Captivity Part 49

"My dear, do you think I want to be a limpet?" she said, "if I don't you know we'll never catch the train when it starts again."

"Never have a free hand," he muttered.

She was puzzled. It seemed impossible to keep a constant watch on a man of Louis's temperament. He resented her vigilance though he demanded it.

If she seemed to be leading him, he bolted. If she let him have his head, he still bolted.

When they were in the train again, drawing away through miles of scrub further and further from the cities, she felt very glad that the strain was going to end soon: she would get a rest and so would he where probably he would have to go fifty miles to get a drink. But she tormented herself with the fear that inaccessibility was not going to strengthen him; rather it would weaken, she was afraid.

At five o'clock the second day the train, which had dwindled down to one coach and five trucks, rattled and groaned into Cook's Wall. The station consisted of a rough wooden platform raised on wooden supports with a weather-board hut which the stationmaster called porter's room, booking-office, luggage-office and station hotel. Someone had ambitiously painted the name on the station. "COOK'S WAL" and "STATION HOT" appeared in green letters on the face of the structure. "L" and "EL" appeared round the corner in red.

The surroundings of the station looked quite hopeless; a few sun-baked sheep-pens and races stretched behind the Station Hotel, s.h.i.+mmering and wavering in the heat haze; half a mile away was a collection of home-made huts consisting of boxes and kerosene tins piled on top of each other. A primitive winding-gear and a heap of slag marked the position of a small manganese mine which had been the cause for prolonging the single line railway so far into the Bush. To the west and south and north stretched scrub and bush, right away to forest and purple hills on the far horizon. Eastward the glittering rails shone back to the city, sending out blinding little flashes of light as the sun caught them.

The guard and driver got leisurely out of the train and stood on the platform; the stationmaster-c.u.m-porter-c.u.m-hotel-keeper, in a pair of dungaree trousers and a dusty vest of flesh-coloured cellular material which gave him the effect of nakedness, stared at them as though pa.s.sengers were the last phenomenon he had expected to see.

"Cripes! What yous want?" he said.

"Are we far from anywhere?" asked Marcella, smiling at him. He spat a.s.siduously through a knothole in the boarding and looked from her to Louis.

"Depends on what you call far," he said reflectively. "There's Gaynor's about fifteen miles along, an' Loose End nigh on thirty. Where yous makin' for, then?"

"I should say Loose End would suit us, by the sound of it," said Louis with a laugh. "But it isn't much use starting out to-night."

The stationmaster looked proprietorially towards the station and the hotel site. There seemed room for tickets, and for the man who sold them--if he were not a very large man. There was not much hope for visitors.

"I'm running up a bosker hotel soon's I can get a bit of weather-boarding and a few nails along," he said hopefully.

"That doesn't solve th-th-the immediate problem," said Louis.

"Let's sleep with half of us in the hotel and half on the platform,"

said Marcella, delighted with the authentic lack of civilization.

"Be et up with h'ants," the driver informed them. "Look here, chum, if I was you I'd sleep in the train. She don't set off till between seven and eight to-morrow."

They jumped at the idea, and the stationmaster, suddenly helpful, offered them the loan of his hut, his spirit lamp, his kerosene tins and his creek which was half a mile away among a few trees, low-growing, stunted blue gums.

"Have to have a wash," the stationmaster told himself unhappily, and suggested the same course to the driver and guard as there was a lady to dinner. Then he piloted Marcella and Louis to his hut.

It struck a homely note in several ways. The name of Rockefeller came to them in the flattened out kerosene tins which, nailed to supports, formed the roof; boxes stencilled with the names of well-known proprietary English goods formed the walls. Inside was a bed in shape of a frayed hammock; upturned boxes formed the chairs and there was an incongruous leather-topped, mahogany-legged writing-table. A kerosene tin was the toilet apparatus: another, cut in two, was used for boiling water. Given a supply of kerosene tins in the Bush, one can make a villa and furnish it, down to cooking utensils and baby's bath.

"Next time's yous happen along, I'll have a bonser hotel," he said, and leading Marcella outside showed her, under the shade of a tree, a _cache_ of dozens of eggs laid by the hens that ran wild, and buried in the earth; half a sheep wrapped in canvas, surrounded by great clouds of flies gave evidence that it had been long dead.

"Help yourself, missus. We'll all kip together. You'll find a bag o'

flour in the hammock," said the stationmaster, and wandered off to get on with his hotel and his station.

Marcella looked at Louis and laughed.

"What luck! Here's a chance to experiment! If we get to the station where they want a cook, to-morrow, I'll be able to say I gave every satisfaction in my last place."

"Always supposing we're aren't all dead before then," said Louis.

The first job was to boil water and wash the plates on which she amused herself by tracing the remains of quite half a dozen different meals.

She felt sickened by the sight of the dead sheep; Louis seemed unmoved as he ran an anatomical eye over it and hacked off slices with a blunt knife. He became very wise on the subject of flapjacks and felt that Marcella was not quite playing up to him when she preferred to make omelets. The meal was quite a success in spite of the fact that, when it was ready Louis had difficulty in beating up the host and the other guests, and there was nowhere to keep warm the mutton which congealed and stuck hard on the plates. But no one troubled about such a detail.

They ate with enjoyment and drank vast quant.i.ties of tea with much sugar and no milk.

They had an unbearably stuffy night in the breathless railway carriage; once Marcella went out on the platform and sat down for awhile listening to the echo-like barking of dingoes out on the ranges. In less than five minutes she was back again, her feet and hands p.r.i.c.kling and sore with the bites of ants and sandflies. She was not at all sorry when dawn came at half-past three. She was disappointed in the creek; it had sounded luxuriously moist from the note of pride in the stationmaster's voice when he mentioned it. It turned out to be a suncracked water-course with a little muddy water lying in hollows, and one or two deeper holes from which the manganese miners got their water. She had been hoping for a swim: she had to be content with dipping a handkerchief in one of the hollows and wiping her face with it, since all the rest was needed for drinking.

"Next time yous come along we'll have had a drop o' rain, an' then you can drownd yourselfs if you want to," said the stationmaster.

They started out at four o'clock with the information that Gaynor's Station was a collection of weather-board huts, a homestead put together by five lads from England who were trying to make a fortune each. They had not yet made a living between them. Loose End was owned by an elderly squatter with many children. Five big gums, which could be seen for miles, stood sentinel over the homestead on a rising knoll of ground.

"But if yous ain't lucky, don't hit up Loose End. Old Twist has lots o'

luck, but it's mostly bad luck. A kid every year, an' eether a bush fire or a flood or something to make up for it. His eldest is going on for ten, I think--an' how's he to pay for labour to clear his land?"

Neither of them knew, but they decided to make for Loose End and see what was going on under the five gums.

That day was the strangest experience to them both. Louis had tramped before in the cooler New Zealand summer; Marcella had walked miles on Lashnagar. But this walking through the dry, sun-scorched scrub, on which their feet slipped and slid was an experience quite unique. The heat rose from the ground to meet that blazing down from the sky of Prussian blue. At eight o'clock they were both tired, but Marcella, who plodded on, calm and unworried, was not nearly so tired as Louis who made himself hot and dissipated much energy in wondering when they would get there--wherever "there" might be. He had started the day whistling and gay; by ten o'clock he was in the depths of despair and took Marcella's attempts to chaff him as insults and injuries. As soon as they reached a patch of stunted bushes she decreed a halt and a rest.

They filled the billy from their water-bottles and, making a fire with the scorched scrub, had it boiling in a few moments. Louis, though he was revived to interest by the pannikin of tea and a cigarette and biscuits, sank back into deep depression after a few minutes, saying that their coming into the Bush had been the act of lunatics, that they would die of starvation and thirst--until she made him take out his map and find out where they were.

Together they pored over it. After much wrangling they located Loose End beside a small lake and decided that they would reach there to-morrow with considerable effort.

"Anyway, we'll have to, because of our water," said Louis. "Otherwise we'll die." But Marcella found that, by going a few miles west, they would catch up the creek that drained into the little lake.

"It'll only be a dried water-course," said Louis miserably.

"No it won't. It's sure to be a foaming torrent if I say it shall.

Didn't you know I was a witch?" she told him, and she was certainly more right than he, for that night they camped under great eucalyptus trees beside a water-course which ran deep and still at their feet. The first thing they did was to gather wood and make a great fire. After the day's anxiety about water it was intoxicating to know that unlimited quant.i.ties were to be dipped up and made into tea. While the water boiled they splashed about in the water, shaking sand out of the folds of their underclothes and their hair.

They had brought eggs and flour and salt. Louis, looking pleased with himself, produced a tin of Eno's Fruit Salt.

"Always take this stuff into the Bush," he explained. "If you can only get muddy water, this makes it more possible. And it's dashed good stuff for making damper less damping."

He put in too much and the damper was so light that it crumbled and got mixed up in the wood ashes. But they were both too hungry to notice whether they were eating damper or wood ash, and much too blissful to care.

They spread the blankets against the roots of a great tree, over a bed of heathery scrub, very soft and springy; they had no axe or any means of chopping wood, but there was a thick carpet of dead stuff under the trees. Noticing dead branches hanging by thin strips of bark Marcella made a la.s.so with the swag straps and pulled them down. As far as warmth went, there was no need for fire at all as soon as the meal was cooked: but out there in the vast purple-blackness of the night with pin-points of starlight in the illimitable loneliness the rose and gold of the spurting flames was comforting and comradely. They piled the dead wood upon it before they lay down; as one resinous branch after another caught fire the trees danced round in giant shadows, as though they were doing a death-dance for their limbs on the funeral pyre. The silence was a complete blank except when a flapping of wings beat the air where some bird changed its night perch, or a parrot squawked hoa.r.s.ely for a moment, causing a fluttering of smaller wings that soon settled to silence again.

Louis rolled over; like Marcella he had been lying on his back, staring through the trees at the stars. His hand sought hers and held it, quivering a little.

"You know, it's going to be a h.e.l.l of a fight, Marcella," he said.

"Oh my dear, do you think so?" she asked, surprised that he was confirming her opinion.

"Yes. In the city, you see, I only have to fight myself. I know, there, that I can always get the stuff--even if I've no money I can beg or pinch it--All I've to fight there is the accessibility of it. Here I've to fight the inaccessibility...."

"I don't quite understand that, Louis."

"I don't suppose you do. You see, dearie, out here it's quite on the cards that I shall go completely off my rocker." He spoke quietly, rather wistfully and sadly.

"Louis!" she cried, sitting up and looking down at him.