‘I guess I can battle for meself,’ she had said stoutly, but rather uncertainly. She would not be afraid. She sang to herself, a little discordantly, a scrap of a tune remembered from some past age of reluctant and compulsory church-going: ‘How beautiful, how beautiful upon the mountains …’ Over and over again she sang it. She did not know any more, but it seemed to her a very fitting tune: ‘How beautiful, how beautiful upon the mountains.’
Between two high-rolling masses of purple vapour that menaced the afternoon with more rain, a weak shaft of sunlight struck down, as though powerless to bless, but willing. It laid its light across the long curves of wooded hills; the ploughed, dark fields; the green slopes, scattered with grey granite boulders; and on the figure of the Stray limping along by herself.
She came round a bend where before her the road wound down and down, and then up the ample curves and swellings of another hill that soon she must climb. The Stray stopped to stare:
‘ ’Strufe!’ she said admiringly.
Through the rift in the clouds the sunlight poured down and lit the nearby hills, leaving those behind in a dimness of shadow; and in the flare of that light the hills showed a mass of purple flowers, a carpet of them, a brilliant torrent of flowers, pouring down the side of the road in colours of crimson and blue mauve, violet and opal, opening curious throated bells like snapdragons. They rushed up the far hill, overpowering everything — the paddocks, the pasture, the roadside grass. It was as though the clouds had rained crimson and blue and it had mingled in an indelible dye.
The Stray sat down on a rock and loosed her unwieldy pack. She simply sat and looked at the flowers. She also nursed her feet thoughtfully. ‘I won’t forget,’ she thought gravely. ‘Not even when I’m old.’ Two nails had worked through the heel of her left shoe, but only part of her took note of it. She was busy glancing about, drinking in the shades of crimson and purple; pleasure and weariness making her a little unsteady, as though this beauty were some dangerous red wine. ‘I won’t forget,’ she repeated. ‘When I get back to Sydney, I’ll have this left.’ If she had never come out on the track, she would never have seen this unknown flower flaunting its colours over miles of hilly ground.
She was still sitting there in a half daze as Snow and Jimmy and the turnout came clopping round the bend of the road.
‘Get up,’ Snow commanded accusingly, sternly, as though she had done him some wrong.
‘We seen you,’ Jimmy remarked. ‘And we shouted and waved and you didn’t take no notice.’
‘You got the staggers like an old horse,’ Snow remarked, as she settled into place between them. ‘Sittin’ down every few yards.’ His tone was censorious, as though she had, by her very sluggishness, forced him to overtake her. ‘What was yer sittin’ there for?’
‘I was looking at them flowers.’ The Stray had hardly greeted him. ‘What they called?’ She waved her hand at the purple flowers.
Snow gave them a disparaging glance. ‘Paterson’s Curse,’ he announced gloomily.
‘Geeze, it’s pretty!’
‘That’s you all over.’ Snow was determined to find fault. ‘It’s a bloody weed. Sit there gawping at a weed that’s driven many a man off his land. Ain’t no use burnin’ it.’ He was rather glad to have something to talk about besides the fact that they were there together again, sitting in the old van, just as they had sat many times. ‘Some farmer’s daughter went out and picked a bunch of the stuff. Brought it home to stick in a vase. Chucked it out when it wilted, and of course it sprouts up lively. Next thing they knew they was fightin’ it like it was a fire. Ends by drivin’ them off the place.’
The flowers flared up from the ground unconquerable. The unrepentant gaiety of the weed, the burning blues and crimsons, set the hills glowing.
‘It’s a plant that’s struck it lucky,’ the Stray said thoughtfully. ‘It hasn’t got no right, but it’s there.’
Oh! she was glad that she had come out into the country. She could never otherwise have seen the weed that ruined a land royally and like an army with a million bugles blowing. She would never have heard the lambs crying to the ewes; limping on white, bent legs, like four props that might buckle under them; trotting along painfully like a girl in high-heeled shoes.
The rain was sweeping towards them over the tree-tops that thinly covered the crest of the rise ahead. With the rain came a sigh, as though the suspense of cold and waiting had been lifted. Soon it would be dark, and the rain would possess all; soaking the cracked, yellow lips of the creeks afresh; running along the sharp ridges of the road. The rain was coming down the slope as though it fought the flowers; as though its grey could beat out the crimson flare and wipe the purple stain into oblivion, into the mud. But under the lash of the heavy drops the flowers swayed undaunted and remained.
‘Five miles to Crookwell,’ Snow observed gloomily. ‘An’ rainin’ like hell; and you sit gawping at the worst sort of land a man ever had the hard luck to farm! I ain’t sorry for cockies as a rule, but I’m sorry for the poor bastard’s got that land.’
‘If you give me a lift into Crookwell, Snow,’ the Stray suggested humbly, ‘I can get along all right by meself.’
Snow gave her a long glance. She had not altered much. Her fair hair lay lank about her face, and her blue eyes were as big, as startling as ever. But, he supposed, he must have got used to her, or something, for the sight of her made him happy.
‘Of all the warby ideas,’ he said, and in spite of the rain and the prospect of a wet camp, in spite of everything, he was smiling at her, ‘the warbiest is you going on your own. I guess Jimmy and me can give you a lift down to Orion for the cherry-pickin’. What say, Jimmy?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jimmy proudly. ‘We don’t mind another one.’ He was not jealous of Dancy. He was rather proud of her as his own find.
‘Suit yourself,’ Snow went on casually. ‘We ain’t no bed of roses, me an’ Jimmy, but, I guess, Stray, you know what you’re in for. Take it or leave it.’
The Stray was unwontedly humble. ‘I learnt how to make jug-covers, Snowy,’ she suggested. ‘I can fake jug-covers round the towns and make a bit that way. And I’ve still got the money for the horse. Jimmy and me didn’t spend no more than seven bob. But I ain’t goin’ to have you sayin’ I shoved in on you. You’ve got Jimmy.’
‘Ar, don’t be a bloody mug,’ Snow said warmly.
And Jimmy echoed: ‘Don’t you be a mug, Dance.’
And, to her intense astonishment, Snow, the undemonstrative and laconic Snow, put one arm round her thin shoulders. Jimmy, sitting proud and possessive on her other side, no less warmly put his arm round her waist.
‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll look after you.’
The Stray was quite overcome. There were tears in her eyes. ‘’Strufe!’ she said, gulping a little. ‘I won’t be no trouble, Snow. I can battle …’
‘Shut up,’ Snow said, not unkindly. ‘We got to camp before dark.’
19
I
The cherries that year were early. By the end of October word was travelling along the roads that the cherries in Orion were early, and towards Orion there began a gradual drift of tiny specks of flotsam and jetsam; tiny, isolated smuts that the road carried as an eddy of slow air might carry soot. The pickers were coming in answer to that mysterious telegraph. They came from the city, stripling boys, men and women; from the farms of the district around; south from Victoria; north from Queensland. They were all classes; all breeds; all tongues; all drawn by one thought: to earn money — money that meant so many fulfilled hopes, so much freedom, so much of added life. Only to get a job, only to join with other men and women in the great moment when silver passed from someone’s hand to their own hardened palms!
Some carelessly, some anxiously, they strained towards Orion, the rich town, the fruitful town coming to harvest. They came laboriously and by many ways; and most of them from dole-station to dole-station. Burnt black by the sun, grimly trudging, pedall
ing their bicycles, whipping up the lean horses, cranking the old trucks! The great wide country tossed along from crest to crest with a little foam of trees on their tops. Sometimes the brown-green waves of fields seemed to rear and topple as a great breaker rears on the shore. From under the enormous heads of the Apennines, mile after mile of vertical sheer so steep that only clouds climbed there, over the roaring hills that sweep up to break against Canobolas, came the pickers, breasting towards the deep, green pools of country where tree-tops swayed in an underseas peace fathoms down.
To stand on the smooth, high, green hills and gaze down on Orion was to look on a curve of rich land where the Lamb River flowed almost in a semi-circle. In the old days, the gold-miner had scooped out great shallow patches and holes from the yellow earth; and the deep hole in which Orion lay might have been just such another claim where a gold-seeking giant had dipped his dish and rinsed the riches of the river and splashed them over the hills. For this was not a ‘dead’ gold town as so many old towns were dead. From the chequered roofs by the silver creek Orion flowed up in a mass of living green. Here were some of the biggest cherry orchards in the world; peach orchards; apples, oranges, figs, grapes, all growing side by side. The regular green stripes of the orchard trees followed the slopes; patches of green peas and wheat, of clover, all the riches of the earth brimmed from that bowl in the hills.
It was not perhaps only the lure of quick ready money that turned the sunburnt, hopeless stream of landless men towards Orion. Here, at the cherry-picking, life quickened, if not into a harvest song, at least into a whirl of dancing, drinking, love-making and fighting, that made the year-round inhabitants of the town raise their eyes to Heaven. A little sourly they regarded this yearly influx of lawless persons and the riot they brewed; but, being God-fearing farmers who plugged on season after season, always moaning about their losses and envying the man next door, they did not blame the pickers as much as they blamed Waldo. And they were right.
The reason why life moved to a different tempo in Orion was all Waldo’s doing. Vladimir Waldo had for the past fifty years occupied in the town the same function that a mediaeval baron might have filled in that unpronounceable town of Central Europe from which Waldo had arisen in the dim past before he burst on Orion. If one citizen met another in the main street, he would be sure to ask: ‘Have you heard the latest about Waldo?’ With his flaring black moustaches, his flaring temperament, Waldo at the age of seventy was as vital as he had been at sixteen, still as ready to beat his breast, to dance, to drink, to offer a fight. He was so immensely rich, so violent, so hard-working, strange and friendly, that he was not only the town’s outstanding citizen, but its favourite sport. Without Waldo, Orion would have lost its individuality. The richness of his spirit was its richness. The violent, living green, striped so tidily up-hill, had something of his overflowing exuberance and his peasant shrewdness.
His nine sons, each with a separate orchard on neighbouring hills, formed a local bodyguard for the old man. They were all sandy and drawling and Australian, and had more of the Jones in them than the Waldo blood. But they managed their sire almost as well as their mother did, and she was the restraining power of the family. They soothed Waldo’s labour force; they settled his quarrels and strikes; they protected him from the results of both his benevolence and his cheese-paring meanness.
There was never any trouble about getting labour at Waldo’s; the thing was to keep it. Just as there are hilltops where the tempests brew when all the land is quiet, so there are human beings who are a magnet peak for emotional violence. Fights would break out, strikes start at Waldo’s when there was peace everywhere else. And just as the turbulent throng would be shouldering its belongings and marching off four abreast down the road, there would be Jim or Bill Waldo dashing after them in a car, arguing, chaffing, exhorting until the pickers came streaming back, laughing and calling like so many children. At night mandolins and mouth-organs would set the air above the orchards quivering, and the singing and dancing and shouting would mount to bacchic heights.
‘I wonder that any respectable girl will pack for Waldo,’ one acid farmer’s wife would comment to another. ‘It’s disgraceful the way they rush to get on in his shed, rather than come to a nice quiet place like ours. I don’t know what girls are coming to.’
But the thoughts of girls have never notably turned to opportunities for quiet retirement. Cherry-picking meant men, young men, strange men with merry, sunburnt faces, and feet for dancing and money to spend. Would a girl with any life in her stay muffled up away from the jokes and music, the rude courtship and quick glances, the opportunities of revelry? To hell with the Church social or the Aunts’ Union! Let them talk! October, November … the smell of ripening oats and ripening fruit, of orange blossom and briar rose, the beautiful, beautiful brim of the year; who would waste so precious a chance, to dull and dwindle in the small-farm round where fathers and brothers talked of the coating of sheep-troughs and new fertiliser? Never! A girl could earn money for herself packing cherries, money of her own, live a life of her own. The best ‘facers’ went to the big orchards.
It was as though the red bubbles swelling on the green boughs of the cherry trees were hope, and hope not only for the young, but something that even the oldest and most broken swag, crouched over his tiny fire on the empty plains, could feel like the spring weather warming the rheumatism out of joints stiff from poor food and cold camps. The pinched minds of the travellers expanded to the beckoning promise. There was not one of those hundreds making their way, singly, in groups, or in little families, along the road who had not innumerable plans ready for fulfilment the moment he or she could ‘snatch some cherries.’
Darkie and his mate Jim, as they pedalled their bicycles sturdily against a gritty head wind, disputed the need of lights for the bicycles against the more dazzling prospect of laying in a stock of articles to hawk from door to door. The Dogger, Snake, Uncle and Angus had various views on the uses to which cherry-picking money could be put. The Scotsman and Dogger yearned to send to Sydney for pamphlets ‘exposing’ such institutions as the landed oligarchy, the steel combine, the sugar combine, the oil, tin, rubber and other assorted combines. Snake, that tall, fair, weedy youth, was wondering if he might not send home some money to his mother. She needed it badly enough. Uncle’s hopes extended no higher than a pair of new boots, and, perhaps, a few shillings to carry him on. He was a singularly quiet and dignified old man, his quietness perhaps due to his association with Angus, but his dignity was an integral part of himself. From Orange came the Tyrells, quarrelling among themselves because Mrs Tyrell wanted to stay in Orange and Dick wanted to go to Bathurst, where lived one of the several young ladies on whom he had set his heart. From the west, Miss Phipps and the busker, unknown to each other, were converging on Orion, Miss Phipps in the back of a bottle-oh’s van, and the busker in the front seat of a comfortable sedan.
Through Wombat, Snow’s brown van rolled patient and slow; Jimmy, Snow and the Stray walking behind it, because they had picked up a man and his wife whose feet were so broken and blistered that they could walk no farther. Beside the van waddled a lean old dog keeping a careful eye on Bluey. It was the dog who had prevented the footsore couple from getting a lift before. Car drivers looked askance at dogs who scratched their leather upholstery; but: ‘Buggered if we’re goin’ to leave old Joe at home, if we have to walk every inch of the way. Nine years he’s been with us, and we won’t ditch him now. Four times we’ve walked out of Sydney with not even a blanket, but we’ve never left old Joe.’ The O’Briens had been going to Wagga, but Orion, forty miles out of their way, was the nearest dole-station. ‘And anyway, we might get a married couple’s job in Orion, if we don’t get on picking.’
For them all — for the Tyrells, the O’Briens, for the Littles, for every one of those anonymous atoms drawing towards Orion — the hope was there, glad, courageous, singing above the anxiety and desperation that so miserably encompassed them. The promi
sed land of plenty lay before, the golden bowl brimming to their lips. ‘Why, a real good picker might make a pound a day and more!’
This fabulous wealth, if they could clutch only a moiety of it, was no fairy gold. It represented solid things like meat and shoe-leather, a new wheel for the van, drink, tobacco, tools or harness.
‘If I got a job pickin’,’ the Stray asked anxiously of Snow, ‘d’you think I’d make enough to get me teef?’ For the money from the sale of Horehound had by this time dwindled to vanishing point.
‘Enough teeth for you and a team of draughts,’ Snow assured her magnificently, although an unskilled picker seldom made more than a few shillings a day.
Through the gentle October weather, that was by day mellow and by night a concourse of great stars, the wage-hungry horde of humanity swept down on Orion, scrutinising critically the laden boughs of the orchards, settling in side lanes and little plots of waste land, rubbing shoulders with other travellers, making friends, begging, finding water, gathering scraps of firewood, turning out the horse to feed, getting drunk, fighting and generally settling in to wait until the cherries should be ripe.
II
Among those who were heading towards Orion was a large, stout man in a big green car, an imposing and vigorous man. As he drove he hummed absent-mindedly under his breath, for he had a hard job ahead of him. His duty it was to convince all those hundreds of pickers that they could not touch a single cherry, that their best interests lay in turning their backs on Orion, penniless as they had come, and going somewhere, anywhere else. It rested with this large, stout personage, soon to become so important in the lives of all the travellers, to lay the Union taboo on every cherry within many miles of Orion, to blight not only the cherry crop, but all the pickers’ hopes. Men have descended into the dens of raging lions, but they did not hum under their breath as did this astonishing man, Christopher Crane. With his mind full of leaflets and the hiring of a hall and meetings and plans for feeding strikers, with the snarling face of enmity, abuse and defeat confronting him, he hummed almost casually as he whirled his chariot of judgment upon the stiff-necked ranks of the orchardists.
The Battlers Page 28