Jack was amused by the odd, humorous expression of the young bush-farmers. Joe Low, scratching his head funnily, said: "I'll put the pot on, if you'll cook the stew." But the most approved proposal was that of a well-to-do young farmer who is now a J. P. and head of a prosperous family.
"Me ol' dad an' me ol' lady, they never had no daughters. They gettin' on well in years, and they kind o' fancy one. I've gotter get 'em one, quick an' lively. I've fifteen head o' cattle an' seventy-six sheep, eighteen pigs an' a fallowin' sow. I've got one hundred an' ninety-nine acres o' cleared land, and ten improved with fruit trees. I've got forty ducks an' hens an' a flock o' geese an' no one home to feed 'em. Meet me Sunday mornin' eight-forty sharp at the cross roads, an' I'll be there in me old sulky to drive y'out an' show y'."
And the girl in pink with the wide smile, answered seriously:
"I will if Mother'll let me, Mr. Burton."
The next girl had been looming up like a big coal-barge. She was a half-caste, of course named Lily, and she sat aggressively forwards, her long elbows and wrists much in evidence, and her pleasant swarthy face alight and eager with anticipation. Oh, these Missioner half-castes!
Jack ordered Easu forward.
But Easu was not to be baited. He strode over, put his hand on the fuzzy head, and said in his strong voice:
"Hump y'r bluey and come home."
The laugh was with him, he had won again.
III
They went down to the cold collation. There Jack found other arrivals. Mary had come in via York with Gran's spinster daughters. Also the Greenlow girls from away back, and they made a great fuss of him. The doctor too turned up. He had been missing all day, but now he strolled back and forth, chatting politely first to one and then another, but vague and washed-out to a degree.
Jack's anger coiled to rest at the supper, for Monica was very attentive to him. She sat next to him, found him the best pieces, and shared her glass with him, in her quick, dangerous, generous fashion, looking up at him with strange wide looks of offering, so that he felt very manly and very shy at the same time. But very glad to be near her. He felt that it was his spell that was upon her, after all, and though he didn't really like flirting with her there in the public supper room, he loved her hand finding his under the cover of her sash, and her fingers twining into his as if she were entering into his body. Safely under the cover of her silk sash. He would have liked to hold her again, close, close; her agile, live body, quick as a cat's. She was mysterious to him as some cat-goddess, and she excited him in a queer electric fashion.
But soon she was gone again, elusive as a cat. And of course she was in great request. So Jack found himself talking to the little elderly Mary, with her dark animal's museau. Mary was like another kind of cat: not the panther sort, but the quiet, dark, knowing sort. She was comfortable to talk to, also soft and stimulating.
Jack and Mary sat on the edge of the barn, in the hot night, looking at the trees against the strange, ragged southern sky, hearing the frogs occasionally, and fighting the mosquitoes. Mrs. Ellis also sat on the ledge not far off. And presently Jack and Mary were joined by the doctor. Then came Grace and Alec Rice, sitting a little further down, and talking in low tones. The night seemed full of low, half-mysterious talking, in a starry darkness that seemed pregnant with the scent and presence of the black people. Jack often wondered why, in the night, the country still seemed to belong to the black people, with their strange, big, liquid eyes.
Where was Easu? Was he talking to Monica? Or to the black half-caste Lily? It might as well be the one as the other. The odd way he had placed his hand on Lily's black fuzzy head, as if he were master, and she a sort of concubine. She would give him all the submission he wanted.
But then, why Monica? Monica in her white, full-skirted frock with its moulded bodice, her slender, golden-white arms and throat! Why Monica in the same class with the half-caste Lily?
Anger against Easu was sharpening Jack's wits, and curiously detaching him from his surroundings. He listened to the Australian voices and the Australian accent around him. The careless, slovenly speech in the uncontrolled, slack, caressive voices. At first he had thought the accent awful. And it was awful. But gradually, as he got into the rhythm of the people, he began even to sympathise with "Kytie" instead of "Katie." There was an abandon in it all—an abandon of restrictions and confining control. Why have control? Why have authority? Why not let everybody do as they liked? Why not?
That was what Australia was for, a careless freedom. An easy, unrestricted freedom. At least out in the bush. Every man to do as he liked. Easu to run round with Monica, or with the black Lily, or to kick Jack's shins in the dance.
Yes, even this. But Jack had scored it up. He was going to have his own back on Easu. He thought of Easu with his hand on the black girl's fuzzy head. That would be just like Easu. And afterwards to want Monica. And Monica wouldn't really mind about the black girl. Since Easu was Easu.
Sitting there on the barn ledge, Jack in a vague way understood it all. And in a vague way tolerated it all. But with a dim yet fecund germ of revenge in his heart. He was not morally shocked. But he was going to be revenged. He did not mind Easu's running with a black girl, and afterwards Monica. Morally he did not mind it. But physically—perhaps pride of race—he minded. Physically he could never go so far as to lay his hand on the darky's fuzzy head. His pride of blood was too intense.
He had no objection at all to Lily, until it came to actual physical contact. And then his blood recoiled with old haughtiness and pride of race. It was bad enough to have to come into contact with a woman of his own race: to have to give himself away even so far. The other was impossible.
And yet he wanted Monica. But he knew she was fooling round with Easu. So deep in his soul formed the motive of revenge.
There are times when a flood of realisation and purpose sweeps through a man. This was one of Jack's times. He was not definitely conscious of what he realised and of what he purposed. Yet, there it was, resolved in him.
He was trying not to hear Dr. Rackett's voice talking to Mary. Even Dr. Rackett was losing his Oxford drawl, and taking on some of the Australian ding-dong. But Rackett, like Jack, was absolutely fixed in his pride of race, no matter what extraneous vice he might have. Jack had a vague idea it was opium. Some chemical stuff.
". . . free run of old George's books? I should say it was a doubtful privilege for a young lady. But you hardly seem to belong to West Australia. I think England is really your place. Do you actually want to belong, may I ask?"
"To Western Australia? To the country, yes, very much. I love the land, the country life, Dr. Rackett. I don't care for the social life of a town like Perth. But I should like to live all my life on a farm—in the bush."
"Would you now!" said Rackett. "I wonder where you get that idea from. You are the granddaughter of an earl."
"Oh, my grandfather is farther away from me than the moon. You would never know how far!" laughed Mary. "No, I am colonial born and bred. Though of course there is a fascination about the English. But I hardly knew Papa. He was a tenth child, so there wasn't much of the earldom left to him. And then he was a busy A. D. C. to the Governor-General. And he married quite late in life. And then Mother died when I was little, and I got passed on to Aunt Matilda. Mother was Australian born. I don't think there is much English in me."
Mary said it in a queer complacent way, as if there were some peculiar, subtle antagonism between England and the colonial, and she was ranged on the colonial side. As if she were a subtle enemy of the father, the English father in her.
"Queer! Queer thing to me!" said Rackett, as if he half felt the antagonism. For he would never be colonial, not if he lived another hundred years in Australia. "I suppose," he added, pointing his pipe stem upwards, "it comes from those unnatural stars up there. I always feel they are doing something to me."
"I don't think it's the stars," laughed Mary. "I am just Australian, in the biggest part of me, that's all."
Jack could feel in the statement some of the antagonism that burned in his own heart, against his own country, his own father, his own empty fate at home.
"If I'd been born in this country, I'd stick to it," he broke in.
"But since you weren't born in it, what will you do, Grant?" asked the doctor ironically.
"Stick to myself," said Jack stubbornly, rather sulkily.
"You won't stick to Old England then?" asked Rackett.
"Seems I'm a misfit in Old England," said Jack. "And I'm not going to squeeze my feet into tight boots."
Rackett laughed.
"Rather go barefoot like Lennie?" he laughed.
Jack relapsed into silence, and turned a deaf ear, looking into the alien night of the southern hemisphere. And having turned a deaf ear to Rackett and Mary, he heard, as if by divination, the low voice of Alec Rice proposing in real earnest to Grace: proposing in a low, urgent voice that sounded like a conspiracy.
He rose to go away. But Mary laid a detaining hand on his arm, as if she wished to include him in the conversation, and did not wish to be left alone with Dr. Rackett.
"Don't you sympathise with me, Jack, for wishing I had been a boy, to make my own way in the world, and have my own friends, and size things up for myself?"
"Seems to me you do size things up for yourself," said Jack rather crossly. "A great deal more than most men do."
"Yes, but I can't do things as I could if I were a man."
"What can a man do, then, more than a woman—that's worth doing?" asked Rackett.
"He can see the world, and love as he wishes to love, and work."
"No man can love as he wishes to love," said Rackett. "He's nearly always stumped, in the love game."
"But he can choose!" persisted Mary.
And Jack with his other ear was hearing Alec Rice's low voice persisting.
"Go on, Grace, you're not too young. You're just right. You're just the ticket now. Go on, let's be engaged and tell your Dad and fix it up. We're meant for one another, you know we are. Don't you think we're meant for one another?"
"I never thought about it that way, truly."
"But don't you think so now? Yes, you do."
Silence—the sort that gives consent. And the silence of a young, spontaneous embrace.
Jack was on tenterhooks. He wanted to be gone. But Mary was persisting, in her obstinate voice—he wished she'd shut up too.
"I wanted to be a sailor at ten, and an explorer at twelve. At nineteen I wanted to become a painter of wonderful pictures." Jack wished she wouldn't say all this. "And then I had' a streak of humility, and wanted to be a gardener. Yet——" she laughed, "not a sort of gardener such as Aunt Matilda hires. I wanted to grow things and see them come up out of the earth. And see baby chicks hatched, and calves and lambs born."
She had lifted her hand from Jack's sleeve, to his relief.
"And marry a farmer like Tom," he said roughly. Mary received this with dead silence.
"And drudge your soul away like Mrs. Ellis," said Rackett. "Worn out before your time, between babies and heavy housework. Groping on the earth all your life, grinding yourself into ugliness at work which some animal of a servant-lass would do with half the effort. Don't you think of it, Miss Mary. Let the servant-lasses marry the farmers. You've got too much in you. Don't go and have what you've got in you trampled out of you by marrying some cocky farmer. Tom's as good as gold, but he wants a brawny lass of his own sort for a wife. You be careful, Miss Mary. Women can find themselves in ugly harness, out here in these god-forsaken colonies. Worse harness than any you've ever kicked against."
Monica seemed to have scented the tense atmosphere under the barn, for she appeared like a young witch, in a whirlwind.
"Hullo, Mary! Hullo, Dr. Rackett! It's just on midnight." And she flitted over to Grace. "Just on midnight, Grace and Alec. Are you coming? You seem as if you were fixed here."
"We're not fixed on the spot, but we're fixed up all right, otherwise," said Alec, in a slight tone of resentment, as he rose from Grace's side.
"Oh, have you and Grace fixed it up!" exclaimed Monica, with a false vagueness and innocence. "I'm awfully glad. I'm awfully glad, Grace."
"I am," said Grace, with a faint touch of resentment, and she rose and took Alec's arm.
They were already like a married couple armed against that witch. Had she been flirting with Alec, and then pushed him over on to Grace? Jack sensed it with the sixth sense which divines these matters.
Monica appeared at his side.
"It's just twelve. Come and hold my hand in the ring. Mary can hold your other hand. Come on! Come on, Alec, as well. I don't want any strangers next to me to-night."
Jack smiled sardonically to himself as she impulsively caught hold of his hand. Monica was "a circumstance over which we have no control," Lennie said. Jack felt that he had a certain control.
They all took hands as she directed, and moved into the barn to link up with the rest of the chain. There in the soft light of the big chamber, Easu suddenly appeared, without collar or cravat, his hair ruffled, his white suit considerably creased. But he lurched up in his usual aggressive way, with his assertive good humour, demanding to break in between Jack and Monica. Jack held on, and Monica said:
"You mustn't break in, you know it makes enemies."
"Does it!" grinned Easu. And with sardonic good humour he lurched away to an unjoined part of the ring. He carried about with him a sense of hostile power. But Jack was learning to keep within himself another sort of power, small and concentrated and fixed like a stone, the sort of power that ultimately would break through the bulk of Easu's domineering.
The ring complete at last, they all began to sing: "Cheer, Boys, Cheer!" and "God Bless the Prince of Wales, John Brown's Body," and "Britons, Never, Never, Never."
Then Easu bawled: "Midnight!" There was a moment's frightened pause. Joe Low blasted on the cornet, his toe beating time madly all the while. Fiddles, whistles, concertinas, Jew's harps raggedly began to try out the tune. The clasped hands began to rock, and taking Easu's shouting lead, they all began to sing, in the ring:
"Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
An' never brought to min'?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?
"For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet
For days of auld lang syne."
They all sang heartily and with feeling. There was a queer Scottish tang in the colony, that made the Scottish emotion dominant. Jack disliked it. There was no auld acquaintance, or auld lang syne, at least for him. And he didn't care for these particular cups of kindness, in one ring with Easu, black Lily, Dr. Rackett and Monica, and all. He didn't like the chain of emotion and supposed pathetic clanship. It was worse here even than on shipboard.
Why start the New Year like this? As a matter of fact he wanted to forget most of his own Auld Acquaintance, and start something a little different. And any rate, the emotion was spurious, the chain was artificial, the flow was false.
Monica seemed to take a wicked pleasure in it, and sang more emotionally than anybody, in a sweet but smallish voice. And poor little Mary, with her half-audible murmur, had her eyes full of tears and seemed so moved.
Auld lang syne!
Old Long Since.
Why not put it in plain English?
IV
The celebration did not end with Auld Lang Syne. By half-past two most of the ladies had retired, though some ardent dancers still footed the floor, and a chaperone or two, like crumpled rag-bags, slept on their boxes. A good number of young men and boys were asleep with Herbert on the sacks, handkerchiefs knotted round their throats in place of collars. The concertina, the cornet, the fiddles and the rest of the band had gone down to demolish the remains of the cold collation, whilst Tom, Ross, and Ned sat on the barn step singing as uproariously as they could, though a little hoarse, for the last dancers to dance to. Someone was whistling very sweetly.
Where was Easu? Jack wondered as he wandered aimlessly out into the night. Where was Easu? For Jack had it on his mind that he ought to fight him. Felt he would be a coward if he didn't tackle him this very night.
But it was three o'clock, the night was very still and rich, still warm, rather close, but not oppressive. The strange heaviness of the hot summer night, with the stars thick in clouds and clusters overhead, the moon being gone. Jack strayed aimlessly through the motionless, dark, warm air, till he came to the paddock gate, and there he leaned with his chin on his arms, half asleep. It seemed to be growing cooler, and a dampness was bringing out the scent of the scorched grass, the essence of the earth, like incense. There was a half-wild bush with a few pale pink roses near the gate. He could just get their fragrance. If it were as it should be, Monica would be here, in one of her wistful, her fiercely wistful moments! When she looked at him with her yellow eyes and her fierce, naive look of yearning, he was ready to give all his blood to her. If things were as they should be, she would be clinging to him now like that, and nestling against his breast. If things were as they should be!
He didn't want to go to sleep. He wanted what he wanted. He wanted the night, the young, changeable, yearning Monica, and an answer to his own awake young blood. He insisted on it. He would not go to sleep, he would insist on an answer. And he wanted to fight Easu. He ought to fight Easu. His manhood depended on it.
He could hear the cattle stirring down the meadow. Soon it would begin to be day. What was it now? It was night, dark night towards morning, with a faint breathing of air from the sea. And where was he? He was in Australia, leaning on the paddock gate and seeing the stars and the dim shape of the gum-tree. There was a faint scent of eucalyptus in the night. His mother was far away. England was far away. He was alone there leaning on the paddock gate, in Australia.
After all, perhaps the very best thing was to be alone. Better even than having Monica or fighting Easu. Because where you are alone you are at one with your own God. The spirit in you is God in you. And when you are alone you are one with the spirit of God inside you. Other people are chiefly an interruption.
And moreover, he could never say he was lonely while he was at Wandoo, while there were Tom and Lennie, and Monica, and all the rest. He hoped he would have them all his life. He hoped he would never, in all his life, say good-bye to them.
No, he would take up land as near this homestead as possible and build a brick house on it. And he would have a number of fine horses, better than anyone else's, and some sheep that would pay, and a few cows. Always milk and butter with the wheat-meal damper.
What was that? Only a more-pork. He laid his head on his arms again, on the gate. He wanted a place of his own, now. He would have it now if he had any money. And marry Monica. Would he marry Monica? Would he marry anybody? He much preferred the whole family. But he wanted a place of his own. If he could hurry up his father. And old Mr. George. He might persuade Mr. George to be on his side. Why was there never any money? No money! A father ought to have some money for a son.
What was that? He saw a dim white figure stealing across the near distance. Pah! must have been a girl sitting out under the photosphorum tree. When he had thought he was quite alone.
The thought upset him. And he ought to find Easu. Obstinately he insisted to himself that he ought to find Easu.
He drifted towards the shed near the cubby, where Mr. Ellis kept the tools. Somebody unknown and unauthorised had put a barrel of beer inside the shed. Men were there drinking, as he knew they would be.
"Have a pot, youngster?"
"Thanks."
He sat down on a case beside the door, and drank the rather warm beer. His head began to drop. He knew he was almost asleep.
Easu loomed up from the dark, coatless, hatless, with his shirt front open, asking for a drink. He was thirsty. Easu was thirsty. How could you be angry with a thirsty man! And he wasn't so bad after all. No, Easu wasn't so bad after all! What did it matter! What did it all matter, anyhow?
Jack slipped to the ground and lay there fast asleep.
CHAPTER X
SHADOWS BEFORE
I
But in the morning memory was back, and the unquenched smouldering of passion. Easu had insulted him. Easu had insulted him, and that should never be forgiven. And he had this new, half painful, more than half painful desire to see Monica, to be near her, to touch her hand; a sort of necessity upon him all the while which he was not used to. It made him restless, uneasy, and for the first time in his life, a little melancholy. He was used to feeling angry: a steady, almost blithe sort of anger. And beyond that he had always been able to summon up an indifference to things, cover them with oblivion: to retreat upon himself and insulate himself from contact.
Now he could no longer do this, and it fretted him, made him accessible to melancholy. The hot, hot January days, all dry flaming heat, and flies, and mosquitoes, passed over him leaving him strange even to himself. There was work, the drudging work of the farm, all the while. And one just sweated. He learned to submit to it, to the sweating all the time during the day, and the mosquitoes at night. It was like a narcotic. The old, English alertness grew darker and darker. He seemed to be moving, a dim consciousness and an unyielding will, in a dark cloud of heat, in a perspiring, dissolving body. He could feel his body, the English cool body of his being, slowly melting down and being invaded by a new tropical quality. Sometimes, he said to himself, he was sweating his soul away. That was how it felt: as if he were sweating his soul away. And he let his soul go, let it slowly melt away out of his wet, hot body.
Any man who has been in the tropics, unless he has kept all his mind and his consciousness focussed homewards, fixed towards the old people of home, will know how this feels. Now Jack did not turn homewards, back to England. He never wanted to go back. There was in him a slow, abiding anger against this same "home." Therefore he let himself go down the dark tide of the heat. He did not cling on to his old English soul, the soul of an English gentleman. He let that dissolve out of him, leaving what residuum of a man it might leave. But out of very obstinacy he hung on to his own integrity: a small, dark, obscure integrity.
Usually he was too busy perspiring, panting, and working to think about anything. His mind also seemed dissolving away in perspiration and in the curious eucalyptus solvent of the Australian air. He was too busy and too much heat-oppressed even to think of Monica or of Easu, though Monica was a live wire in his body. Only on Sundays he seemed to come half out of his trance. And then everything went queer and strange, a little uncanny.
Dad was back again for the harvest, but his heart was no better, and a queer frightening cloud seemed over him. And Gran, they said, was failing. Somehow Gran was the presiding deity of the house. Her queer spirit controlled, even now. And she was failing. She adored Lennie, but he was afraid of her.
"Gran's the limit," he asserted. "She's that wilful. Always the same with them women when they gets well on in years. I clear out from her if I can, she's that obstropulous—tells y't'wipe y'nose, pull up y'pants, brush y'teeth, not sniff: golly, I can't stand it!"
Sunday was the day when you really came into contact with the family. The rule was, that each one took it in turns to get up and make breakfast, while everybody else stayed on in bed, for a much-needed rest. If it was your turn, you rolled out of bed at dawn when Timothy banged on the wall, you slipped on your shirt and pants and went to the "everlasting" fire. Raking the ashes together with a handful of sticks, you blew a blaze and once more smelt the burning eucalyptus leaves. You filled the black iron kettle at the pump, and set it over the flame. Then you washed yourself. After which you carved bread and butter: tiny bits for Gran, moderate pieces for upstairs, and doorsteps for the cubby. After which you made the tea, and holloa'd! while you poured it out. One of the girls, with a coat over her nighty and her hair in a chignon, would come barefoot to carry the trays, to Gran and to the upstairs. This was just the preliminary breakfast: the Sunday morning luxury. Just tea in bed.
Later the boys were shouting for clean shirts and towels, and the women were up. Proceeded the hair-cutting, nail-paring, button-sewing, and general murmur, all under the supervision of Ma. Then down to the sand-bagged pool for a dip. After which, clean and in clean raiment, you went to the parlour to hear Dad read the lessons.
The family Bible was carefully kept warm in the parlour, during the week, under a woollen crochet mat. A crochet mat above, and a crochet mat below. Nothing must ever stand on that book, nothing whatever. The children were quite superstitious about it.
Lennie, the Benjamin of his father Jacob, each Sunday went importantly into the drawing-room, in a semi-religious silence, and fetched the ponderous brass-bound book. He put it on the table in front of Dad. Gran came in with her stick and her lace cap, and sat in the arm-chair near the window. Mrs. Ellis and the children folded their hands like saints. Mr. Ellis wiped his spectacles, cleared his throat, looked again at the little church calendar of the lessons, found the place, and proceeded in a droning voice. Nobody looked at him, except Mrs. Ellis. Everybody looked another way. Gran usually gazed sideways at the floor. Tick, tock! went the clock. It was a little eternity.
Jack knew the Bible pretty well, as a well-brought-up nephew of his Aunts. He had no objection to the Bible. On the contrary it supplied his imagination with a chief stock of images, his ear with the greatest solemn pleasure of words, and his soul with a queer heterogeneous ethic. He never really connected the Bible with Christianity proper, the Christianity of Aunts and clergymen. He had no use for Christianity proper: just dismissed it. But the Bible was perhaps the foundation of his consciousness. Do what seems good to you in the sight of the Lord. This was the moral he always drew from Bible lore. And since the Lord, for him, was always the Lord Almighty, Almighty God, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Jesus being only a side-issue; since the Lord was always Jehovah the great and dark, for him, one might do as David did, in the sight of the Lord, or as Jacob, or as Abraham or Moses or Joshua or Isaiah, in the sight of the Lord. The sight of the Lord was a vast strange scope of vision, in the semi-dark.
Gran always listened the same, leaning on her stick and looking sideways to the ground, as if she did not quite see the stout and purple-faced Jacob, her son, as the mouthpiece of the Word. As a matter of fact, the way he read Scripture irritated her. She wished Lennie could have read the lessons. But Dad was head of the house, and she was fond of him, poor old Jacob.
And Jack always furtively watched Gran. She frightened him, and he had a little horror of her: but she fascinated him too. She was like Monica, at the great distance of her years. Her lace cap was snowy white, with little lavender ribbons. Her face was pure ivory, with fine-shaped features, that subtly arched nose, like Monica's. Her silver hair came over her dead-looking ears. And her dry, shiny, blue-veined hand remained fixed over the pommel of her black stick. How awful, how unspeakably awful, Jack felt, to be so old! No longer human. And she seemed so little inside her clothes. And one never knew what she was thinking. But surely some strange, uncanny, dim non-human thoughts.
Sunday was full of strange, half-painful impressions of death and of life. After lessons the boys would escape to the yards, and the stables, and lounge about. Or they would try the horses, or take a gun into the uncleared bush. Then came the enormous Sunday dinner, when everyone ate himself stupid.
In the afternoon Tom and Jack wandered to the loft, to the old concertina. Up there among the hay, they squeezed and pulled the old instrument, till at last, after much practice, they could draw forth tortured hymnal sounds from its protesting internals.
"Ha-a-appy Ho-ome! Ha-appy Ho-ome!
Oh Haa-py Ho-me! Oh Haa-py Ho-me!
In Paradise with thee!"
Over and over again the same tune, till Tom would drop off to sleep, and Jack would have a go at it. And this yearning sort of hymn always sent a chill to his bowels. They were like Gran, on the brink of the grave. In fact the word Paradise made him shudder worse than the word coffin. Yet he would grind away at the tune. Till he too fell asleep.
And then they would wake in the heat to the silence of the suspended, fiercely hot afternoon. Only to feel their own sweat trickling, and to hear the horses, the draft-horses which were in stable for the day, chop-chopping underneath. So, in spite of sweat and heat, another go at the fascinating concertina.
II
One Sunday Jack strolled in an hour early for tea. He had made a mistake, as one does sometimes when one sleeps in the afternoon. Gran was sitting by a little fire in the dark living room. She had to have a little fire to look at. It was like life to her.
"Come here, Jack Grant," she said in her thin, imperious voice. He went on reluctant feet, for he had a dread of her years and her strange femaleness. What did she want of him?
"Did y'hear Mr. George get my son to promise to make a will, when y'were in Perth?"
"No, marm," said Jack promptly.
"Well, take it from me, if he promised, he hasn't done it. He never signed a paper in his life, unless it was his marriage register. And but for my driving, he'd never have signed that. Sit down!"
Jack sat on the edge of a chair, his heart in his boots.
"I told you before I'd ha' married your grandfather, if he hadn't been married already. I wonder where you'd ha' been then! Just as well I didn't, for he wouldn't look at me after he took my leg off. Just come here a minute."
Jack got up and went to her side. She put her soft, dry, dead old hand on his face and stroked it, pressing on the cheekbones.
"Ay," she said. "I suppose those are his bones again. And my bones are in Monica. Don't stand up, lad, take your seat."
Jack sat down in extreme discomfort.
"Well," she resumed, "I was very well off with old Ellis, so I won't complain. But you've got your English father's eyes. You'd have been better with mine. Those bones, those beautiful bones, and my sort of eyes."
Gran's eyes were queer and remote now. But they had been perhaps like Monica's, only a darker grey, and with a darker, subtler cat look in them.
"I suppose it will be in the children's children," she resumed, her eyes going out like a candle. "For I married old Ellis, though to this day I never quite believe it. And one thing I do know. I won't die in the dying room of his house. I won't do it, not if it was the custom of a hundred families. Not if he was here himself to see me do it. I wouldn't. Though he was kindness itself. But not if he was here himself, and had the satisfaction of seeing me do it. A dreadful room! I'd be frightened to death to die in it. I like me sheets sun-kissed, heat or no heat, and no sun ever gets into that room. But it's better for a woman to marry, even if she marries the wrong man. I allus said so. An old maid, especially a decayed gentlewoman, is a blight on the face of the earth."
"Why?" said Jack suddenly. The old woman was too authoritative.
"That's why! What do you know about it," she said contemptuously.
"I knew a nice old lady in England, who'd never been married," he said, thinking of a really beautiful, gentle woman, Who had kept all her perfume and her charm, in spite of her fifty-odd years of single blessedness. But then she had a naturally deep and religious nature, not like this pagan old cat of a Gran.
"Did you!" said Gran, eying him severely. "What do you know at your age? I've got three unmarried daughters, and I'm ashamed of them. If I'd married your grandfather I never should have had them. Self-centred, and old as old boots, they are. I'd rather they'd gone wrong and died in the bush, like your Aunt who had a child by Mary's father."
Jack made round, English eyes of amazement at this speech. He disapproved thoroughly.
"You've got too much of your English father in you," she said, "and not enough of your hard-hearted grandfather. Look at Lennie, what a beautiful boy he is."
There was a pause. Jack sat in a torment while she baited him. He was full of antagonism towards her and her years.
"But I tell you, you never realise you're old till you see your friends slipping away. One by one they go—over the border. That's what makes you feel old. I tell you. Nothing else. Annie Brockman died the other day. I was at school with her. She wasn't old, though you'd have thought so."
The way Gran said this was quite spiteful. And Jack thought to himself: "What nonsense, she was old if she was at school with Gran. If she was as old as Gran, she was awfully old."
"No, she wasn't old—school girls and fellows laughing in the ball room, or breathing fast after a hard ride. You didn't know Sydney in those days. And men grown old behind their beards for want of understanding; because they're too dense to understand what living means. Men are dense. Are ye listening?"
The question came with such queer aged force that Jack started almost out of his chair.
"Yes, marm," he said.
"'Yes marm!' he says!" she repeated, with a queer little grin of amusement. "Listen to this grandfather's chit saying 'Yes marm!' to me! Well, they'll have their way. My friends are nearly all gone, so I suppose I shall soon be going. Not but what there's plenty of amusement here."
She looked round in an odd way, as if she saw ghosts. Jack would have given his skin to escape her.
"Listen," she said with sudden secrecy. "I want ye to do something for me. You love Lennie, don't ye?"
Jack nodded.
"So do I! I'm going to help him." Her voice became sharp with secrecy. "I've put by a stocking for him," she hissed. "At least it's not a stocking, it's a tin box, but it's the same thing. It's up there!" She pointed with her stick at the wide black chimney. "D'ye understand?"
She eyed Jack with aged keenness, and he nodded, though his understanding was rather vague. Truth to tell, nothing she said seemed to him quite real. As if, poor Gran, her age put her outside of reason.
"That stocking is for Lennie. Tom's mother was nobody knows who, though I'm not going to say Jacob never married her, if Jack says he did. But Tom'll get everything. The same as Jacob did. That's how it hits back at me. I wanted Jacob to have the place, and now it goes to Tom, and my little Lennie gets nothing. Alice has been a good woman, and a good wife to Jacob: better than he deserved. I'm going to stand by her. That stocking in there is for Lennie because he's her eldest son. In a tin box. Y'understand?"
And she pointed again at the chimney.
Jack nodded, though he didn't really take it in. He had a little horror of Gran at all times; but when she took on this witch-like portentousness, and whispered at him in a sharp, aged whisper, about money, hidden money, it all seemed so abnormal to him that he refused to take it for real. The queer, aged, female spirit that had schemed with money for the menfolk she chose, scheming to oust those she had not elected, was so strange and half-ghoulish, that he merely shrank from taking it in. When she pointed with her white-headed stick at the wide black mouth of the chimney, he glanced and looked quickly away again. He did not want to think of a hoard of sovereigns in a stocking—or a tin box—secreted in there. He did not want to think of the subtle, scheming, vindictive old woman reaching up into the soot, to add more gold to the hoard. It was all unnatural to him and to his generation.
But Gran despised him and his generation. It was as unreal to her as hers to him.
"Old George couldn't even persuade that Jacob of mine to sign a marriage settlement," she continued. "And I wasn't going to force him. Would you believe a man could be such an obstinate fool?"
"Yes, marm," said Jack automatically.
And Gran stamped her stick at him in sudden vicious rage.
The stamping of the stick brought Grace, and he fled.
III
That evening they were all sitting in the garden. The drawing room was thrown open, as usual on Sunday, but nobody even went in except to strum the piano. Monica was strumming hymns now. Grace came along calling Mary. Mary was staying on at Wandoo.
"Mary, Gran wants you. She feels faint. Come and see to her, will you?"
Ellie came and slipped her fat little hand into Jack's, hanging on to him. Katie and Lennie sat surreptitiously playing cats'-cradle, on the steps: forbidden act, on the Sabbath. The twin boys wriggled their backs against the gate-posts and their toes into the earth, asking each other riddles. Harry as usual aimed stones at birds. It was a close evening, the wind had not come. And they all were uneasy, with that uncanny uneasiness that attacks families, because Gran was not well.
Harry was singing profanely, profaning the Sabbath.
"A blue jay sat on a hickory limb,
He wink at me, I wink at him.
I up with a stone, an' hit him on the shin.
Says he, Little Nigger, don' do that agin!
Clar de kitchen, ol' folk, young folk!
Oar de kitchen, ol' folk, young folk!
An' let us dance till dawn O."
Harry shouted out these wicked words half loud to a tune of his own that was no tune.
Jack did not speak. The sense of evening, Sunday evening, far away from any church or bell, was strong upon him. The sun was slow in the sky, and the light intensely strong, all fine gold. He went out to look. The sunlight flooded the dry, dry earth till it glowed again, and the gum-trees that stood up hung tresses of liquid shadow from trunks of gold, and the buildings seemed to melt blue in the vision of light. Someone was riding in from westward, and a cloud of pure gold-dust rose fuming from the earth about the horse and the horseman, with a vast, overwhelming gold glow of the void heavens above. The whole west was so powerful with pure gold light, coming from immense space and the sea, that it seemed like a transfiguration, and another horseman rode fuming in a dust of light as if he were coming, small and Daniel-like, out of the vast furnace-mouth of creation. Jack looked west, into the welter of yellow light, in fear. He knew again, as he had known before, that his day was not the day of all the world, there was a huger sunset than the sunset of his race. There were vaster, more unspeakable gods than the gods of his fathers. The god in this yellow fire was huger than the white men could understand, and seemed to proclaim their doom.
Out of this immense power of the glory seemed to come a proclamation of doom. Lesser glories must crumble to powder in this greater glow, as the horsemen rode trotting in the glorified cloud of the earth, spuming a glory all round them. They seemed like messengers out of the great West, coming with a proclamation of doom, the small, trotting, aureoled figures kicking tip dust like sun-dust, and gradually growing larger, hardening out of the sea of light. Like sun-arrivals.
Though after all it was only Alec Rice and Tom. But they were gilded men, dusty and sun-luminous, as they came into the yard, with their brown faces strangely vague in shadow, unreal.
The sun was setting, huge and liquid, and sliding down at immense speed behind the far-off molten, wavering, long ridge towards the coast. Fearsome the great liquid sun was, stooping fiercely down like an enemy stooping to hide his glory, leaving the sky hovering and pulsing above, with a sense of wings, and a sense of proclamation, and of doom. It seemed to say to Jack: I and my race are doomed. But even the doom is a splendour.
Shadow lay very thin on the earth, pale as day, though the sun was gone. Jack turned back to the house. The tiny twins were staggering home to find their supper, their hands in the pockets of their Sunday breeches. The pockets of everyday breeches were, for some mysterious reason, always sewn up, so Sunday alone knew this swagger. Harry was being called in to bed. And Len and Katie, rarely far off at meal times, were converging towards supper too.
Monica was still drumming listlessly on the piano, and singing in a little voice. She had a very sweet voice, but she usually sang "small." She was not singing a hymn, Jack became aware of this. She was singing, rather nervously, or irritably, and with her own queer yearning pathos:
"Oh Jane, Oh Jane, my pretty Jane, Oh Jane,
Ah never, never look so shy.
But meet me, meet me in the moonlight,
When the dew is on the rye."
Someone had lighted the piano candles, and she sat there strumming and singing in a little voice, and looking queer and lonely. His heart went hot in his breast, and then started pounding. He crossed silently, and stood just behind her. For some moments she would not notice him, but went on singing the same. And he stood perfectly still close behind her. Then at last she glanced upward at him, and his heart stood still again with the same sense of doom the sun had given him. She still went on singing for a few moments. Then she stopped abruptly, and jerked her hand from the piano.
"Don't you want to sing?" she asked sharply.
"Not particularly."
"What do you want then?"
"Let us go out."
She looked at him strangely, then rose in her abrupt fashion. She followed him across the yard in silence, while he felt the curious sense of doom settling down on him.
He sat down on the step of the back-door of the barn, outside, looking southward into the vast, rapidly darkening country, and glanced up at her. She, rather petulantly, sat down beside him. He felt for her cool slip of a hand, and she let it lie in his hot one. But she averted her face.
"Why don't you like me?" she asked petulantly.
"But I love you," he said thickly, with shame and the sense of doom piercing his heart.
She turned swiftly and stared him in the face with a brilliant, oddly triumphant look.
"Sure?" she said.
His heart seemed to go black with doom. But he turned away his face from her glowing eyes, and put his arm round her waist, and drew her to him. His whole body was trembling like a taut string, and she could feel the painful plunging of his heart as he pressed her fast against him, pressed the breath out of her.
"Monica!" he murmured blindly, in pain, like a man who is in the dark.
"What?" she said softly.
He hid his face against her shoulder, in the shame and anguish of desire. He would have given anything, if this need never have come upon him. But the strange fine quivering of his body thrilled her. She put her cheek down caressingly against his hair. She could be very tender, very, very tender and caressing. And he grew quieter.
He looked up at the night again, hot with pain and doom and necessity. It had grown quite dark, the stars were out.
"I suppose we shall have to be married," he said in a dismal voice.
"Why?" she laughed. It seemed a very sudden and long stride to her. He had not even kissed her.
But he did not answer, did not even hear her question. She watched his fine young face in the dark, looking sullen and doomed at the stars.
"Kiss me!" she whispered, in the most secret whisper he had ever heard. "Kiss me!"
He turned, in the same battle of unwillingness. But as if magnetised he put forward his face and kissed her on the mouth: the first kiss of his life. And she seemed to hold him. And the fierce, fiery pain of pleasure which came with that kiss sent his soul rebelling in torment to hell. He had never wanted to be given up, to be broken by the black hands of this doom. But broken he was, and his soul seemed to be leaving him, in the pain and obsession of this desire, against which he struggled so fiercely.
She seemed to be pleased, to be laughing. And she was exquisitely sweet to him. How could he be otherwise than caught, and broken.
After an hour of this love-making she blackened him again, by saying they must go in to supper. But she meant it, so in he had to go.
Only when he was alone again in the cubby did he resume the fight to recover himself from her again. To be free as he had been before. Not to be under the torment of the spell of this desire. To preserve himself intact. To preserve himself from her.
He lay awake in his bed in the cubby and thanked God he was away from her. Thanked God he was alone, with a sufficient space of loneliness around him. Thanked God he was immune from her, that he could sleep in the sanctity of his own isolation. He didn't want even to think about her.
IV
Gran did not leave her room that week, and Tom talked of fetching the relations.
"What for?" asked Jack.
"They'd like to be present," said Tom.
Jack felt incredulous.
Lennie came out of her room, sniffing and wiping his eyes with his knuckles.
"Poor ol' girl!" he sniffed. "She do look frail. She's almost like a little girl again."
"You don't think she's dying, do you, Len?" asked Jack.
"I don't think, I knows," replied Len, with utmost scorn. "Sooner, or later she's bound to go hence and be no more seen. But she'll be missed, for many a day, she will."
"But Tom," said Jack. "Do you think Gran will like to have all the relations sniffling round her when she gets worse?"
"I should think so," replied Tom. "Anyway, I should like to die respectable, whether you would or not."
Jack gave it up. Some things were beyond him, and dying respectable was one of them.
"Like they do in books," said Len, seeing that Jack disapproved, and trying to justify Tom's position. "Even ol' Nelson died proper. 'Kiss me, 'Ardy,' he said, an' 'Ardy kissed him, grubby and filthy as he was. He could do no less, though it was beastly."
Still the boys were not sent for the relations until the following Sunday, which was a rest day. Jack went to the Gum Valley Homestead, because he knew the way. He set off before dawn. The terrific heat of the New Year had already passed, and the dawn came fresh and lovely. He was happy on that ride, Gran or no Gran. And that's what he thought would be the happiest: always to ride on at dawn, in a nearly virgin country. Always to be riding away.
The Greenlows seemed to expect him. They had been "warned." After he had been refreshed with a good breakfast, they were ready to start, in the buggy. Jack rode in the buggy with them, his saddle under his seat and the neck-rope of the horse in his hand. The hack ran behind, and nearly jerked Jack's arms out of their sockets, with its halts and its disinclination to trot. Almost it hauled him out of the buggy sometimes. He would much rather have ridden the animal, but he had been requested to take the buggy, to spare it.
Mr. and Mrs. Greenlow scarcely spoke on the journey; it would not have been "showing sorrow." But Jack felt they were enjoying themselves immensely, driving in this morning air instead of being cooped up in the house, she cooking and he with the Holy Book. The sun grew furiously hot. But Gum Valley Croft was seven miles nearer to Wandoo than the Ellis' Gum Tree Selection, so they drove into the yard, wet with perspiration, just before the mid-day meal was put on to the table. Mrs. Ellis, aproned and bare-armed, greeted them as they drove up, calling out that they should go right in, and Jack should take the horses out of the buggy.
Quite a number of strange hacks were tethered here and there in the yard, near odd, empty vehicles, sulkies dejectedly leaning forward on empty shafts, or buggies and wagonettes sturdily important on four wheels. Yet the place seemed strangely quiet.
Jack came back to the narrow verandah outside the parlour door, where Mrs. Ellis had her fuchsias, ferns, cyclamens and musk growing in pots. A table had been set there, and dinner was in progress, the girls coming round from the kitchen with the dishes. Grace saw Jack hesitate, so she nodded to him. He went to the kitchen and asked doubtfully:
"How is she?"
"Oh, bad! Poor old dear. They're all in there to say goodbye."
Lennie, who was sitting on the floor under the kitchen window, put his head down on his arms and sobbed from a sort of nervousness, wailing:
"Oh, my poor ol' Gran! Oh, poor ol' dear!"
Jack, though upset, almost grinned. Poor Gran indeed, with that ghastly swarm of relations. He sat there on a chair, his nerves all on edge, noticing little things acutely, as he always did when he was strung up: the flies standing motionless on the chopping-block just outside the window, the smooth-tramped gravel walk, the curious surface of the mud floor in the kitchen, the smoky rafters overhead, the oven set in brick below the "everlasting" fire, the blackness of the pots and kettles above the horizontal bars ...
"Do you mind sitting in the parlour, Jack, in case they want anything?" Mrs. Ellis asked him.
Jack minded, but he went and sat in the parlour, like a chief lackey, or a buffer between all the relations and the outer world.
The house had become more quiet. Monica had gone over to the Reds with clean overalls for the little boys, who had been bundled off there. Jack got this piece of news from Grace, who was constantly washing more dishes and serving more relations. A certain anger burned in him as he heard, but he took no notice. Mary was lying down upstairs: she had been up all night with Gran. Tom was attending to the horses. Katie and Mrs. Ellis had gone upstairs with Baby and Ellie, and Mr. Ellis was also upstairs. Lennie had slipped away again. So Jack had track of all the family. He was always like that, wanting to know where they all were.
Mrs. Greenlow came in from Gran's inner room.
"Mary? Where's Mary?" she asked hurriedly.
Jack shook his head, and she passed on. She had left the door of Gran's room open, so Jack could see in. All the relations were there, horrible, the women weeping and perspiring, and wiping tears and perspiration away together, the men in their waistcoats and shirt-sleeves, perspiring and looking ugly. A Methodist parson son-in-law was saying prayers in an important monotone.
At last Mary came, looking anxious.
"Yes, Gran? Did you want me?" Jack heard her voice, and saw her by the bed.
"I felt so overcome with all these people," said Gran, in a curiously strong, yet frightened voice. "What do they all want?"
"They've come to see you. Come—" Mary hesitated "—to see if they can do anything for you."
"To frighten the bit of life out of me that I've got. But they're not going to. Get me some beef tea, Mary, and don't leave me alone with them."
Mary went out for the beef tea. Then Jack saw Gran's white hand feebly beckon.
"Ruth!" she said. "Ruth!"
The eldest daughter went over and took the hand, mopping her eyes. She was the parson's wife.
"Well, Ruth, how are you!" said Gran's high, quavering voice in a conversational tone.
"I'm well, Mother. It's how are you?" replied Ruth dismally.
But Gran was again totally oblivious of her. So at length Ruth dropped away embarrassed from the bedside, shaking her head.
Again Gran lifted her head on the pillow.
"Where's Jacob?"
"Upstairs, mother."
"The only one that has the decency to leave me alone." And she subsided again. Then after a while she asked, without lifting her head from the pillow, in a distant voice:
"And are the foolish virgins here?"
"Who, mother?"
"The foolish virgins. You know who I mean."
Gran lay with her eyes shut as she spoke.
There was an agitation among the family. It was the brothers-in-law who pushed the three Miss Ellises forward. They, the poor things, wept audibly.
Gran opened her eyes at the sound, and said, with a ghost of a smile on her yellow, transparent old face:
"I hope virginity is its own reward."
Then she remained unmoved until Mary came with the soup, which she took and slowly sipped, as Mary administered it in a spoon. It seemed to revive her.
"Where's Lennie and his mother?" she asked, in a firmer tone.
These also were sent for. Mrs. Ellis sat by the bed and gently patted Gran's arm; but Lennie, "skeered stiff," shivered at the door. His mother held out her hand to him, and he came in, inch by inch, watching the fragile old Gran, who looked transparent and absolutely unreal, with a fascination of horror.
"Kiss me, Lennie," said Gran grimly: exactly like Nelson.
Lennie shrank away. Then, yielding to his mother's pressure he laid his dark, smooth head and his brown face on the pillow next to Gran's face, but he did not kiss her.
"There's my precious!" said Gran softly, with all the soft, cajoling gentleness that had made her so lovely, at moments, to her men.
"Alice, you've been good to my Jacob," she said, as if remembering something. "There's the stocking. It's for you and Lennie." She still managed to say the last words with a caress, though she was fading from consciousness again.
Lennie drew away and hid behind his mother. Gran lay still, exactly as if dead. But the laces of her eternal cap still stirred softly, to show she breathed. The silence was almost unbearable.
To break it, the Methodist son-in-law sank to his knees, the others followed his example, and he prayed in a low, solemn, extinguished voice. When he had said Amen the others whispered it and rose from their knees. And by one consent they glided from the room. They had had enough deathbed for the moment.
Mary closed the inner door when they had gone, and remained alone in the room with Gran.
V
The sons-in-law all melted through the parlour and out on to the verandah, where they helped themselves from the decanter on the table, filling up from the canvas water-bag that swung in the draught to keep cool. The daughters sat down by the table and wept, lugubriously and rather angrily. The sons-in-law drank and looked afflicted. Jack remained on duty in the parlour, though he would dearly have liked to decamp.
But he was now interested in the relations. They began to weep less, and to talk in low, suppressed, vehement voices. He could only catch bits.—"It's a question if he ever married Tom's mother. I doubt if Tom's legitimate. I don't even doubt it, I'm sure. We've suffered from that before. Where's the stocking? Stocking! Stocking—saved up—bought Easu out. Mother should know better. If she's made a will—Jacob's first marriage—children to educate and provide for. Unmarried daughters—first claim—stocking—" And then quite plainly from Ruth: "It's hard on our husbands if they have to support mother's unmarried daughters." This said with dignity.
Jack glanced at the three Miss Ellises, to see if they minded, and inwardly he vowed that if he ever married Monica, for example, and Grace was an unmarried sister, he'd find some suitable way of supporting her, without making her feel ashamed. But the three Miss Ellises did not seem to mind. They were busy diving into secret pockets among their clothing, and fetching out secret little packages. Someone dropped the glass stopper out of a bottle of smelling salts, and spilled the contents on the floor. The pungent odour penetrated throughout the house. Jack never again smelt lavender salts without having a foreboding of death, and seeing mysterious little packets. The three Miss Ellises were surreptitiously laying out bits and tags of black braid, crape, beading, black doth, black lace; all black, wickedly black, on the table edge. Smoothing them out. For as a matter of fact they kept a little shop. And everybody was looking with interest. Jack felt quite nauseated at the sight of these black blotches, the row of black patches.
Mary came out of Gran's room, going to the kitchen with the cup. She did not pass the verandah, so nobody noticed her. They were all intent on the muttering gloom of their investigation of those scraps of mourning patterns.
Jack felt the door of Gran's room slowly open. Mary had left it just ajar. He looked round and his hair rose on his head. There stood Gran, all white save for her eyes, like a yellow figure of aged female Time, standing with her hand on the door, looking across the parlour at the afternoon and the preoccupied party on the verandah. Her face was absolutely expressionless, timeless and awful. It frightened him very much. The inexorable female! He uttered an exclamation, and they all looked up, caught.
CHAPTER XI
BLOWS
I
Jack managed to escape. When the rooks were fluttered by the sight of that ghostly white starling, he just ran. He ran in disgust from the smell of lavender salts, the tags of mourning patterns, respectable dying, and these awful people. Surely there was something rotten at the bottom of people, he thought, to make them behave as they did. And again came over him the feeling he had often had, that he was a changeling, that he didn't belong to the so-called "normal" human race. Nor, by Jupiter, did he want to. The "normal" human race filled him with unspeakable repulsion. And he knew they would kill him if they found out what he was. Hence that unconscious dissembling of his innocent face.
He ran, glad to get into a sweat, glad to sweat it all out of himself. Glad to feel the sun hot on his damp hands, and then the afternoon breeze, just starting, cool on his wet skin. When he reached the sand-bagged pool, he took off his clothes and spread them in the sun, while he wallowed in the lukewarm water. Ay! if one could wash off one's associations! If one could but be alone in the world.
After bathing he sat in the sun awhile to dry, then dressed and walked off to look at the lower dam pump. Tom had said it needed attending to. And anyway it led him away from the house.
The pump was all right. There had been a March shower that had put water in the dam. So after looking round at the sheep, he turned away.
Which way? Not back home. Not yet.
The land breeze had lifted and the sea breeze had come, clearing the hot dry atmosphere as if by magic, and replacing the furnace breath by tender air. Which way?
At the back of his mind was the thought of Monica not home yet from the Reds' place, and evening coming on, another of the full golden evenings when the light seemed fierce with declaration of another eternity, a different eternity from ours.
Last Sunday, on such an evening, he had kissed her. And much as he wanted to avoid her, the desire to kiss her again drove him as if the great yellowing light were a wind that blew him, as a butterfly is blown twinkling out to sea. He drifted towards the trail from the Reds' place. He walked slowly, listening to the queer evening noise of the magpies, and the more distant screeching of flying parrots. Someone had disturbed the parrots beyond the Black Barn gums. So as if by intuition he walked that way, slightly off the trail.
And suddenly he heard the sound his spirit expected to hear: Monica crying out in expostulation, anger, and fear. It was the fear in her voice that made his face set. His first instinct was not to intrude on their privacy. Then again came the queer, magpie noise of Monica, this time with an edge of real hatred to her fear. Jack pushed through the bushes. He could smell the warm horses already.
Yes, there was Lucy standing by a tree. And Monica, in a long skirt of pink-sprigged cotton, with a frill at the bottom, trying to get up into the side-saddle. While Easu, in his Sunday black reach-me-downs and white shirt and white rubber-soled cricketing boots, every time she set her foot in the stirrup, put his hand round her waist and spread his fingers on her body, and lifted her down again, lifted her on one hand in a childish and ridiculous fashion, and held her in a moment's embrace. She, in her long cotton riding-dress with the close-fitting bodice, did indeed look absurd, hung like a child on Easu's hand, as he lifted her down and held her struggling against him, then let her go once more, to mount her horse. Lucy was shifting uneasily, and Easu's big black horse, tethered to a tree, was jerking its head with a jingle of the bit. The girth hung loose. Easu had evidently dismounted to adjust it.
Monica was becoming really angry, really afraid, and really blind with dismay, feeling for the first time her absolute powerlessness. To be powerless drove her mad, and she would have killed Easu if she could, without a qualm. But her hate seemed to rouse the big Easu to a passion of desire for her. He put his two big hands round her slender body and compassed her entirely. She gave a loud, strange, uncanny scream. And Jack came out of the bushes, making the black horse plunge. Easu glanced round at the horse, and saw Jack. And at the same time our hero planted a straight, vicious blow on the bearded chin. Easu, unprepared, staggered up against Lucy, who began to jump, while Monica, tangled in her long skirt, fell to her knees on the ground.
Quite a picture! Jack said it himself. Even he saw himself standing there, like Jack the Giant-killer. And of course he saw Monica on her knees, with tumbled hair and scarlet cheeks, unspeakably furious at being caught, angrily hitching herself out of her long cotton riding-skirt and pressing her cheeks to make them less red. She was silent, with averted face, and she seemed small. He saw Easu in the Sunday white shirt and rather tight Sunday breeches, facing round in unspeakable disgust and fury. He saw himself in a ready-made cotton suit and cheap brown canvas shoes, bought at the local store, standing awaiting an onslaught.
The onslaught did not come. Instead, Easu said, in a tone of unutterable contempt:
"Why, what's up with you, you little sod!"
Jack turned to Monica. She had got on to her feet, and was pushing her hair under her hat.
"Monica," he said, "you'd better get home. Gran's dying."
She looked at him, and a slow, wicked smile of amusement came over her face. Then she broke into a queer, hollow laugh, at the bottom of which was rage and frustration. Then her laugh rose higher.
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" she laughed. "Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! ha-ha-ha! Ah! ! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! ha-ha-ha! Ah! ! ! ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ah! ha-ha! Ha! Ah! Gran's dying! Ha-ha-ha! Is she really? Oh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! No, I don't mean it. But it seems so funny! Ah! ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ah! ha-ha-ha!"
She smothered herself into a confused bubbling. The two men stood aghast, shuddering at the strange, hysterical woman's laughter that went shrilling through the bush. They were horrified lest someone else should hear.
Monica, in her cotton frock and long sweeping skirt, stood pushing her handkerchief in her mouth, and trying in vain to stifle the hysterical laughter that still shook her slender body. Occasionally a strange peal, like mad bells, would break out. And then she ended with a passionate sobbing.
"I know! I know!" she sobbed, like a child. "Gran's dying, and you won't let me go home."
"You can go home," Jack said. "You can go home. But don't go with your face all puffed up with crying."
She gradually gained control of herself, and turned away to her horse. Jack went to help her mount. She got into the saddle, and he gave her the reins. She kept her face averted, and Lucy began to move away slowly, towards the home track.
Easu still stood there, planted with his feet apart, his head a little dropped, and a furious, contemptuous, revengeful hate of the other two in his light blue eyes. He had his head down, ready for an attack. Jack saw this, and waited.
"Going to take your punishment?" said Easu, in a nasty voice.
"Ready when you are," said Jack.
Ugh! How he hated Easu's ugly, jeering, evil eyes, how he would love to smash them out of his head. In the long run, hate was an even keener ecstasy than love, and the battle of hate, the fight with blood in the eyes, an orgasm of deadly gratification keener than any passionate orgasm of love.
Easu slowly threw his hat on the ground. Jack did the same, and started to pull off his coat. Easu glanced round to see if Monica was going. She was. Her back was already turned, and Lucy was stepping gingerly through the bushes. He lifted his chin, unknotted his tie, and threw it in his hat. Then he unbuttoned his shirt-cuffs, and pulled off his shirt, and hitched his belt. He was now naked to the waist. He had a very white skin with reddish hair at the breast, and an angular kind of force. His reddish-haired brawny arms were burnt brown-red, as was his neck. For the rest his skin was pure white, with the dazzle of absolute health. Yet he was ugly rather than beautiful. The queer angularity of his brawn, the sense of hostile mechanical power. The sense of the mechanism of power in him made him like some devil fallen into a lower grade.
Jack's torso was rather absurdly marked by the sun-burnt scallops of his vest-lines, for he worked a good deal in a vest. Easu always wore a shirt and no vest. And Jack, in spite of the thinness of youth, seemed to have softer lines and a more human proportion, more grace. And there was a warmth in his white skin, making it much less conspicuous than the really dazzling brilliance of Easu. Easu was a good deal bigger, but Jack was more concentrated, and a born fighter. He fought with all his soul.
He shaped up to Easu, and Easu made ready, when they were interrupted by a cry from Monica, in a high, hysterical voice. They looked up. She had reined in her horse among the bushes, and was looking round at them with a queer sharp, terrified face, from the distance. Her shrill voice cried:
"Don't forget he saved Herbert's life."
Both men faced round and looked at her as if she had committed an indecency. She quailed in her saddle. Easu, with a queer jerk of the head, motioned to her to go. She sank a little forward in her saddle, and hurriedly urged her horse through the bush, out of sight, without ever looking round, leaving the men, as she knew, to their heart's desire.
They waited for a while. Then they lifted their fists again, and drew near. Jack began the light, subtle, harmonious dancing which preceded his attack. He always attacked, no matter whom he fought. He could not fight unless he took the initiative. So now he danced warily, subtly before Easu, and Easu stood ready to side-step. Easu was bigger, harder, much more powerful than Jack, and built in hard mechanical lines: the kind that is difficult to knock out, if you have not much weight behind your blow.
"Are y' insured?" sneered Easu.
But Jack did not listen. He had always fought with people bigger and older than himself. But he had never before had this strange lust dancing in his blood, the lust of rage dancing for its consummation in blows. He had known it before, as a sort of game. But now the lust bit into his very soul, and he was quivering with accumulated desire, the desire to hit Easu hard, hit him till he knocked him out. He wanted to hit him till he knocked him out.