other mumbled, suddenly wrenching himself free of that hypnotic gaze. He beat a hasty retreat up the yard, not looking back until he reached the door, where he stood to wipe his brow on a handkerchief as large as a dish-towel.
The Apostle took the escape in good spirit. ‘Just a friendly discussion’ he said to himself as though he was explaining to his wife.
Snow, weak and uncertain, was pleased to see the shabby figure of the Apostle coming to meet him. The Apostle had an unmistakable walk: a kind of quick shamble, as though he was escaping, dodging someone. He hurried along, stopping abruptly every now and then to take off his preposterous cloth cap and knuckle the grey curls on his forehead thoughtfully, his eyes on the dust at his feet or on some leaf-blade, some glance of light by the roadside.
He came up to Snow as though not at all surprised to see him there, and all the way back to the river he talked of nothing but cruelty and the possibility, which was a certainty to his way of thinking, that within the next few days there would be a war on the other side of the world — a great war. Snow listened impatiently. All he wanted was the loan of Thirty-Bob’s horse and sulky to drive out along the Crumwell Road to see if there was any chance of ‘getting on’ to some shearing. Most of the shearing was done by big contracting firms who brought their own men from the city and worked all the year round. They might shear for fifty sheds in the one district. But there would still be small cockies, Snow hoped, who would need him. Even if he got on only as a rouseabout, it would be something.
‘I’ll drive out with you,’ the Apostle suggested. ‘Then I can bring the horse back.’
Snow sat and drank cup after cup of the strong tea that Mrs Postlewaite set before him. He cursed the hospital for making him so weak. He was even relieved at the Apostle’s suggestion, although he knew that the Apostle’s idea of driving was to let the horse go where it pleased. If the Apostle ever got home with Thirty-Bob’s stallion in the shafts, it would be a miracle.
As he watched the attempts of Bryson and the Apostle to harness the stallion, he wished Thirty-Bob could see them. Weak as he was, Snow was impelled to stagger over and do the job himself. He took the reins from the Apostle and climbed into the sulky. He didn’t wish to go back to hospital again, and he had once seen the Apostle drive a horse.
The country curved up its green, rolling waves, all the greener for the recent rain. In the wide, arching heights of the sky a hawk was at home, quivering as a cinder might on a breath of air, light as an ash of burnt love. They passed an old brickyard where a pool of water lay in a hollow of yellow clay, and then another pool under the trees, black, full of old leaves. As they mounted into the hills, the country became poorer. Instead of the rolling green, there was only a splintered waste of burnt and ring-barked timber, and tufts of grass like a badly-worn mat, white where the wind pressed them.
The two men, so oddly unlike, sat silent, side by side, the Apostle still pondering on war and cruelty, Snow thinking of shearing. Farm succeeded farm, a house on every rise, the paddocks rolling round them in a flood of grass where trees stood like scattered enemies, some fallen, some ready to fall. Farmers have a hatred of trees. The sight of one reminds them only of the labour and sweat of clearing and burning off, the uncertainty and misery of a man making a start on an inimical forest. The trees the farmers tolerated were tame, like a mop upon a stick — kurrajo
ngs or acacias useful for reserve feed; they had no wild strength or promethean courage; they were mute captives of the conqueror.
‘Here we are,’ the Apostle said. ‘This should be the place where Angus and the Dogger got on.’ Snow reined in the horse. ‘If you just leave the horse with me,’ the Apostle suggested, ‘I don’t mind waiting to see how you get on.’
So they tied the horse to a post, and the Apostle lay down on his back in the grass with his arms under his head.
The homestead, like all other homesteads, stood well back from the highway; but the shearing-shed, a long, grey building, built of split slabs, together with the men’s bunkhouse and cookhouse, were close to the road for convenience in carting the wool. Beside the shed the little engine spat jets of steam ‘Put-put-put,’ as it ran the machinery working the shearing-blades. A mob of sheep had just been driven in by one of the farmer’s sons. Their wool was a red-yellow, and they were cross-bred. Snow, regarding them critically, decided they were a poor lot.
He asked to see the boss, and was told he was in the shed sorting. Snow hung about, waiting for the mid-day break. It was close on noon, and the spell was about due. The whirr and racket of the machine, the thump of the engine, made him feel weaker than ever. Inside the shed it was dim and cool. The men, in a row, stooped over their sheep, hardly lifting their heads. Now and then one would take a swig from the billy beside him, or straighten his back as the shorn sheep scrambled down the shoot.
The shearing was rough, Snow considered; the sheep were all chipped about and bleeding. Every one of them was a mass of raw gashes and long, raking scours where the blades had bitten in. The farmer’s son, a fair boy with a soft down on his face, would gather up the fleece and run with it to the board, holding it spread before him like a sail. As it fell, his father would sort it and throw it into one of the bins; and another boy would run up with another fleece.
‘That’s three sons he’s got working,’ Snow thought, ‘and I’ll bet me last zac most of the others are uncles or nephews.’
He hung about until the noon whistle went, and then collared the boss and asked if he was wanting a shearer. The boss instantly denied any such need, and turned away rather abruptly to give his son some directions about the sheep. ‘Fair enough,’ Snow thought. He had expected a ‘knock-back,’ but he had at least tried. He slouched over to the kitchen and touched his hat politely to a stout woman who was cooking for the shearers — an aunt of the boys, by the look of her. That was the worst of these small cockies. They always gave any job to relations.
‘How is it for some tucker, missus?’ he asked in his most courteous voice. He was feeling, not only loose in his joints, but very hollow in the middle. The shearers were already sitting down with mugs and plates of meat before them; and unwritten law demanded that Snow should be invited to share. But the worst of town women is that they know little of unwritten law; and the cook had been imported from Logan, where she usually helped in a shop.
Her eyes snapped at the importunate tramp. ‘I’ve got no time,’ she said irritably, ‘to be feeding damn bagmen. There’s enough to do without that.’
A deadly silence fell on the diners. It was as though a mob of cattle had raised their heads and were gazing thunderstruck from Snow to the cook to see how this breach of etiquette had arisen. Burning Angus recovered fast. He sprang up from the head of the table and pushed his plate away.
‘You heard that, mates?’ he demanded. ‘Have any of you ever heard a shearers’ cook that spoke like that before?’
The cook stood her ground. ‘I’m here to cook for you men, and not for any lousy bagmen that come biting tucker.’
The Scotsman glared at her. ‘If you were a man,’ he said, ‘I’d know what I’d do about it.’ He turned to the men at the table. ‘I’m a bagman meself, and I won’t have a chap that comes looking for a hand-out turned down. I said we ought to vote for our own cook, didn’t I? I said that if we let the boss hire the cook, we were breaking the union agreement, didn’t I? Well, wasn’t I right?’
‘Oh, shut up, Angus.’ One of the men looked up for a minute. ‘Give it a rest.’
But Burning Angus was too angry. ‘A chap’s got to stand up for a mate when he’s out of a job,’ he declared. ‘I’m going to see the boss about this. I’m asking you others who are bagmen to come with me. You, Dogger, and Uncle and Snake.’
The three obediently put down their knives and forks. All through the Scotsman’s tirade they had been shovelling in food as though this was their last meal. Wiping their mouths, they followed him across the yard to where the boss was still talking to his son about the sheep. There followed a long, wordy, wrangling argument, the upshot of it being that the boss refused to sack the cook — she was his wife’s sister, and he was afraid of what his wife would say — but he tried to soothe Angus, a hard man to soothe. One word led to another, and the Dogger returned to an earlier grievance, that the sheep were as poor as ‘damn race-horses.’
This fired the boss’s blood. He was not too proud of those sheep himself. He knew they were hard to handle and poor enough; but he would not have them disparaged in his hearing. It ended with his saying: ‘All right, then, if that suits you. You can get your time as quick as you like.’ And he went off to get his cheque-book.
The Apostle showed no surprise at the sight of Snow returning with Burning Angus and Uncle in his wake. Snake and the Dogger were coming later on the wool-truck. All the way back to town Angus expressed his views on the A.W.U. organiser, who, he claimed, was never to be seen except when he collected the ten shillings levy and the twenty shillings for the union ticket; who hob-nobbed with the bosses and drove round in a big car, and didn’t care a hoot in hell what the conditions at a shed might be like.
It was Uncle who insisted that, as Snow was just out of hospital, they should all stop at the first hotel and get him a ‘face plaster.’ The Apostle dropped them there, courteously declining a drink. He got his from the river, he declared, and it was much the same colour and taste.
‘You’ll be camping down by the bridge,’ he called, as he drove away. ‘If so, I’ll see you later.’
‘We’ll be camping down by the bridge.’ It would take more than an official edict to shift the bagmen off the river.
It was dusk when they came down the bank, laden with bottles, and reinforced by the Dogger, Snake, and two bagmen known respectively as Dark and Jim. Dogger and Snake had also been breaking up their ‘silver cheque’ into a more potable form, and they were all very merry.
Dark and Jim had spent the day clearing the graveyard of a vigorous growth of marshmallow which had sprouted after the flood, and not only were they being paid ten shillings a day, but they had been working in the midst of a set of unpaid sentimentalists and chattering school children, composing a volunteer working bee, with a Ladies’ Committee taking round afternoon tea.
‘And didn’t we just wop into them big slabs of cake with cream in the middle?’ Dark exclaimed.
‘But the funniest of the lot,’ his mate broke in, ‘is when Dark’s scrapping away those weeds — they’re up to our waists — and he sings out: “Hey, Jim, here’s a copper’s grave.” ’
‘“Well, don’t clear none of the weeds away from him,” I says. “He’s bludged on bagmen all his life.” And I goes over to have a look, and strike me, if it don’t say: “Trooper Harold York, Fought at Gallipoli.” That damn fool of a Dark thought trooper meant he was a copper. So we cleaned up his grave better than all the rest put together, and the mayor, when he comes down to have a look, gives us five bob each, because this Trooper York’s his brother.’
‘That means a new tyre for the back wheel of the bike — nine bob, and a shilling left to play round with.’
The rest of the party was also pleased with itself; Snow because he was out of hospital and in good company; Angus because he had told the boss what he thought of him, and his mates because they ‘never wanted to shear no flamin’ jumbucks, anyway,’ and were ‘glad to get away
from the smell of them and the damn cocky’s relatives.’
‘Here comes the bloody ’Postle,’ Dark said, with the touch of affectionate contempt and exasperation which so generally greeted the Apostle among the bagmen. They felt the Apostle was ‘putting a roughie over them.’ A parson ought to have a rectory or a presbytery and stay in it. Why did he want to go wandering round pretending to be just a human being? And if he was one of themselves, why did he break out every now and then pretending to be a parson?
‘How’s the war, Harry?’ Angus hailed him.
‘Very close, Angus,’ the Apostle responded in a low, grave voice.
They settled down to talk international politics. ‘The papers say’ or ‘I was reading the other day’ began every second sentence, for most bagmen pride themselves on their knowledge of general affairs, and Angus and the Dogger in particular were always calling at the post-office for bundles of papers sent on to them by friends.
‘If it comes, it’ll be the First Oil War,’ Angus prophesied. ‘I tell ye, we’ll see the world divided up like a cocky’s back paddock.’
The Dogger was not in agreement. ‘It’s a sign the democracies are waking up,’ he announced. ‘They see the menace of Hitler at last. The first job of the workers is to crush Hitler, and any country that goes to war against Germany gets all my support.’ From the way he said it, you almost waited for the hysterical cheers of relief from the darkness as England and France learned that the Dogger was with them.
‘If it comes off,’ Snake cried, ‘I’ll be with the first to take a bayonet and have a jab at old Hitler.’
‘You’re a mug,’ Angus said with biting contempt. ‘Let the capitalists fight their own wars. That’s the line for the workers.’
But he was in a minority. They turned on him furiously and tried to convince him that he was wrong.
‘This is a justifiable war …’
The Battlers Page 23