Rex Beach - "The Net"

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Australia Felix

H >> Henry Handel Richardson (1870 1946) >> Australia Felix




A temptation, indeed! . . . but one that did not affect him. Mahony let
the reins droop on his horse's neck, and the animal picked its way among
the impedimenta of the bush road. It concerned only those who had money
to spare. Months, too, must go by before, from even the most promising
of these co-operative affairs, any return was to be expected. As for
him, there still came days when he had not a five-pound note to his
name. It had been a delusion to suppose that, in accepting John's offer,
he was leaving money-troubles behind him. Despite Polly's thrift, their
improved style of life cost more than he had reckoned; the patients,
slow to come, were slower still to discharge their debts. Moreover, he
had not guessed how heavily the quarterly payments of interest would
weigh on him. With as good as no margin, with the fate of every shilling
decided beforehand, the saving up of thirty odd pounds four times a year
was a veritable achievement. He was always in a quake lest he should not
be able to get it together. No one suspected what near shaves he had--
not even Polly. The last time hardly bore thinking about. At the
eleventh hour he had unexpectedly found himself several pounds short. He
did not close an eye all night, and got up in the morning as though for
his own execution. Then, fortune favoured him. A well-to-do butcher, his
hearty: "What'll yours be?" at the nearest public-house waved aside, had
settled his bill off-hand. Mahony could still feel the sudden lift of
the black fog-cloud that had enveloped him--the sense of bodily
exhaustion that had succeeded to the intolerable mental strain.

For the coming quarter-day he was better prepared--if, that was,
nothing out of the way happened. Of late he had been haunted by the fear
of illness. The long hours in the saddle did not suit him. He ought to
have a buggy, and a second horse. But there could be no question of it
in the meantime, or of a great deal else besides. He wanted to buy Polly
a piano, for instance; all her friends had pianos; and she played and
sang very prettily. She needed more dresses and bonnets, too, than he
was able to allow her, as well as a change to the seaside in the summer
heat. The first spare money he had should go towards one or the other.
He loved to give Polly pleasure; never was such a contented little soul
as she. And well for him that it was so. To have had a complaining, even
an impatient wife at his side, just now, would have been unbearable. But
Polly did not know what impatience meant; her sunny temper, her fixed
resolve to make the best of everything was not to be shaken.

Well, comforts galore should be hers some day, he hoped. The practice
was shaping satisfactorily. His attendance at Dandaloo had proved a key
to many doors: folk of the Glendinnings' and Urquharts' standing could
make a reputation or mar it as they chose. It had got abroad, he knew,
that at whatever hour of the day or night he was sent for, he could be
relied on to be sober; and that unfortunately was not always the case
with some of his colleagues. In addition his fellow-practitioners showed
signs of waking up to his existence. He had been called in lately to a
couple of consultations; and the doyen of the profession on Ballarat,
old Munce himself, had praised his handling of a difficult case of
version.

The distances to be covered--that was what made the work stiff. And he
could not afford to neglect a single summons, no matter where it led
him. Still, he would not have grumbled, had only the money not been so
hard to get in. But the fifty thousand odd souls on Ballarat formed,
even yet, anything but a stable population: a patient you attended one
day might be gone the next, and gone where no bill could reach him. Or
he had been sold off at public auction; or his wooden shanty had gone up
in a flare--hardly a night passed without a fire somewhere. In these
and like accidents the unfortunate doctor might whistle for his fee. It
seldom happened nowadays that he was paid in cash. Money was growing as
scarce here as anywhere else. Sometimes, it was true, he might have
pocketed his fee on the spot, had he cared to ask for it. But the
presenting of his palm professionally was a gesture that was denied him.
And this stand-offishness drove from people's minds the thought that he
might be in actual need of money. Afterwards he sat at home and racked
his brains how to pay butcher and grocer. Others of the fraternity were
by no means so nice. He knew of some who would not stir a yard unless
their fee was planked down before them--old stagers these, who at one
time had been badly bitten and were now grown cynically distrustful. Or
tired. And indeed who could blame a man for hesitating of a pitch-dark
night in the winter rains, or on a blazing summer day, whether or no he
should set out on a twenty-mile ride for which he might never see the
ghost of a remuneration?

Reflecting thus, Mahony caught at a couple of hard, spicy, grey-green
leaves, to chew as he went: the gums, on which the old bark hung in
ribbons, were in flower by now, and bore feathery yellow blossoms side
by side with nutty capsules. His horse had been ambling forward
unpressed. Now it laid its ears flat, and a minute later its master's
slower senses caught the clop-clop of a second set of hoofs, the noise
of wheels. Mahony had reached a place where two roads joined, and saw a
covered buggy approaching. He drew rein and waited.

The occupant of the vehicle had wound the reins round the empty
lamp-bracket, and left it to the sagacity of his horse to keep the
familiar track, while he dozed, head on breast, in the corner. The animal
halted of itself on coming up with its fellow, and Archdeacon Long opened
his eyes.

"Ah, good-day to you, doctor!--Yes, as you see, enjoying a little nap.
I was out early."

He got down from the buggy and, with bent knees and his hands in his
pockets, stretched the creased cloth of his trousers, where this had cut
into his flesh. He was a big, brawny, handsome man, with a massive nose,
a cloven chin, and the most companionable smile in the world. As he
stood, he touched here a strap, there a buckle on the harness of his
chestnut--a well-known trotter, with which he often made a match--and
affectionately clapped the neck of Mahony's bay. He could not keep his
hands off a horse. By choice he was his own stableman, and in earlier
life had been a dare-devil rider. Now, increasing weight led him to
prefer buggy to saddle; but his recklessness had not diminished. With
the reins in his left hand, he would run his light, two-wheeled trap up
any wooded, boulder-strewn hill and down the other side, just as in his
harum-scarum days he had set it at felled trees, and, if rumour spoke
true, wire-fences.

Mahony admired the splendid vitality of the man, as well as the
indestructible optimism that bore him triumphantly through all the
hardships of a colonial ministry. No sick bed was too remote for Long,
no sinner sunk too low to be helped to his feet. The leprous Chinaman
doomed to an unending isolation, the drunken Paddy, the degraded white
woman--each came in for a share of his benevolence. He spent the
greater part of his life visiting the outcasts and outposts, beating up
the unbaptised, the unconfirmed, the unwed. But his church did not
suffer. He had always some fresh scheme for this on hand: either he was
getting up a tea-meeting to raise money for an organ; or a series of
penny-readings towards funds for a chancel; or he was training with his
choir for a sacred concert. There was a boyish streak in him, too. He
would enter into the joys of the annual Sunday-school picnic with a zest
equal to the children's own, leading the way, in shirt-sleeves, at
leap-frog and obstacle-race. In doctrine he struck a happy mean between
low-church practices and ritualism, preaching short, spirited sermons to
which even languid Christians could listen without tedium; and on a
week-day evening he would take a hand at a rubber of whist or
ecarte--and not for love--or play a sound game of chess. A man, too, who,
refusing to be bound by the letter of the Thirty-nine Articles, extended
his charity even to persons of the Popish faith. In short, he was one of
the few to whom Mahony could speak of his own haphazard efforts at
criticising the Pentateuch.

The Archdeacon was wont to respond with his genial smile: "Ah, it's all
very well for you, doctor!--you're a free lance. I am constrained by my
cloth.--And frankly, for the rest of us, that kind of thing's too--
well, too disturbing. Especially when we have nothing better to put in
its place."

Doctor and parson--the latter, considerably over six feet, made Mahony,
who was tall enough, look short and doubly slender--walked side by side
for nearly a mile, flitting from topic to topic: the rivalry that
prevailed between Ballarats East and West; the seditious uprising in
India, where both had relatives; the recent rains, the prospects for
grazing. The last theme brought them round to Dandaloo and its unhappy
owner. The Archdeacon expressed the outsider's surprise at the strength
of Glendinning's constitution, and the lively popular sympathy that was
felt for his wife.

"One's heart aches for the poor little lady, struggling to bear up as
though nothing were the matter. Between ourselves, doctor"--and Mr.
Long took off his straw hat to let the air play round his head--
"between ourselves, it's a thousand pities he doesn't just pop off the
hooks in one of his bouts. Or that some of you medical gentlemen don't
use your knowledge to help things on."

He let out his great hearty laugh as he spoke, and his companion's
involuntary stiffening went unnoticed. But on Mahony voicing his
attitude with: "And his immortal soul, sir? Isn't it the church's duty
to hope for a miracle? . . . just as it is ours to keep the vital spark
going," he made haste to take the edge off his words. "Now, now, doctor,
only my fun! Our duty is, I trust, plain to us both."

It was even easier to soothe than to ruffle Mahony. "Remember me very
kindly to Mrs. Long, will you?" he said as the Archdeacon prepared to
climb into his buggy. "But tell her, too, I owe her a grudge just now.
My wife's so lost in flannel and brown holland that I can't get a word
out of her."

"And mine doesn't know where she'd be, with this bazaar, if it weren't
for Mrs. Mahony." Long was husband to a dot of a woman who, having borne
him half a dozen children of his own feature and build, now worked as
parish clerk and district visitor rolled in one; driving about in
sunbonnet and gardening-gloves behind a pair of cream ponies--tiny,
sharp-featured, resolute; with little of her husband's large tolerance,
but an energy that outdid his own, and made her an object of both fear
and respect. "And that reminds me: over at the cross-roads by Spring
Hill, I met your young brother-in-law. And he told me, if I ran across
you to ask you to hurry home. Your wife has some surprise or other in
store for you. No, nothing unpleasant! Rather the reverse, I believe.
But I wasn't to say more. Well, good-day, doctor, good-day to you!"

Mahony smiled, nodded and went on his way. Polly's surprises were
usually simple and transparent things: some one would have made them a
present of a sucking-pig or a bush-turkey, and Polly, knowing his relish
for a savoury morsel, did not wish it to be overdone: she had sent
similar chance calls out after him before now.

When, having seen his horse rubbed down, he reached home, he found her
on the doorstep watching for him. She was flushed, and her eyes had
those peculiar high-lights in them which led him jokingly to exhort her
to caution: "Lest the sparks should set the house on fire!"

"Well, what is it, Pussy?" he inquired as he laid his bag down and hung
up his wide-awake. "What's my little surprise-monger got up her sleeve
to-day? Good Lord, Polly, I'm tired!"

Polly was smiling roguishly. "Aren't you going into the surgery,
Richard?" she asked, seeing him heading for the dining-room.

"Aha! So that's it," said he, and obediently turned the handle. Polly
had on occasion taken advantage of his absence to introduce some new
comfort or decoration in his room.

The blind had been let down. He was still blinking in the half-dark when
a figure sprang out from behind the door, barging heavily against him,
and a loud voice shouted: "Boh, you old beef-brains! Boh to a goose!"

Displeased at such horseplay, Mahony stepped sharply back--his first
thought was of Ned having unexpectedly returned from Mount Ararat. Then
recognising the voice, he exclaimed incredulously: "YOU, Dickybird?
You!"

"Dick, old man. . . . I say, Dick! Yes, it's me right enough, and not my
ghost. The old bad egg come back to roost!"

The blind was raised; and the friends, who had last met in the dingy
bush hut on the night of the Stockade, stood face to face. And now
ensued a babel of greeting, a quick fire of question and answer, the two
voices going in and out and round each other, singly and together, like
the voices in a duet. Tears rose to Polly's eyes as she listened; it
made her heart glow to see Richard so glad. But when, forgetting her
presence, Purdy cried: "And I must confess, Dick. . . . I took a kiss
from Mrs. Polly. Gad, old man, how she's come on!" Polly hastily retired
to the kitchen.

At table the same high spirits prevailed: it did not often happen that
Richard was brought out of his shell like this, thought Polly
gratefully, and heaped her visitor's plate to the brim. His first hunger
stilled, Purdy fell to giving a slapdash account of his experiences. He
kept to no orderly sequence, but threw them out just as they occurred to
him: a rub with bushrangers in the Black Forest, his adventures as a
long-distance drover in the Mildura, the trials of a week he had spent
in a boiling-down establishment on the Murray: "Where the stink wa so
foul, you two, that I vomited like a dog every day!" Under the force of
this Odyssey husband and wife gradually dropped into silence, which they
broke only by single words of astonishment and sympathy; while the child
Trotty spooned in her pudding without seeing it, her round, solemn eyes
fixed unblinkingly on this new uncle, who was like a wonderful
story-book come alive.

In Mahony's feelings for Purdy at this moment, there was none of the old
intolerant superiority. He had been dependent for so long on a mere
surface acquaintance with his fellows, that he now felt to the full how
precious the tie was that bound him to Purdy. Here came one for whom he
was not alone the reserved, struggling practitioner, the rather moody
man advancing to middle-age; but also the Dick of his boyhood and early
youth.

He had often imagined the satisfaction it would be to confide his
troubles to Purdy. Compared, however, with the hardships the latter had
undergone, these seemed of small importance; and dinner passed without
any allusion to his own affairs. And now the chances of his speaking out
were slight; he could have been entirely frank only under the first
stimulus of meeting.

Even when they rose from the table Purdy continued to hold the stage.
For he had turned up with hardly a shirt to his back, and had to be
rigged out afresh from Mahony's wardrobe. It was decided that he should
remain their guest in the meantime; also that Mahony should call on his
behalf on the Commissioner of Police, and put in a good word for him.
For Purdy had come back with the idea of seeking a job in the Ballarat
Mounted Force.

When Mahony could no longer put off starting on his afternoon round,
Purdy went with him to the livery-barn, limping briskly at his side. On
the way, he exclaimed aloud at the marvellous changes that had taken
place since he was last in the township. There were half a dozen gas-lamps
in Sturt Street by this time, the gas being distilled from a
mixture of oil and gum-leaves.

"One wouldn't credit it if one didn't see it with one's own peepers!" he
cried, repeatedly bringing up short before the plate-glass windows of
the shops, the many handsome, verandahed hotels, the granite front of
Christ Church. "And from what I hear, Dick, now companies have jumped
the claims and are deep-sinking in earnest, fortunes'll be made like one
o'clock."

But on getting home again, he sat down in front of Polly and said, with
a businesslike air: "And now tell me all about old Dick! You know, Poll,
he's such an odd fish; if he himself doesn't offer to uncork, somehow
one can't just pump him. And I want to know everything that concerns him
--from A to Z."

Polly could not hold out against this affectionate curiosity.
Entrenching her needle in its stuff, she put her work away and complied.
And soon to her own satisfaction. For the first time in her married life
she was led to discuss her husband's ways and actions with another; and,
to her amazement, she found that it was easier to talk to Purdy about
Richard than to Richard himself. Purdy and she saw things in the same
light; no rigmarole of explanation was necessary. Now with Richard, it
was not so. In conversation with him, one constantly felt that he was
not speaking out, or, to put it more plainly, that he was going on
meanwhile with his own, very different thoughts. And behind what he did
say, there was sure to lurk some imaginary scruple, some rather
far-fetched delicacy of feeling which it was hard to get at, and harder
still to understand.




Chapter VII

Summer had come round again, and the motionless white heat of December
lay heavy on the place. The low little houses seemed to cower beneath
it; and the smoke from their chimneys drew black, perpendicular lines on
the pale sky. If it was a misery at this season to traverse the blazing,
dusty roads, it was almost worse to be within doors, where the thin
wooden walls were powerless to keep out the heat, and flies and
mosquitoes raged in chorus. Nevertheless, determined Christmas
preparations went on in dozens of tiny, zinc-roofed kitchens, the
temperature of which was not much below that of the ovens themselves;
and kindly, well-to-do people like Mrs. Glendinning and Mrs. Urquhart
drove in in hooded buggies, with green fly-veils dangling from their
broad-brimmed hats, and dropped a goose here, a turkey there, on their
less prosperous friends. They robbed their gardens, too, of the summer's
last flowers, arum-lilies and brilliant geraniums, to decorate the
Archdeacon's church for the festival; and many ladies spent the whole
day beforehand making wreaths and crosses, and festoons to encircle the
lamps.

No one was busier than Polly. She wanted to give Purdy, who had been on
short commons for so long, a special Christmas treat. She had willing
helpers in him and Jerry: the two of them chopped and stoned and
stirred, while she, seated on the block of the woodstack, her head tied
up in an old pillow-case, plucked and singed the goose that had fallen
to her share. Towards four o'clock on Christmas Day they drew their
chairs to the table, and with loosened collars set about enjoying the
good things. Or pretending to enjoy them. This was Mahony's case; for
the day was no holiday for him, and his head ached from the sun. At
tea-time Hempel arrived to pay a call, looking very spruce in a long black
coat and white tie; and close on his heels followed old Mr. Ocock. The
latter, having deposited his hat under his seat and tapped several
pockets, produced a letter, which he unfolded and handed to Polly with a
broad grin. It was from his daughter, and contained the news of his
wife's death. "Died o' the grumbles, I lay you! An' the first good turn
she ever done me." The main point was that Miss Amelia, now at liberty,
was already taking advice about the safest line of clipper-ships, and
asking for a reply BY RETURN to a number of extraordinary questions.
Could one depend on hearing God's Word preached of a Sunday? Was it
customary for FEMALES to go armed as well as men? Were the blacks
CONVERTED, and what amount of clothing did they wear?

"Thinks she's comin' to the back o' beyond, does Mely!" chuckled the old
man, and slapped his thigh at the sudden idea that occurred to him of
"takin' a rise out of 'er." "Won't she stare when she gits 'ere, that's
all!"

"Well, now you'll simply HAVE to build," said Polly, after threatening
to write privately to Miss Amelia, to reassure her. Why not move over
west, and take up a piece of ground in the same road as themselves? But
from this he excused himself, with a laugh and a spit, on the score that
no land-sales had yet been held in their neighbourhood: when he DID turn
out of his present four walls, which had always been plenty good enough
for him, he wanted a place he could "fit up tidy"; which it 'ud stick in
his throat to do so, if he thought it might any day be sold over his
head. Mahony winced at this. Then laughed, with an exaggerated
carelessness. If, in a country like this, you waited for all to be fixed
and sure, you would wait till Domesday. None the less, the thrust
rankled. It was a fact that he himself had not spent a sou on his
premises since they finished building. The thought at the back of HIS
mind, too, was, why waste his hard-earned income on improvements that
might benefit only the next-comer? The yard they sat in, for instance!
Polly had her hens and a ramshackle hen-house; but not a spadeful of
earth had been turned towards the wished-for garden. It was just the
ordinary colonial backyard, fenced round with rude palings which did not
match, and were mended here and there with bits of hoop-iron; its ground
space littered with a medley of articles for which there was no room
elsewhere: boards left lying by the builders, empty kerosene-tins, a
couple of tubs, a ragged cane-chair, some old cases. Wash-lines, on
which at the moment a row of stockings hung, stretched permanently from
corner to corner; and the whole was dominated by the big round
galvanised-iron tank.

On Boxing Day Purdy got the loan of a lorry and drove a large party,
including several children, comfortably placed on straw, hassocks and
low chairs, to the Races a few miles out. Half Ballarat was making in
the same direction; and whoever owned a horse that was sound in the wind
and anything of a stepper had entered it for some item on the programme.
The Grand Stand, a bark shed open to the air on three sides, was
resorted to only in the case of a sudden downpour; the occupants of the
dust-laden buggies, wagonettes, brakes, carts and drays preferred to
follow events standing on their seats, and on the boards that served
them as seats. After the meeting, those who belonged to the
Urquhart-Glendinning set went on to Yarangobilly, and danced till long
pastmidnight on the broad verandah. It was nearly three o'clock before
Purdy brought his load safely home. Under the round white moon, the lorry
was strewn with the forms of sleeping children.

Early next morning while Polly, still only half awake, was pouring out
coffee and giving Richard who, poor fellow, could not afford to leave
his patients, an account of their doings--with certain omissions, of
course: she did not mention the glaring indiscretion Agnes Glendinning
had been guilty of, in disappearing with Mr. Henry Ocock into a dark
shrubbery--while Polly talked, the postman handed in two letters, which
were of a nature to put balls and races clean out of her head. The first
was in Mrs. Beamish's ill-formed hand, and told a sorrowful tale. Custom
had entirely gone: a new hotel had been erected on the new road; Beamish
was forced to declare himself a bankrupt; and in a few days the Family
Hotel, with all its contents, would be put up at public auction. What
was to become of them, God alone knew. She supposed she would end her
days in taking in washing, and the girls must go out as servants. But
she was sure Polly, now so up in the world, with a husband doing so
well, would not forget the old friends who had once been so kind to her
--with much more in the same strain, which Polly skipped, in reading the
letter aloud. The long and short of it was: would Polly ask her husband
to lend them a couple of hundred pounds to make a fresh start with, or
failing that to put his name to a bill for the same amount?

"Of course she hasn't an idea we were obliged to borrow money
ourselves," said Polly in response to Mahony's ironic laugh. "I couldn't
tell them that."

"No . . . nor that it's a perpetual struggle to keep the wolf from the
door," answered her husband, battering in the top of an egg with the
back of his spoon.

"Oh, Richard dear, things aren't quite so bad as that," said Polly
cheerfully. Then she heaved a sigh. "I know, of course, we can't afford
to help them; but I DO feel so sorry for them"--she herself would have
given the dress off her back. "And I think, dear, if you didn't mind
VERY much, we might ask one of the girls up to stay with us . . . till
the worst is over."

"Yes, I suppose that wouldn't be impossible," said Mahony. "If you've
set your heart on it, my Polly. If, too, you can persuade Master Purdy
to forgo the comfort of your good feather-bed. And I'll see if I can
wring out a fiver for you to enclose in your letter."

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