Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land Part 20

She cried out at him.

'How could you have left me alone here with those horrible drunken men down there making such a noise that I thought every minute they would break in on me? And swearing! I've never dreamed of such dreadful language; and I can't stand it--I won't stand it a moment longer.'

'You shan't. It's abominable, I've been a thoughtless beast.'

He swooped out through the open door, down the wooden stairs which creaked under his wrathful steps. Bridget heard him call the landlady, 'Mrs Maloney! Come here!' in a voice of sharp command. Presently she heard him speaking to the men in the bar, not abusively, indeed almost good humoured tone, but imperatively.

'Look here, mates.' The uproar stopped suddenly. 'You're decent blokes I know, and you've all had mothers if you haven't had wives. Well, there's a lady up there--she's my wife, and she's never heard bullock-drivers swear before, and you've scared her a bit. Just you stop it. Shut up and be off like good chaps.'

Some dissentient voices arose; an attempt at drunken ribaldry, strident hisses, 's.h.!.+ s.h.!.+' Cries of 'Shame.' 'Chuck it!' Then again, McKeith's voice, this time like thunder. 'Stop that I say--one more word and out you go, whether you like it or not.'

On that, came the noise of a scuffle and the fall of a heavy body across the veranda. And of McKeith, once more breathing satisfaction:

'All right! I haven't killed him--only given him a lesson .... But just you understand I'm not taking any of your bluff. You've GOT TO GO. If you don't, it'll be a case of the lock-up for some of you. And if you do--quietly mind, there'll be a shout all round for the lot of you to-morrow. Drink my health and my wife's, d'ye see? Here Mrs Maloney, chalk it down.'

In five minutes he was back in the sitting room, looking rather dishevelled, and with his coat awry. But there was silence below except for the putting up of shutters, the sound of shuffling feet along the road and s.n.a.t.c.hes of the bullock drivers' chorus which gradually died away in the night.

McKeith went up to his wife who was still standing by the corner of the table, and put his arm round the little trembling form.

'Oh! Biddy--my darling. I've been a brute. I'm not fit to take care of you. I ought to have thought of all that. But one gets used to such goings-on in the Bush, and they aren't bad chaps--the bullockys, and you've got to discount their lurid language a bit. I don't know whether it is that bullocks are more profane than most animals, but it's certain sure that you can't get them to move without swearing at them.'

Then, as she said, half crying, half laughing, 'I see. So this is my baptism into the Bus.h.!.+ You should have taught me the vocabulary, Colin, first.'

'Don't be too hard on me. You won't have this kind of thing at Moongarr. That's the worst of these cursed coast towns.h.i.+ps. I shouldn't have left you alone, but if I hadn't, we couldn't have got off properly to-morrow, and I'd set my heart on having things s.h.i.+p-shape for our first camping out. Everything's fixed up now--I've been wiring like mad up the line .... The buggy's at the Terminus all right, and I've got the black-boys there, and the tent and all that. It's going to be an experience you'll never forget. THAT'S to be your baptism into the Bush, my dear .... If only there's water enough left in the Creek yet .... But if there isn't we can dig for it. Oh, Biddy, think of it--a night like this--moonlight and starlight--MY starlight--MY star, that I used to look up at and wonder about, come down to earth. No, no, I won't maunder, I won't be a romantic zany--not till to-morrow night--I know the very spot for our camp ....'

He began to describe it--a pocket by the river bed--pasturage for the horses--then pulled himself short. No! He wanted it all to be a surprise .... She was to have just the very thing she had often said to him she would like best .... And now it was getting late and they must be up in good time to-morrow. Would she go to bed and try to sleep....

He took her to the door of her room .... Was she as comfortable as she could be here, anyhow? .... He knew it must seem cruelly rough to her; but it wouldn't be his fault in the future if she didn't have things as she liked them--so far as conditions would permit .... And after all, there women who enjoyed a wild life with their husbands. There was Lady Burton--and scores of other women--Biddy had asked him to have patience--and he meant to be patient--he wors.h.i.+pped her too much not to be patient. Well, she must be patient too with him, and with this queer old Bush which she would get to feel as much at home in as he did himself--in time.

He left her at her bedroom door, kissing her hand with the native chivalry that sat well upon him, and went back to his pipe and the waking dreams of an ardent but self-restrained lover who had practical as well as romantic considerations to weigh. Bridget went to sleep with the smell of his tobacco--and yet did not seem to mind it in the least--coming in whiffs through the door cracks and filling her nostrils. She too dreamed--a vivid dream, but by some law of contrariety, not of any idyllic camping ground in the Never-Never Land.

She dreamed that she was seeing the Carnival at Nice--a medley of dancing waves, azure sky, palms, gold-laden orange trees and white green-shuttered houses--flowers, CONFETTI, masks, grotesque pageantry, the merry music of the South. And though he had never been with her at Nice, Willoughby Maule came into her dream. They were doing impossible things--dancing together in the Carnival crowd, flinging confetti, bobbing and grimacing before the comic masks. Then the carnival scene seemed to turn flat, and to become a painted picture on the drop curtain of a stage, and she started up at the sound of knocks such as one hears before the curtain rises in a French theatre.

CHAPTER 5

Her husband was at her door calling her in the grey of dawn. He had everything ready he said. She dressed fumblingly as if she were still in her dream, and they walked to the station-shed whither the baggage had already gone. The sun was only a little way above the horizon when they took their places in the bush train that was to bear her on the second stage of her journey into the Unknown. Such a wheezy, shaky little train, and such funny, ugly country! Sandy flats spa.r.s.ely grown, mostly with gum trees, where there were no houses and gardens. Near the towns.h.i.+p there were a good many of these wooden dwellings with corrugated iron roofs--some of the more aged ones of slab--and with a huge chimney at one end. They were set in fenced patches of millet and Indian corn or gardens that wanted watering and with children perched on the top rail of the fences who cheered the train as it pa.s.sed.

Sometimes the train puffed between lines of grey slab fencing in which were armies of white skeleton trees that had been 'rung' for extermination, or with bleached stumps sticking up in a chaos of felled trunks, while in some there had sprung up sickly iron-bark saplings.

Now and then, they would stop at a deserted-looking station, round which stood a few shanties, and the inevitable public house. Maybe it had formerly been a sheepfold, abandoned when the scab had destroyed the flocks; and there were enormous rusty iron boiling-pots to which a fetid odour still clung, and where the dust that blew up, had the grittiness and faint smell of sun-dried sheeps' droppings.

At one of the more important stopping places, they had early lunch of more fried steak, with sweet potatoes and heavy bread and b.u.t.ter and peach jam. Most of the other pa.s.sengers got out for lunch also.

There was a fifth-rate theatrical company cracking jokes among themselves, drinking brandy and soda at extortionate prices, and staring hard at Lady Bridget. Colin pointed out to her a lucky digger and his family--two daughters in blue serge trimmed with gold braid, and a fat red-faced Mamma, very fine in a feathered hat, black brocade, a diamond brooch, and with many rings and jangling bangles. There were some battered, bearded bushmen who seemed to be friends of Colin's, though he did not introduce them to his wife, and who talked on topical subjects in a vernacular which Lady Bridget thought to herself she would never be able to master. There was a professional horse-breaker whom McKeith hailed as Zack Duppo, and to whom he had a good deal to say also. There were some gangs of shearers or stockmen or what not, who appeared to be the following of two or three rakish, aggressive looking males upon whom the bushmen scowled. Union delegates, Strike Organisers, McKeith explained.

After that station, marks of civilisation diminished. The Noah's Ark humpeys in their clearings became few and far between, and the long lines of grey two-railed fences melted into gum forest. Now and then, they saw herds of cattle and horses. Once, a company of kangaroos sitting up with fore paws drooping and a baby marsupial poking its head out of the pouch of one of the does. Then, taking fright in a second, all leaped up, long back legs stretched, tails in air, and, in a few ungainly bounds they were lost to sight among the gum trees. Early in the afternoon the train reached the temporary Terminus, for the line was being carried on by degrees through the Leura district. This was a mining town called Fig Tree Mount--why, n.o.body could tell, for there were no fig trees, and not a sign of a hill as far as the level horizon--except for the heaps of refuse mullock that showed where shafts had been sunk. A good many years ago, Bridget was told, there had been a rush to the place, but the gold field turned out not so good as had been expected, and it was only lately that the discovery of a payable reef had brought the digging population back again. From one direction came the whirr of machinery, and there was in the same quarter a collection of white tents and roughly put up humpeys.

Otherwise, the towns.h.i.+p consisted of a long dusty street cutting the sandy plain and, out of the two score or so of zinc-roofed buildings, twenty were public houses.

Lady Bridget had been very silent all day. To Colin's anxious enquiries she answered that it was enough to take in so many new impressions without talking about them. Through the crude blur of these impressions her husband stood out definitely, a dominant influence. She seemed to be only now beginning to feel his dominance. Yet all the time, she could not get away from the sense of living in some fantastic dream--an Edward Lear nonsense dream. The sight of the kangaroos in the Bush brought a particular rhyme of her childhood to her mind. She half said, half sang it to an improvised tune:

'Said the Duck to the Kangaroo, "Good gracious! how you hop!

Over the fields and water too, As if you never would stop!"'

She caught her husband looking at her in a fascinated, puzzled way, and paused and gave him her funny little smile.

'That's a very pretty song,' he said. 'But I can't make out what it means. What is it about a duck or a kangaroo? They're nonsense words, aren't they?'

'Nonsense--oh yes, frightful nonsense. Only it struck me that there's sometimes a lot of truth in nonsense. Listen now,' and she went on:

'"My life is a bore in this nasty pond, And I long to go out in the world beyond.

I wish I could hop like you!"

Said the Duck to the Kangaroo.'

He still looked puzzled--but adoring.

'You've got no sense of humour,' she said, 'Don't you see that you and I are as incongruous as the duck and the kangaroo?'

'That is so,' he answered gravely. 'But I'll be a kangaroo with pleasure if it makes the Bush more attractive to you.'

She fell suddenly silent again, and sat gloomy and staring at the endless procession of gum trees as the train lumbered on through that fantastic forest, which made her think of all kinds of ridiculous things. And she was conscious all the time of his furtive watching from the corner opposite, and of his readiness to spring forward at the least indication of her wanting anything. It bewildered her--the strangeness of being alone with, entirely dependent upon this big man of the Bush, who had the right to look after her, and yet of whom she knew so little.

He did look after her with sedulous care. He had natty bush dodges for minimising the discomfort of the hot, dusty train journey. He manufactured a windsail outside the carriage window, which brought in a little breeze during the airless heat of mid-day. He contrived to get cool drinks and improvised for her head a cus.h.i.+on out of his rolled up poncho, a silk handkerchief and a large cold cabbage leaf against which she leaned her hot forehead. In all his actions she watched him with a curious blend of feelings. There was a satisfaction in his largeness, his commonsense, his breeziness. She liked hearing his quaint Bush colloquialisms, when he leaned out of the window at the small stations and exchanged greetings with whomsoever happened to be there--officials, navvies, miners, even Chinamen--most of whom saluted him with a 'Glad to see you back, sir!' ... or a 'Good-day, Boss. Good luck to you,' as if they all knew the significance of this wedding journey--which no doubt they all did.

Bridget kept in the background and smiled enigmatically at it all. She was interested in her husband both in the personal and abstract sense, and was a little surprised at herself for being pleased when he paid her any attention or sat down beside her. At moments, she even hankered after the touch of his fingers, and had a perverse desire to break down the restraint he was so manifestly putting upon himself. Once, when he had been sitting very still in the further corner, thinking she was asleep, she had looked at him suddenly, and had found his eyes fixed on her in a gaze so concentrated, so full of intense longing, that she felt as if he were trying to hypnotise her into loving him. She knew that if he were, it must be unconscious hypnotism on his part. There were no subtleties of that kind in Colin McKeith. No, it was the primal element in him that appealed to her, dominated her. For she was startled by a sudden realization of that dominant quality in him as applied to herself. In their courts.h.i.+p it had been she who dominated him.

He reddened guiltily when he caught her eyes. His long upper lip went down in obstinate resistance to impulse. But if he had kissed her then, she would not have rebelled.

'Colin, what are you thinking of?' she said, and he answered in a tone, husky with pent emotion.

'I was thinking of our camp to-night--of how we should be alone together in the starlight.... And of how I want to make you happy and of how wonderful it all is--like some impossible dream.'

'Yes. I've been feeling too that it is like a dream,' she replied gravely.

'A bit of nightmare so far, I'm afraid, for you, Biddy,' he said shaking himself free from sentiment. 'But this part of it will soon be over.'

He got up, pulled the blind down behind her, and readjusted the cabbage leaf under her head. Just then, the train pulled up at a station where there were selectors' holdings, and a German woman was lugging along a crate of garden produce. He jumped out and bought another cabbage from which he shredded a fresh cool leaf for her pillow. And at that they laughed and he relapsed into normal commonplace.

When she got out at Fig Tree Mount, he took her across the sandy street to the nearest and largest of the public houses which had 'Station Hotel' printed on it in big blue letters--a glaring, crude, zinc-roofed box with a dirty veranda that seemed a receptacle for rubbish and a lounge for kangaroo dogs, to say nothing of drunken men. The dogs took no notice of the male loungers, but started a vigorous barking at the sight of a lady. There was the usual bar at one end, the usual noise going on inside, and the usual groups of bush loafers outside. Several riding horses were hitched up to the palings at a right angle with the Bar, and a bullock dray loaded with wool-bales--on the top of which a whole family appeared to reside under a canvas tilt--was drawn up in the road. The beasts were a repulsive sight, with whip-weals on their panting sides, their great heads bowed under the yoke and their slavering tongues protruding. Bridget looked at everything with a wide detached gaze, as she followed her husband along the hotel veranda.

McKeith, motioning to his wife to proceed, stopped to peer at the faces of two men lying in a drunken sleep on the boards.

'Not my men, anyway,' he said, rejoining her. 'But that will keep.' The place seemed deserted and in disorder. There were glimpses through the open windows of unmade beds within, and, on the veranda, lay some red blankets bundled together. Colin took his wife into a parlour, where flies buzzed round the remains of a meal and some empty whisky bottles and gla.s.ses. After considerable shouting and knocking at doors along the pa.s.sage, he succeeded in arousing the landlady, who came in, b.u.t.toning her blouse. Her obviously dyed yellow hair was in a dishevelled state, her eyes were heavy and her face sodden. She had evidently been sleeping off the effects of drink.

'Had a night of it, I suppose, Mrs Hurst?' observed McKeith glumly.

'This is a nice sort of place to show a lady into.'