Now, if they could have seen any houses to ask for help, they would have asked; but there was nothing on that desolate road. They could have cried, they were so hungry and tired and desolate.
‘Jimmy, are you any good at prayin’?’ The Stray had almost to yell against the wind.
Jimmy thought. ‘Who to?’ he asked deliberately.
‘Anyone you like, love. I’d have a shot at it meself, if I thought I was any good at it.’
‘St Christopher,’ said Jimmy, ‘looks after travellers. Father Sheehan told me that.’
‘Well, you word him, Jimmy’ — the Stray had a superstitious nature — ‘that we could do with a bit of lookin’ after. You might give it a go.’
‘No,’ Jimmy said sullenly. Then he thought. ‘But I’ll promise him a candle.’
‘Me, too,’ the Stray agreed. ‘Two candles.’
They had stopped for a minute to rest, their backs against a rock, and now it seemed that someone was shouting to them. They saw a man over in a field waving his arms, beckoning, and they limped across to him. He was an old man with a grey beard who was, he explained, doing a bit of fencing. His mate emerged from a tent to survey the two newcomers.
‘If it ain’t a shame,’ he said, removing his pipe, ‘to see a woman and a kid on the road. And by themselves, too.’
The Stray explained that she was going to join her husband, and the old men exchanged a glance of indignant pity.
‘Come in and sit down,’ they invited. ‘You look as though you could do with a rest.’
The two old men, kindly and silent, knew from having lived long years together what each was thinking. They made their plans in a murmured undertone. The girl and the boy were ‘knocked up.’ They could not possibly go on. The Stray must have a portion of the tent screened off. They explained apologetically that they could not sleep out, because it would probably be a heavy storm. The Stray and Jimmy were only too thankful for company and kindness and shelter. They did not care what kind of shelter.
It seemed that the sky, tortured by the wind, had broken into a passion that was almost horrible. Great, swirling wisps of livid vapour raced below the higher, darker passes of the sky where, dull, formidably, the curdled wrath of rain towered up and up, writhing. Then the water crashed down in a cold, howling, driving spate, as though a dam had burst above, as though the tiny tent lay in the vent of some celestial drain-pipe, whose black mouth jetted an unholy spray.
As the four huddled close around the hurricane lamp, the Stray, weary and frightened as she was, had a feeling of immeasurable delight and comfort. Through all her miseries there had come to her the sudden, blinding certainty that something was looking after her.
It might be Jimmy’s Saint Christopher, it might be just the ‘ghosts’ she was so afraid of, but something had brought them to this little tent out of the lightning that crashed blue fire over the rocks, out of the threat of the thunder and darkness.
She closed her eyes the better to enjoy this contentment that wrapped her round. ‘It’s me Luck,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I’m lucky, that’s what it is.’ Perhaps cheering Jimmy on with this assurance, she had convinced herself, but this huge, vague, shadowy Luck towered over her as definitely as the storm towered over the tent.
The wind was now a tremendous, sustained uproar. Its note was a howl so malignant that even the thunder faded before it. The tent bellied outwards suddenly, swayed, and, as the two old men vainly scrambled up to stay it, blew away.
In the roaring darkness the Stray heard the old men shouting about a bridge not far off. Slipping and stumbling, they set out for it, carrying such belongings as they could find.
Here once again the two hosts courteously insisted on rigging up a little partition with a blanket for their lady guest, so that one half the bridge, which dripped dismally, was hers in privacy and decency.
‘Course I don’t mind about the tent,’ the Stray assured them, when they apologised for the fourth time for the inadequacies of their deserted dwelling. ‘We’re lucky we got a bridge to shelter under, ain’t we, Jimmy? Lots of people haven’t a bridge.’
II
For three days the cold rain lashed down; the wind blew a gale; and the roads ran mud. Through the gaping, eroded wounds in the hill-slopes the earth came tumbling. The soggy grass squelched underfoot as though the ground were swollen with water. Farmers who had bemoaned the dry weather now cursed to see their wheat-fields threshed flat by hail. The owners of orchards where the blossom had been mashed into an unsightly brown mess of petals wondered how they would live, even if the bank should help them. Many a gaunt man who had fought the country for a bare living for years saw his hopes of a good harvest lying ruined in the paddocks. The bitter lines deepened in the farmers’ faces, just as the eroded lines of the slopes deepened under the downpour.
At Crookwell, it snowed. Not much, but just enough to show that it was possible for the weather at Crookwell to do anything. The Minister for Water and Drainage, who had come up officially to open a new reservoir, had to stand in a torrent while he did it; and his speech on the benefits of water was testily altered at the last minute.
Meanwhile Snow remained snugly in a prospectors’ camp a few miles from Woodstock. He had turned off the road to carry a message to three gold fossickers, friends of Scotty, and had decided to stay until the weather cleared. While the rain poured down, he sat by the fire in the hut, resting and yarning with Scotty’s friends. It was here that messages first began to reach him from the Stray. He knew it must be the Stray when they said his ‘wife.’ Only the Stray seemed to have this power to upset his life and turn it aside. He had told Thirty-Bob that he was going to Crookwell, but he had not intended to go farther than Mt McDonald. Now he would have to go through to Crookwell after all. And then the thought came: Why should he go? But the perturbing news that the Stray had Jimmy with her settled that idea. He must get Jimmy. After all, he need not saddle himself with the Stray as well. At least, he tried to comfort himself with the assurance that he did not need to saddle himself with the Stray. Something told him, however, that the Stray was fate, a rather bedraggled and vigorous fate in the body of a girl who refused to be left behind. He could no more be done with her than he could be done with his own nature, which had been reproaching him for his desertion of that outrageous little bit of feminine flotsam.
The message had come, like most country news, through a mailman who was a friend of the baker’s. The Stray and Jimmy, desolately toiling past isolated farms, had aroused more interest than they would ever imagine. ‘I wonder what became of that poor woman and the boy,’ one farmer’s wife would ask another over the telephone. ‘Did they pass your place? I nearly went out and invited them in. I’m sorry now I didn’t.’
‘The mailman may have seen them. I’ll ask him.’
So that the progress of the two lonely wanderers was watched from farm to farm, as two free, swimming fishes might be watched by limpets under a protective shell.
‘Haven’t heard anything of a cove with a brown van and a brown horse Woodstock way?’ the mailman asked gloomily from farm to farm. He was a laconic man, who always looked as though he might have some secret engine trouble, and he had an air of listening for a knock in the pistons while he drove.
‘Well, I seen a cove go past here with a brown van Friday. He turns off past Pierce’s place and down to the left where them fellers are prospectin’. It might be him.’
Sighing wearily, as though the burden was too much to bear, the mailman had driven a long way down the rutty, dangerous track to carry the message to ‘the cove with a brown van’ that his wife and boy had gone through to Crookwell and were waiting for him there. The mailman had no incentive to go out of his way for any unknown boy or woman, but he was used to delivering messages or going errands, and the habit was just too much for him. Besides, the whole countryside wanted to know how the Stray and Jimmy fared. Their story spread like ripples in a pool.
Before Snow had travelled twen
ty miles on his way, the Stray’s message had been delivered to him five times by interested farmers; and he had begun to curse this friendly interest in his affairs. His coming was heralded. The mailman, going ahead on his daily round, announced it. The word was passed along from Reid’s Flat by a lorry-driver who pulled in and hailed the Stray and Jimmy, where they were having their blisters nursed by a bridge-building gang.
‘Your old man’s coming along, missus. He ought to be here tomorrow. He’s coming along behind.’
The Stray and Jimmy had explained to everyone that Snow had left them with a friendly family in Logan while she was laid up with some mysterious ailment, and that he had intended to call back for them; but, the Stray recovering earlier than expected, the two had set forth to find ‘me husbing’ somewhere along the track. Everyone accepted the story for what it was worth, and they were kind enough to the young woman and the boy who was obviously too old to be her son.
The mailman became the curse of Snow’s life. He pulled up again on his trip back from Reid’s Flat and said despondently: ‘They’re waitin’ for you at the bridge, Joe Banks’s camp, on the Bigga Road,’ as though this were a tragedy in which Snow had all his sympathy. The mailman’s passengers encouraged Snow and took an interest. Even the two cages of parroquets that the mailman was transporting to town for a friend seemed to take an interest. The bags of flour and groceries and mail had a sentimental air, as though they were saying to each other: ‘It doesn’t matter what your position may be in life. The heart is always the same, isn’t it? Fancy that poor woman and the boy coming to find the father! Fancy, now! Such a sullen, unpleasant-looking man, too.’
The very men to whom Snow came with tidings of the formation of the Trackmen’s Union greeted him with the news that ‘your wife and kid were through here looking for you a day or so ago. Stopped and had a bit of tucker with us. Good kid that.’
Snow, who had seen himself travelling a lonely road, a secret emissary of the new union, found that he was far from being either lonely or secret. Everyone was watching for a brown van and a brown horse, and as soon as they saw him in the distance, they had to gallop up and verify his existence and tell him all over again about Jimmy and the Stray, wanting to know his whole life-story, inviting him to put his horse in the farm paddock and shelter in the farm shed, boil his billy over the fire, or sit in the kitchen until the rain stopped. The shyness that had prevented the farmers’ wives extending hospitality to the Stray and Jimmy had melted, and all their kindliness that caution had dammed back was showered on Snow. Never before had Snow known such a friendly lot of farmers as there seemed to be in this district, and considering that they were recently ruined for at least the eleventh time according to their own reckoning it was all rather mystifying. He did not kill one sheep. He did not need to. Someone was always giving him eggs or meat or bread or sugar. He had only to ask, and often it was offered without asking. He felt as though the whole countryside was shoving him irresistibly towards the clutch of the Stray. There was no turning back. She had Jimmy as hostage, and she had announced to the whole world that she was Mrs Grimshaw; and to all intents and purposes it was clear she intended to remain Mrs Grimshaw, whether he liked it or not. He might just as well give in and accept his position of pleased husband and father journeying to meet his dear ones.
Snow, however, was a stubborn man and set in his ways. He had cast the Stray off; and it annoyed him that she refused to be cast off. He brooded over the problem as the slow old van moved on. There was nothing to make him travel with her. There wasn’t any law that could force him to do it. He sulked.
It was a good thing the Stray and Jimmy had progressed beyond the orbit of the mailman, or he would have given them a lift back the way they had come, and landed them on Snow as though he was delivering two bags of groceries. And Snow did not want them dumped on him so. His hatred of interference was linked with his dislike of gaol. He no more cared to be penned in to a set course of action than to a confined space. He wanted to be free.
As he drove along, the face of the Stray seemed to float in front of him: the big blue eyes, the sunburnt fair skin, the tight funny mouth of a toothless old woman, the flossy hair like pale silk, the loose, badly-fitting print dress that covered her small, thin body — her whole hobgoblin self persisted before his mind like some vision that could not be banished into the limbo from which it had risen. Jimmy had sunk into unimportance, although, of course, he would be pleased to have Jimmy again. But the Stray had spoilt his plans of working and making money and getting a ship-shape divorce and taking legal possession of the boys. She had snapped all his carefully woven future aside like a cobweb, with her customary vigour and mettle. She could remind him that his track-card was still made out for a wife, and that they were her rations he had drawn at Cowra as well as his own. But the Stray was not mean. She would not do that. She would want to ride in the van, share his life, share Jimmy, probably share his bed as well, and this thought gave Snow a distinct uneasiness.
There was a strain in him which, if not exactly monastic, took a certain pleasure in a physical isolation. He was a born monogamist — that rare creature, a man who felt little of the casual attractions which seduce the drover from his matrimonial loyalty. Marriage with him was a matter of habit. He was used to regarding himself as married to Molly. She might not be either a satisfactory partner or a very loving one, but he was fixed in his attitude. She was his wife, and that settled it. He did not think of the Stray as his wife, and behind all his plans there lingered the faint hope that Molly might still change her mind and rejoin him. Jimmy’s desertion might soften her. Suppose Molly should turn up some day and say: ‘Theo, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. Will you have me back?’ What could he say, if the Stray was obtrusively thrusting herself into the picture?
There! He had thought of her again. He could not prevent his mind nervously shying away from the idea of the Stray boldly claiming the right of sleeping in his arms. He couldn’t throw her out of the camp bodily, could he? But again, he couldn’t see himself making love to her. ‘It’s a matter of breaking in,’ he muttered aloud. He had been broken in to Molly. You couldn’t train a plough-horse for a trotter, and a racer was no good ploughing. To these rather disconsolate and apprehensive images, particularly the one of the Stray curling up like a kitten, sleeping in the curve of his arm, his mind reverted again and again. He had a paternal liking for the Stray, an elderly indulgence of her tantrums that were so like those of a spoilt small girl.
Oh, well, whatever happened, he couldn’t help it. It was as the Apostle said: Life just flowed along, and it didn’t matter a damn what you wanted. You just paddled the way you were meant to go. Already he was half resigned to his lot. If he had to have the Stray, that was all about it.
The vindictive ghost of winter risen like conscience was bitter company on the road. Everywhere was the crying and calling of ewes, for it was still lambing time in these parts: a desolate, weak crying they made, full of the knowledge of sudden cold and the death of new-born lambs with the frosts on their fleeces. The grey stones stood together like sheep, and when the sheep moved, it was as though the rocks had stirred and walked restless with the cold. The road wriggled forward uncertainly over rises and down hollows as though it tried to escape into the green fields and was forever driven on like a worn-out drudge, its yellow ribs bare and staring. Towards him along that yellow road laboured the figure of a small boy.
Snow looked again, astounded. Yes, it was Jimmy right enough, coming down a long slope and across the level. But where was the Stray? He flicked Don into a faster pace.
‘Hallo, Dad!’ Jimmy called excitedly. ‘I said I’d come, didn’t I?’ Triumph shone in his eyes. ‘I got here.’
His father helped him into the van. ‘Where’s the woman?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Dancy got a lift. She’s gone on. Said to tell you, now she knows I’m all right, she’ll be on her way. Hey, Dad, Bluey knows me. Look at him.’
And, inde
ed, Bluey was wagging his tail and fawning along the ground and stretching himself on his chain until he nearly strangled himself in his efforts to express joyful welcome. But Snow seemed abstracted. His firm determination to have nothing to do with the Stray seemed to have weakened on him, and in its place the urgent necessity of finding her was settling itself like a welcome guest.
‘How far ahead d’you s’pose she’d be?’ he asked presently, when Jimmy’s flood of news had a little subsided.
‘Not far, I guess. She on’y got a lift from a farmer in a sulky, and he said he was turning off at the cross-roads.’
Snow urged Don onwards. ‘I guess we better try and catch her up,’ he said with an effort. ‘Don’t seem right to leave a woman footin’ by herself.’
‘She said she’d be all right. To tell you she’s got some money.’
But Snow was hurrying Don in a manner that set the van creaking and groaning. Jimmy looked at his father sideways.
‘I can stay, Dad?’ he asked anxiously. ‘You won’t go sending me back?’
‘You can stay, son, I guess, if your damn mother don’t put the police on me for having you; we’ll get along.’ He was peering ahead as though he expected to see the little, thin figure of the Stray around every new angle of the road.
‘She’s a nice lady,’ Jimmy said presently.
‘She ain’t no lady,’ Snow grunted; but his tone was not one of reproof.
With all the pain of the sharp pebbles on her broken shoes and broken blisters, the Stray was plodding on; and she was, much to her own surprise, neither sad nor down-hearted. When it grew dark she might feel afraid, but the bitter afternoon held for her a strange exhilaration. At the last moment she had abandoned all her plans. She had left Jimmy — impatient, eager Jimmy — to walk back to meet his father alone. She had gone on, to what destination she did not know, but with a new confidence in herself. She was not going to let Snow think she would be a drag on him. If a man didn’t want her, she wouldn’t be hanging round him; and thinking it over, she had come to the conclusion that Snow would be happy alone with Jimmy.
The Battlers Page 27