Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “You mean your engagement? I remember the terms perfectly. I have only to write you a check for the next six months’ salary any time I like, to put an end to it. And upon my word, Monty, you seem to want me to do so to-night!”

  CHAPTER III “HARD TIMES”

  It was the middle of the Sunday afternoon, when the young men of Taroomba were for the most part sound asleep upon their beds. They were wise young men enough, in ways, and to punctuate the weeks of hard labor at the wool-shed with thoroughly slack Sundays at the home station was a practice of the plainest common-sense. To do otherwise would have been to fly in the face of nature. Yet just because Naomi Pryse chose to settle herself in the veranda outside the sitting-room door with a book, the young man who had worked harder than any of the others during the week must needs be the one to spend the afternoon of rest at her feet, and with nothing but a lean veranda-post to shelter his broad back from the sun.

  This was Tom Chester, of whom Naomi had spoken highly to her protégé, the piano-tuner. Tom was newly and beautifully shaved, and he had further observed the Sabbath by putting on a white shirt and collar, and a suit of clothes in which a man might have walked down Collins Street; but he seemed quite content to sit in them on the dirty veranda boards, for the sake of watching Naomi as she read. She had not a great deal to say to him, but she had commanded him to light his pipe, and as often as she dropped the book into her lap to make a remark, she could reckon upon a sympathetic answer, preceded by a puff of the tobacco-smoke she loved.

  “It is a dreadful noise, though, isn’t it?” Naomi had observed more than once.

  “It is so,” Tom Chester would answer, with a smile and another puff.

  “He made such a point of setting to work this morning, you know, and it’s so good of him to work on Sunday. I don’t see how we can stop him.”

  Then Naomi would sit silent, but not reading, and would presently announce that she had counted the striking of that note twenty-nine times in succession. Once she made it sixty-six; but the piano-tuner behind the closed door had broken his own record, and seemed in a fair way of hammering out the same note a hundred times running, when Monty Gilroy came tramping along the veranda with blinking yellow eyelashes, and his red face pale with temper. Miss Pryse was keeping tally aloud when the manager blundered upon the scene.

  “I say, Naomi, how long is this to go on?” exclaimed Gilroy, in a tone that was half-complaining, half-injured, but wholly different from that which he had employed toward her the night before.

  “Eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five,” counted Naomi, giving him a nod and a smile.

  “I hadn’t been asleep ten minutes when he awoke me with his infernal din.”

  “Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three — —”

  “It’s no joke when a man has been over the board the whole week,” said Gilroy, trying to smile nevertheless.

  “Ninety-seven, ninety-eight — well, I’ll be jiggered!”

  “Ninety-eight it is,” said Tom Chester.

  “Yes, he’s changed the note. He might have given it a couple more! Still, it’s the record. Now, Monty, please forgive us; we’re trying to make the best of a bad job, as you see.”

  “It is a bad job,” assented Gilroy, whose rueful countenance concealed (but not from the girl) a vile temper smouldering. “It’s pretty rough, I think, on us chaps who’ve been working like Kanakas all the week.”

  “Well, but you were pretty rough upon poor Mr. Engelhardt last night; so don’t you think that it serves you quite right?”

  “Poor Mr. Engelhardt!” echoed Gilroy, savagely. “So it serves us right, does it?” He forced a laugh. “What do you say, Tom?”

  “I think it serves you right, too,” answered Tom Chester, coolly.

  Gilroy laughed again.

  “So you’re crackin’, old chap,” said he, genially. He generally was genial with Tom Chester, for whom he entertained a hatred enhanced by fear. “But I say, Naomi, need this sort of thing go on all the afternoon?”

  “If it doesn’t he will have to stay till to-morrow.”

  “Ah! I see.”

  “I thought you would. The piano was in a bad way, and he said there was a long day’s work in it; but he seems anxious to get away this evening, that’s why he began before breakfast.”

  “Then let him stick to it, by all means, and we’ll all clear out together. I’ll see that his horse is run up — I’ll go now.”

  He went.

  “That’s the most jealous gentleman in this colony,” said Naomi to her companion. “He’d rather suffer anything than leave this little piano-tuner and me alone together!”

  “Poor little chap,” said Chester of the musician; he had nothing to say about Gilroy, who was still in view from the veranda, a swaggering figure in the strong sunlight, with his hands in his cross-cut breeches’ pockets, his elbows sticking out, and the strut of a cock on its own midden. Tom Chester watched him with a hard light in his clear eye, and a moistening of the palms of his hands. Tom was pretty good with his fists, and for many a weary month he had been spoiling for a fight with Monty Gilroy, who very likely was not the only jealous gentleman on Taroomba.

  All this time the piano-tuner was at his fiendish work behind the closed door, over which Naomi Pryse had purposely mounted guard. Distracting repetitions of one note were varied only by depressing octaves and irritating thirds. Occasionally a chord or two promised a trial trip over the keys, but such promises were never fulfilled. At last Naomi shut her book, with a hopeless smile at Tom Chester, who was ready for her with an answering grin.

  “Really, I can’t stand it any longer, Mr. Chester.”

  “You have borne it like a man, Miss Pryse.”

  “I wanted to make sure that nobody bothered him. Do you think we may safely leave him now?”

  “Quite safely. Gilroy is up at the yards, and Sanderson only plays the fool to an audience. Let me pull you out of your chair.”

  “Thanks. That’s it. Let us stroll up to the horse-paddock gate and back; then it will be time for tea; and let’s hope our little tuner will have finished his work at last.”

  “I believe he has finished now,” Tom Chester said, as they turned their backs on the homestead. “He’s never run up and down the board like that before.”

  “The board!” said Miss Pryse, laughing. “No, don’t you believe it; he won’t finish for another hour.”

  Tom Chester was right, however. As Naomi and he passed out of earshot, the piano-tuner faced about on the music-stool, and peered wistfully through the empty room at the closed door, straining his ear for their voices. Of course he heard nothing; but the talking on the veranda had never been continuous, so that did not surprise him. It gladdened him, rather. She was reading. She might be alone; his heart beat quicker for the thought. She had sat there all day, of her own kind will, enduring his melancholy performance; now she should have her reward. His eyes glistened as he searched in his memory for some restful, dreamy melody, which should at once soothe and charm her ears aching from his crude unmusical monotonies. Suddenly he rubbed his hands, and then stretching them out and leaning backward on the stool he let his fingers fall with their lightest and daintiest touch upon Naomi’s old piano.

  He had chosen a very simple, well-known piece; but it need not be so well known in the bush. Miss Pryse might never have heard it before, in which case she could not fail to be enchanted. It was the “Schlummerlied” of Schumann, and the piano-tuner played it with all the very considerable feeling and refinement of which he was capable, and with a smile all the time for its exceeding appropriateness. What could chime more truly with the lazy stillness of the Sunday afternoon than this sweet, bewitching lullaby? Engelhardt had always loved it; but never in his life had he played it half so well. As he finished — softly, but not so softly as to risk a single note dropping short of the veranda — he wheeled round again with a sudden self-conscious movement. It was as though he expected to find the door open and Nao
mi entranced upon the threshold. It is a fact that he sat watching the door-handle to see it turn, first with eagerness, and at last with acute disappointment. His disappointment was no greater when he opened the door himself and saw the book lying in the empty chair. That, indeed, was a relief. To find her sitting there unmoved was what his soul had dreaded.

  But now that his work was done, the piano-tuner felt very lonely and unhappy. To escape from these men with whom he could not get on was his strongest desire but one; the other was to stay and see more of the glorious girl who had befriended him; and he was torn between the two, because his longing for love was scarcely more innate than his shrinking from ridicule and scorn. He knew this, too, and had as profound a scorn for himself as any he was likely to meet with from another. His saving grace was the moral courage which enabled him to run counter to his own craven inclinations.

  Thus in the early morning he had apologized to Sanderson, the store-keeper, for the loss of his temper overnight; after lying awake for hours chewing the bitterness of this humiliating move, he had determined upon it in the end. But determination was what he had — it takes not a little to bring you to apologize in cold blood to a rougher man than yourself. Engelhardt had done this, and more. At breakfast and at dinner he had made heroic efforts to be affable and at ease with the men who despised him; though each attempt touched a fresh nerve in his sensitive, self-conscious soul. And now, because from the veranda he could descry Gilroy and Sanderson up at the stock-yards, and because these men were the very two whose society he most dreaded, his will was that he must join them then and there.

  He was a man himself; and if he could not get on with other men, that was his own lookout. No doubt, too, it was his own fault. It was a fault of which he swore an oath that he would either cure himself or suffer the consequences like a man. He may even have taken a private pride in being game against the grain. There is no fathoming the thoughts that generate action in egotistical, but noble, natures, whose worst enemy is their own inner consciousness.

  Gilroy and Sanderson were in the horse-yard, leaning backward against the heavy white rails. Their pipes were in their mouths, and they were watching Sam Rowntree stalk a wiry bay horse that took some catching. Sam was the groom, and he had just run up all the horses out of the horse-paddock. The yard was full of them. Gilroy hauled a freckled hand out of a cross pocket to point at the piano-tuner’s nag.

  “Poor-looking devil,” said he.

  “Yes, the kind you see when you’re out without a gun,” remarked the wit. “Quite good enough for a thing like him, though.” Some association of ideas caused him to glance round toward the homestead through the rails. “By the hokey, here’s the thing itself!” he cried.

  The pair watched Engelhardt approach.

  “I’d like to break his beastly head for him,” muttered the manager. “The cheek of him, spoiling our spell with that cursed row!”

  The piano-tuner came up with a pleasant smile that was an effort to him, and pretended not to notice Sanderson’s stock remark, that “queer things come out after the rain.”

  “You’ll be glad to hear, gentlemen, that I’ve finished my job,” said he, airily.

  “Thank God,” growled Gilroy.

  “I know it’s been a great infliction — —”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” said Sanderson, winking desperately. “We liked it. It’s just what we do like. You bet!”

  The wiry bay horse had been caught by this time, and Sam Rowntree was saddling it, by degrees, for the animal was obviously fresh and touchy. Engelhardt watched the performance with a bitter feeling of envy for all Australian men, and of contempt for himself because they contemned him. The fault was his, not theirs. He was of a different order from these rough, light-hearted men — of an altogether inferior order, as it seemed to his self-criticising mind. But that was no excuse for his not getting on with them, and as a rider puts his horse at a fence again and again, so Engelhardt spurred himself on to one more effort to do so.

  “That’s your horse, Mr. Gilroy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw the ‘G’ on the left shoulder.”

  “You mean the near shoulder; a horse hasn’t a left.”

  “No? I’m not well up in horses. What’s his name?”

  “Hard Times.”

  “That’s good! I like his looks, too — not that I know anything about horses.”

  Here Sanderson whispered something to Gilroy, who said carelessly to Engelhardt:

  “Can you ride?”

  “I can ride my own moke.”

  “Like a turn on Hard Times?”

  “Yes! I should.”

  This was said in a manner that was all the more decided for the moments of deliberation which preceded it. The piano-tuner was paler even than usual, but all at once his jaw had grown hard and strong, and there was a keen light in his eyes. The others looked at him, unable to determine whether it was a good rider they were dealing with or a born fool.

  “Fetch him out of the yard, Sam,” said Gilroy to the groom. “This gentleman here is going to draw first blood.”

  Sam Rowntree stared.

  “You’d better not, mister,” said he, looking doubtfully at the musician. “He’s fresh off the grass — hasn’t had the saddle on him for two months.”

  “Get away, Sam. The gentleman means to take some of the cussedness out of him. Isn’t that it, Engelhardt?”

  “I mean to try,” said Engelhardt, quietly.

  A lanky middle-aged bushman, who had loafed across from the men’s hut, here spat into the sand without removing the pipe from his teeth, and put in his word.

  “Becod, then ye’re a brave man! He bucks like beggary. He’s bucked me as high as a blessed house!”

  “We’ll see how high he can buck me,” said Engelhardt.

  Gilroy was losing interest in the proceedings. The little fool could ride after all; instead of being scored off, he was going to score. The manager thrust his hands deep in his cross pockets, and watched sullenly, with his yellow eyelashes drooping over his blue eyes. Suddenly he strode forward, crying:

  “What the blazes are you up to, you idiot?”

  Engelhardt had shown signs of mounting on the off-side, but was smiling as though he had done it on purpose.

  “He’s all right,” said the long stockman with the pipe. “He knows a thing or two, my word.”

  But his style of mounting in the end hardly tallied with this theory. The piano-tuner scrambled into the saddle, and kicked about awkwardly before finding his stirrups; and the next thing he did was to job the horse’s mouth with the wanton recklessness of pure innocence. The watchers held their breath. As for Hard Times, he seemed to know that he was bestridden by an unworthy foeman, to appreciate the humor of the situation, and to make up his evil mind to treat it humorously as it deserved. Away he went, along the broad road between homestead and yards, at the sweetest and most guileless canter. The rider was sitting awkwardly enough, but evidently as tight as he knew how. And he needed all the grip within the power of his loins and knees. Half-way to the house, without a single premonitory symptom, the wiry bay leapt clean into the air, with all its legs gathered up under its body, its head tucked between its knees, and its back arched like a bent bow. Down it came, with a thud, then up again like a ball, again and again, and yet again.

  At the first buck Engelhardt stuck nobly; he evidently had been prepared for the worst. The second displayed a triangle of blue sky between his legs and the saddle; he had lost his stirrups and the reins, but was clinging to the mane with all ten fingers, and to the saddle with knees and shins.

  “Sit tight!” roared Gilroy. “Stick to him!” yelled Sanderson. “Slide off as he comes down!” shouted the groom.

  But if Engelhardt heard them he did not understand. He only knew that for the first time in his life he was on a buck-jumper, and that he meant to stay there as long as the Lord would let him. A wild exhilaration swamped every other sensation. The blue sky fell be
fore him like a curtain at each buck; at the fifth his body was seen against it like a burst balloon; and after that, Hard Times was left to the more difficult but less exciting task of bucking himself out of an empty saddle.

  They carried Engelhardt toward the house. But Naomi came running out and met them half-way, and Tom Chester was at her back. From the veranda the two had seen it happen. And in all that was done during the next minutes Naomi was prime mover.

  “You call yourselves men. Men indeed! There’s more manhood lying here than ever there was or will be in the two of you put together!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  The voices were those of Miss Pryse and Tom Chester. They were the first that Engelhardt heard when his senses came back to him. But the first thing that was said to him when he opened his eyes was said by Gilroy:

  “Why the devil didn’t you tell us you couldn’t ride?”

  He did not answer, but Tom Chester said coolly before them all:

  “He can ride a jolly sight better than you can, Gilroy. You sit five bucks and I’ll give you five notes.”

  There was bad blood in the air. The piano-tuner could not help it. His head was all wrong, and his right arm felt red-hot from wrist to elbow; he discovered that it was bare, and in the hands of Miss Pryse. He felt ashamed, it was such a thin arm. But Miss Pryse smiled at him kindly, and he smiled faintly back at her; he just saw Tom Chester tearing the yellow backs off a novel, and handing them to the kneeling girl; then once more he closed his eyes.

  “He’s off again,” said Naomi. “Thank God I can set a joint. There’s nothing to watch, all of you! Sam, you may as well turn out this gentleman’s horse again. If anybody thought of getting rid of him to-night, they’ve gone the wrong way about it, for now he shall stay here till he’s able to go on tuning pianos.”

  And as she spoke Naomi looked up, and sent her manager to the rightabout with a single stare of contempt and defiance.