Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  “I might buy it for you. A little Christmas present, eh?”

  “Ugh, Christmas. By Christmas I'll be in America.”

  “America? Damn it, you'll be here.”

  “What's a bloke want to hang around here for? A bloke's not appreciated. A bloke's only a hanger-on. I'm going to America.”

  Cabell bit back his anger. “I'll buy you the horse and double your allowance right away—how's that? What could you do in America? You've got a good home here.”

  “A good home!” Geoffrey grumbled. “Where a bloke's always being accused of pinching off his father! I tell you, a bloke's got pride. I've had enough. I'm going.”

  Of course he did not go. Cabell gave him a racehorse, paid his bills, doubled his allowance, submitted to being robbed, and had miserable nights wondering what would happen if one of his business enemies ever discovered how cheaply they could buy Geoffrey, and the hundred ways they could use him, or if Larry were to get free and come back.

  So really he was not sorry to have James in the house once more. James had always done as he was told and Cabell had no doubt he would go on doing it. No backbone and a prig, but honest. As his proxy in Brisbane and at the mine he would obey orders, and if he didn't Geoffrey would smell him out. Thus the indomitable old man prepared to go on fighting, though no longer with any purpose except to hide from himself that he had no purpose for which to go on fighting and amassing wealth. He did not want to see the blind wall, hear the question, “What was it all for? Who will thank you?”

  From the first peep of dawn when he awoke till well after midnight when sleep came reluctantly over his sharp, obscure, and unconfessed pain, he sat at his desk and tried to keep his eye turned out by loading himself with worry about the most trivial details of the mine and the stations. He scrutinized every line in the mine managers' reports, every figure in Custard's schedules of stock and rations, checking them again and again with mercifully time-wasting calculations and tormenting the life out of his small army of administrators with niggling demands for an explanation why the boilers had consumed 2.2 tons of wood for a crushing of 9.5 tons of stone on 11 May, and 2.3 tons for a crushing of 9.1 tons on 14 May, and where the devil were the hundred lambskins booked at Ningpo on 15 February last and not included in the stocktaking on 30 June? And when there were no reports to read and no complaints to write he filled in the black gap of hours with long sums estimating how many pounds of wool he would take from his sheep by the year 1900, how much gold there was in Black Mountain, how many years before it was worked out (“Twenty, eh? I'll see the end of it then!”), what his share would be. . .

  But best of all he liked to pass the hours nagging his family—especially James. Any excuse was good enough.

  “That horse Sambo showed me this morning, is that the horse you wasted a thousand guineas on?”

  “I don't think it was wasted.”

  “YOU don't!”

  “He calls it Cabell's Pride,” Geoffrey put in with a snicker.

  “Oho, does he? Crowbait—that's what Sambo calls it.”

  “Its grandfather won the Derby,” James said, “and its mother ran third.”

  The old man laughed. “Don't tell me. Some horse-butcher saw a fool coming.”

  “Excuse me, Father, Lord Blackenridge is my friend.”

  “Oho, listen to him. The Lord's his friend.” He changed his attack, becoming nastier. “Think you're a gentleman, don't you? Think you're too good for us? You're the son of a bitch, that's what you are. Your mother was a criminal and so is your brother and your damned sister—she'll be on the streets before long, mark my words. She'll come back here one day and I won't see her. I'll let her have her say and I won't answer. I'll shut the door on her. She'll have to sit on the steps till the coach comes and beg a ride to Brisbane. You'll see. You'll see.”

  Geoffrey yawned and drowsed. Miss Montaulk tut-tutted and nodded her sweat-streaked mask of cosmetics over the inevitable bit of dingy crochet, murmuring “Ah me! That I should have lived to see it! What did I tell you!” Julia watched James. James looked down his thin, disgusted nose.

  “It's the truth I'm telling you about yourself,” Cabell sneered at him. “Look at the colour of your skin. Is it a white man's skin? Is it?”

  Sometimes there was the faintest yellow tinge under James's cheeks, jaundice or indigestion most likely, but Cabell loved to insist that it was a mark of gipsy blood. “It'll spread,” he taunted James. “You'll see. Your mother was fairly white when I met her, but your Uncle Dirk Surface was as yellow as butter. It'll come out after you're forty. Just watch yourself in your glass, you snob. A fine sight for your London friends you'll be. Mr Joseph Chamberlain, eh? By God, they won't touch you with a poker. All your flash duds and la-di-da manners won't cover it up.”

  Behind his wooden face James writhed, but Cabell could not see that. The insults he heaped on James frightened him. “Why doesn't he say something. Ah, they're all like her. They don't speak. They store it up and stab you in the back.”

  “What's in your mind there?” he cried. “What're you thinking? I'll tell you. You think I'm going blind, don't you? You think you won't have to put up with me much longer. Oho, don't you worry.”

  “It's the truth,” James spat through his tight, colourless mouth. “You're nearly seventy. Your eye will never get better.” He took a breath and added soothingly, “Really, sir, you ought to try to compose yourself. You should think of the future and seek some spiritual consolation.”

  “Christian forgiveness, eh? Oho, I know what that means. Forgive Larry so that he can come up and finish the job, eh? If you want my brains kicked out, do it yourself why don't you?”

  A week after James's return they brought Larry up for trial, but Cabell was still afraid to take his eye out in the sun and Larry was remanded for another month. By that time Cabell's face had healed and the hair was growing on his brow again. His sight was worse but he swore to himself that it was better and to prove it took Geoffrey off to Pyke's Crossing and gave evidence against Larry, who was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. The scandal was terrific. The Labour newspapers reported how Larry had to be dragged from the dock shouting, “He starved my mother. He hit her in the face.”

  Outside the court a crowd waited to hiss Cabell as he walked to the hotel. Geoffrey took one look at them and deserted his father. But they did not hiss. The stiff set of his jaw made them think twice about it. He looked as if he was printing every face there on his memory for future reference. Actually he was floundering like a bat, and he had locked his jaws to prevent himself from singing out for someone to lead him down the street.

  When he'd put Larry out of the way he was quieter, scared—scared of ghosts. He believed that Emma was haunting him. At night-time James heard him talking in his room. “I offered to make him manager twice, but you let him do this to me, so that I couldn't go after her and bring her back. . .”

  One day he went out to the flame-tree under which Emma was buried and dug the coffin up and carried it on his shoulder down to the scrub and buried it there. No use. He could still see her crouching in dark corners at night, wizened, foreknowing, and full of hate.

  James wanted to pack up and clear out of the madhouse back to London, but his conscience pricked him. He called it his conscience. Under the thought, “Poor old devil, he's half off his head, half-blind, and nearly half-dead,” was the assurance that if he waited a little longer the foul old brute who dishonoured his father's name would be out of the way; for James found that he had two fathers, this one and the romantic, aristocratic old pioneer who was esteemed in London. The second was much the more real. He was always slightly surprised when he went into Cabell's room and found the battered face squinting at him.

  Poor James was learning more than he wanted to know about the way Cabell had performed his historic mission. Less abusive now, the old man prepared him for work by letting him into the secret of complex financial wanglings and wirepullings. How he had done the McFarlane
s out of their land, how he had made a hundred and eighty thousand pounds out of the Investment Corporation, how he had speculated in land, how he circumvented the miners' attempts to get better wages out of the Waterfall Goldmining Company by bribing their leaders, how he used money and influence to prevent awkward inquiries into accidents at the mine, how he subsidized the election funds of politicians who sent him soldiers during a strike, and the dozen other shifts by which he, like all rich men, contrived to remain rich and grow richer—these aspects of empire-building hitherto unsuspected stunned James's innocent mind.

  James protested against taking part in such infamous affairs.

  “Infamous, you think? I've had to fight for every cent with cut-throats and droughts and stupid sheep and God knows what else.” Cabell spoke quietly, with a note almost of entreaty in his voice. “It's easy to talk now. I didn't do these things because I liked them, but because—because. . .” He sheered away from talking about the motives which had driven him through the last half-century lest he should see that those motives no longer existed.

  “I know that,” James said. “In the early days it was unavoidable. Lands aren't won without. . .”

  “I didn't come to win any lands,” Cabell interrupted irritably. “Don't you see you can't gloss it over by telling me that some confounded politician in London esteems me. I don't give a damn for his esteem. A lot of good to decorate a dead conscript with honour and glory.” His irritation passed and he spoke beseechingly again with his hand on James's arm. “Glossing it over isn't just, James. You've got to go back and find out how every drop of sweat and blood was spilt, and understand that it couldn't have happened otherwise and. . . no, not forgive, damn you, sitting on your pedestal. If you could understand you wouldn't be the kind of smug bastard who talks about forgiveness. You'd go down on your knees and ask for it from all the generation of poor devils whose lives were wasted before this country became a place you could wear your starched pants in.” He turned back to the papers they were studying. “What's the use talking. It's all plain black and white to you.”

  This kind of talk distressed James more than straight out cursing. The entreaty in the old man's voice hinted at dark, dark deeds and asked James not to judge too severely those deeds which had loomed in James's nightmares since boyhood. Something worse than cheating shareholders and robbing men of their land? James never again talked of the infamy of his father's business methods or encouraged him to speak in that apologetic and horribly suggestive strain, but industriously set to work to master the intricate workings of station and mine and real estate market so that as soon as possible the power of doing mischief to the name of Cabell might be taken from the old man.

  He trotted to and fro between the Reach and Brisbane and Waterfall, interviewing bankers and cabinet ministers, addressing directors, bossing managers and foremen, as his father ordered him. He was forced to know unpleasant people, shady lawyers, stock-jobbers, and real estate touts who slapped him on the back and called him by his first name, made him smoke bad cigars and listen to dirty stories, choke down vile liquors and exchange banter with their favourite barmaids. The heat, and the noise, and the dust, and the smell of Waterfall sickened him, continuous travel made his digestion worse, and with alarm he noticed that coarse talk was coming easily to his lips and sharp business trickery to his mind. In the beginning he had been disgusted to discover that his father had a share in a slum property in Sydney—one of the nastiest slums in the world, people said—at the end of a year he was automatically haggling to invest money in more places of the same kind.

  But he didn't like it at all. He could feel his hands getting very dirty. Couldn't they invest the money in something more respectable? he suggested. Perhaps pull the slums down and build new modern tenements where people wouldn't die of typhoid at quite such a fearful rate? The old man listened wearily, then told him to go and see that the prices in the station stores had been marked up in readiness for the shearers or to threaten the manager at McFarlane's with the sack for overserving the hands five pounds of tea in their rations last month. A devil of a life it was. Ten times a week James determined to put an end to it, but obedience to his father was an old habit with him now—or filial duty, as he called it. As though being bullied by his father, spied on by Geoffrey, and humiliated by the work he had to do wasn't enough, Julia began to nag. She was bored sick at the Reach. She wanted to go back to London.

  “Quite impossible,” James said. “You see how it is with Father. Somebody has to look after things.”

  “Do you flatter yourself you're looking after them?” Julia scoffed. “You message-boy!” She was beginning to use her rapier like a meataxe. Also her face was hardening and her body was growing stringy.

  James regarded her with his usual cold surprise. What a common grating tone her voice had nowadays! “I would be much obliged if you would let me know my own. . .”

  “Duty?” she sneered.

  “Yes, duty.”

  “Duty, buncombe! Duty, my eye! You'd smother him in his sleep if you had the bowels. Don't talk to me about duty, you snivelling, hypocritical, stuffed imitation of a man.”

  “Really, Julia. . .”

  “Yes, an imitation of a man. You've always let that old pig have his own way. That's why you married me and that's why we're living in this filthy, rat-ridden hole. Because he says so. You know you don't like it. You much prefer being stroked by fat, elderly peeresses. My, it's a wonder, James, you ever learnt to do up your pants by yourself.”

  He dribbled out a smile. “I don't understand a word you're saying, my dear.”

  “You don't? I'll mighty soon make you understand. You get me out of this house soon or I'll take to drink like my mother.”

  “Julia!” He came down off his high horse in a hurry. “Of course I understand—dull life, yes. But there are nice people. You'll get to know them. And, of course, I intend to have this wretched house pulled down and re-built. It is, as you say, a little. . .”

  “You re-build the house!” Julia laughed. “Have you told him.”

  “Not yet,” James confessed. “But at the first opportunity. . .”

  He did try to mention it but somehow never got to the point. As a compromise he had a talk with Custard about moving the drafting-yards and the slaughter-house a few miles down the river and planting a garden in their place.

  “What's boss say?” Custard asked.

  “No need to trouble him with such a trifle,” James said. He hoped to spring the accomplished fact on the old man, who now rarely went out, but he omitted to grease Geoffrey's palm.

  Cabell rushed down to the yard and shook his fist in Custard's face, and threatened to put a head on him if ever he took orders again without making sure that they were his boss's orders.

  Custard cringed. “Aye, sir. Aye, muster.”

  Nobody guessed that he could hardly see Custard's face as he held his own so close that their beards mingled. Slowly, stiffly, he marched back to the house. A rail from the partially demolished yards lay in his path. James put out a hand to guide him, then took his hand away. He stumbled over the rail and stamped on quickly, trusting to luck, knowing that their eyes were upon him.

  Goggs was standing near. He had seen James's hand move. He glanced round to make sure Geoffrey was not near, then grinned at James.

  Goggs was a cunning fellow—he knew that time was on James's side.

  Chapter Four: Blind

  Yes, time was against him. Every day the smudge of light on his eye grew smaller. Last month he could see the far edge of the table, and last week the stain of spilt ink in the middle, and two days ago the knot in the wood near the corner of the blotter. It was as though he watched his vital essence melting away on the table before him.

  For days he nurtured it, this little grey circle of light, sat motionless, hardly breathing, in his room with the blinds down, his eye closed, glancing out from under his hand now and then to see that it was still there, still intact, the final, gutt
ering dregs of sight. If James came in with papers for him to read or sign he would storm him out of the room and lock the door. Traitorous swine, trying to gouge the eye out of him! Hours passed. He sat at the table with his head in his hands. When he opened his eye again the visible patch of blotter, paper, pen, was almost gone, and as he stared, leaning over the table with a look of outrage and consternation as though he had discovered a bug or a centipede crawling across it, the darkness swallowed everything. He floundered to the window and pulled the blind aside and bellowed, “Hey, what's the time, you?” to the man he could hear rattling milk cans in the dairy.

  “Somewheres near six, I reckon,” the man shouted back.

  “Ah, thank God, it's ALL dark.”

  He went on like this for days. From without came the sounds of the station's life, horsemen arriving and departing, Sambo and Custard arguing, plates rattling, a stock-whip, dogs barking, the bellows in the blacksmith's shop, a swaggie begging at the back door, the jingle of trace chains, creak of dray-wheels, a brief splutter of quarrelling between James and Julia, James and Geoffrey, cattle, sheep, and the opaque bush silence roaring up between these fretful human interludes—sounds so accustomed that he was hardly aware of them till he realized suddenly with astonishment that his station and his mine went on working without any co-operation from him, as though he was already dead. Then he opened the door and bawled for James, Geoffrey, Custard, Miss Montaulk, the book-keeper, the storekeeper, demanded to know what was being done, why something different wasn't done, changed every one's plans, upset the house, and produced convulsive twitchings even on the petrified face of Ah Lung.

  Within half an hour he was galloping across the valley towards Black Mountain, potent and assured once more on his big piebald stallion, which rushed him on with his retinue of sons and sycophants spluttering far behind in his dust. He reached down and felt the muscles cording under the soft, hot hide and his own mastery in the horse's response as it quickened the clatter-rap of its gallop to a fluid thunder of hoofs, which stampeded sheep and cattle browsing along the fence and started dogs barking miles away at the mountain echo of an affrighted flight. Five miles down the road he rested the horse and waited, chuckling, for the others to come up.