Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  There was even a worse indignity in store. Julia had him forcibly bathed. He refused to wash, refused to change his clothes. He must have known how it annoyed them. His beard matted, his hands were black, his cuffs and collar stiff with greasy dirt, rooms needed airing when he left them. One day Julia had the bath filled with hot water and carbolic and ordered the Chinaman to dump him in and scrub him. There was a merry half-hour in the bathroom, from which he emerged spluttering and malevolent. “I'll show you up for this,” he told Julia. “You wait.”

  Julia laughed.

  “A blackgin's daughter. That's what you are. I can prove it.”

  “The dregs of a noble man,” James sighed, but consoled himself that that noble man was now an unassailable fact of national history. Landtaker—empire-builder—and now philanthropist. Movements for ameliorating the lot of unfortunate aborigines, rapidly becoming extinct, for carrying the consolations of religion to boundary-riders on distant outstations, for fighting vice, building churches, educating workers, uplifting the poor, always commanded the purse of one Derek Cabell. Such philanthropy could not go unrewarded, and the new King Edward was pleased to bestow a knighthood of the British Empire on this old man whose name, even as an object of abuse, people had forgotten in the noisy events of the changing century.

  Chapter Eight: Old Men Remember

  Suddenly the old man would start up and demand to have his horse saddled, and go tearing across the country. It was generally after Sambo had been delivering him one of his sardonic commentaries on the decadence of men and beasts.

  Nobody knew how old Sambo was, but he must have been nearly as old as Cabell. The years had fined him away to a thin transparency of skin and delicate bone and almost falsetto voice, so that it seemed as though a touch would make him fall into a heap of white ash. At the door of his hut, where he had nailed up the bleached skull of a horse—“That selfsame identical roan the boss pinched offa Flanagan down Moreton Bay sixty year ago”—he sat and watched with faded eyes, which could tell the age and ancestry of a cow a mile off, the incredible mutations of his world, now arguing with himself, now belittling the wonders of modernity with tales of heroic horses and riders. With his whims and fancies—a habit of calling James “young Jimmy” and threatening him with a terrible visitation of wrath from the boss (“Kick the backside offa you he will, shifting them young bulls off green feed this time of the year”), and with an annual attempt to reach Brisbane and the elysia of Frogs' Hollow, doomed to perish at the first grog shanty, whence he returned, a miraculously animated cadaver, two months later—James forbore. It was hard to do otherwise. Sambo's tongue was something he went a long way to pacify.

  “You—you ain't hardly crowbait in comparison to your old man, young Jimmy. Could youa done for all them black savages, like him, with the fever on and the blood coming out his face by the bucketful from the brand they give him? Up there on Black Mountain it were—one morning just after the rains. We shot 'em all, every black son-of-a-gun, and burned 'em after with a smell makes your mouth water every time you think of it. A proper barbecue. They was pretty fat after tuckering up on our Durhams and there wasn't much tinder needed to get a start. Only we couldn't burn old Tom. He was nothing but bones and greenhide, and every time I chucked him on he put the fire out. So we dug him a hole. And then the fever come over the boss and he collapsed down, and that's the only time I ever did see him collapse down, but the fever came over him extra-special bad then. I'da like to seen you do for a whole tribe of black myall savages with the fever on you like he done. You ain't turned out nothing like him, young Jimmy—you musta chucked back to them new-chum blokes in England he usta talk about. Your old man wouldna stood for cutting up the land the way you done and getting rid of good monkeys and breeding them skinny-legged horses that can't hardly walk offa the grass without going lame on a bloke. Not to mention you letting them union blokes come in planting things. Cocky farmers! No, it ain't regular, Jimmy. You know what your da said straight out about them—how he'd brain you, for just suggesting it. Cripes, he's a savage man, I'm telling you. Like the day me and Monaghan discovered a bit of a goldmine up in the hills. My oath, I was scared. He had every blooming bloke scared then—a fine swearing man that'd knock you down soon's look at you. Jeez, wasn't you bluffed of him! All for running away and not being a ingyneer, wasn't you? And you didn't run away and you was a ingyneer. Ingyneer! Blimy, what's a ingyneer know about cattle. You're turning them there Herefords into cocky farmers' milking shorthorns. Ain't nobody been gored round these parts the last coupla years. . .”

  On moonlight nights he went up to the old homestead and sat on the steps and played his mouth-organ. After a while Cabell would come out. “The moon's up, eh?”

  “Yeah.” He went on playing softly. Down in the settlement the dogs were howling. A cow came to the river to drink, and the moon spangles on the water tinkled against the roots of the trees along the bank.

  Sambo wiped his mouth. “Say, boss, remember that night it was full moon and we got the old red bull that was taking the cows offa Andy's Camp?”

  “It wasn't the red,” Cabell grumbled, “it was a roan scrub that had a white calf with her.”

  “Garn. Whatya talking about! It was a red bull I tell you, with a strawberry heifer—the one that chased you the time we was running in fats for Smiths at Ipswich. Remember?”

  A long pause. “I remember,” the old man said, and after another long pause chuckled, “She was a randy old tart, she was—a calf off one of the first lot that came up from Moreton Bay.”

  “Yeah, that's right. That was her sister, that big brindle cow we usta milk.”

  “Be damned. That wasn't her sister. Her sister was a white cow that McFarlane pinched and was always with the mob up near where I set fire to the boundary fence.”

  “Her! Cripes, you must be going offa your nut. She was piebald, the cow McFarlane pinched. Her mother wasn't the one with the broken horn that got bogged up near Ningpo. It was the sister of that one. Their father was the yellow bull I shot in the gully out near Jardine's.”

  “It wasn't you shot it. It was me.”

  “Garn. I shot it with me new Snider.”

  “You hold your clap. I shot it with—with—I shot it.”

  They were silent for a long time, offended with each other. Then Cabell chuckled again, “By God, remember how he nearly horned Bill Penberthy? Used to run with the little down-horned heifer. . . she's alive yet. . . got another calf. . . saw them near the Three Mile. . . when I went to run in the bullock for the cask last. . . last. . .”

  “That was a long time ago, boss,” Sambo said gently.

  “Eh?”

  “There ain't no Three Mile now. That's where all them cocky farmers are young Jimmy cut up the land for.”

  “What's that? Cut what land up?”

  “You know. Ten years ago that was.”

  “Yes, yes, now I remember.”

  Sambo went on playing. The old man got up and paced the veranda, getting angrier and angrier. Suddenly he stopped and said, “Go and put my saddle on. I'm going out.”

  Sambo went and saddled two horses. At first Cabell rode the piebald stallion, one of his own breed, foaled in the rocky gullies where the colts spent two years galloping up and down almost inaccessible declivities till they were run in and broken, horses to ride and trust on the blackest night because they had learnt every hole and fallen log. But the stallion was dead now and no more horses were bred at the Reach that way. James's foals of thousand-guinea sires grew up in fenced paddocks “where they sweep away every stick and stone as if the nags had glass feet,” Sambo said indignantly, and were gently cajoled, never driven.

  James had warned his father once, “These horses are not meant for careering madly round the country-side at night. You'll come to grief.”

  Sambo smiled pityingly. “Whatya talking about. Boss'd ride anything with hair on.”

  Anyway, he'd done his duty, James reflected, as he heard them go off d
own the road at a demented gallop, racing neck for neck in some old man's fantasy of recaptured youth.

  Early in the morning they would return, quarrelling. James would awake, turn over and sigh. . .

  One night a frantic banging on the door roused him. It was Sambo. Cabell had been riding a chestnut taffy horse, newly broken in. It had fallen with him.

  They brought him home on a door. The young doctor from the settlement thought that the skull was fractured. “He can't live. He may never even regain consciousness.”

  “I warned him. I tried to stop him,” James kept repeating.

  Sambo sat on the veranda steps and grizzled like a child.

  Chapter Nine: Return of a Prodigal

  James had long ago decided what duty would require him to do at this crisis. He sent off two telegrams, one to Harriet, one to Larry, and a cable to Geoffrey in New York, telling them that Cabell was dying; drew up an order for the family's mourning; and from the filing cabinet in his office took out a folder marked “Obit. Father,” read it over, added a few commas, wrote into the blank space “September” with a query after, addressed the envelopes to the newspapers, set them in a neat pile on his desk, and sat down to wait.

  The dusty winter was coming to an end. Down in the settlement the ploughs had opened up geometrical stretches of black and red earth, congenially suggestive to James of ordered and respectable husbandry and a page of life freshly turned and yet unmarked. The birds which had fled north from the brief spell of cold were coming back to the trees along the river. The peach-trees were in bloom and the little green and gold love-birds fluttered from branch to branch in a snowfall of pink petals.

  James tried to fix his mind on solemn thoughts proper to the occasion, but it was difficult. A picture of his new house, an English lawn down that side of the slope, another tennis court over there, a bowling-green on the shady side, and all these unsightly native trees gone, kept rising to his eyes. Once or twice he fell asleep in the warm breeze. He roused himself, shook his head, and heaved a sigh. Poor old Dad!

  Sambo was playing his mouth-organ under the flame-tree in the backyard. James sent one of the servants out to remind him that it was no time for mouth-organs with his old master passing away. . . At least the doctor assured James that he was sinking fast, could not last another day—and that went on for a week. The mourning arrived—arm-bands and hatbands for the hands and the domestics, black silk for Julia. Harriet telegraphed that she was on her way from Sydney. James's message had been following her from old addresses.

  James no longer relaxed in the balmy spring sunshine. All day he was tiptoeing back and forth to his father's room. The old man lay just as they had put him down—naked, bony arms on the counterpane, his head, with a black rash of blood where he had fallen, twisted slightly among the pillows. Looking down at the uptilted mouth James sometimes felt that the old man had closed his eyes when he heard James coming, wasn't unconscious at all, but only fooling them.

  “His pulse is stronger this morning,” the nurse said.

  “Indeed?”

  “A wonderful constitution!”

  “Wonderful!” James agreed. “Wonderful!”

  A few hours before Harriet arrived Cabell was sitting up in bed demanding food.

  The doctor looked as James could not help feeling—as though the old fiend had played a trick on them. “Only one in a hundred. . .” the doctor protested.

  “All right. All right,” James said, then smiled. “You must be a wonderworker.”

  “Only one in a hundred. . .”

  “There's no need to apologize, doctor. We are most grateful. . .” When Harriet arrived with her three noisy young boys filling the inside of the coach Cabell was in the rocking-chair on the veranda snoring off a heavy feed of roast chicken.

  James found no trace of his angular and overwrought young sister in the matron who launched herself from the coach and kissed him energetically and damply three times on the mouth. A likeness, a striking likeness to his mother there was, which brought back to mind Emma's obstinate, deep-set eyes and obstinate, flat mouth, but it was a likeness with enormous differences in the details. Harriet's face was plump, with a double chin incipient, which softened the obstinacy in her eyes and mouth. Plainly, like her mother, she demanded her own way, but she was in the habit of getting it—that was the difference. She was dressed in expensive clothes but looked untidy. Her dress, a shade too bright for her years, fitted her where it touched, her hat, a shade too luxuriously laden with bright artificial fruits, just did not match her dress, the pearl-drop ear-rings with diamond corona were just a little too ornate for a respectable woman, her laughter just a little too loud and frequent. She looked spoilt, a little, James could not help thinking, of the parvenue, a trifle vulgar. The familiar way she spoke to the coachman when he was unloading her portmanteaux from the boot—“Come on now, Joe, move your lazybones”—the size of the wad of notes from which she stripped a tip far too extravagant seemed strident over-emphasis to James.

  “And how is he?”

  “He's much better, thank you,” James said, stressing his proprietary rights in a father whose last hours he had not intended to share with Harriet when he sent the telegram.

  “Thank God for that,” Harriet said, and started for the house. “I was afraid I'd be late.”

  “But wait a moment,” James said, exerting his long legs to keep up with her. “He's asleep now, and besides. . .” He held her back. “Harriet, you can't rush into him after. . . everything. Have some thought for his feelings.”

  “Feelings? Don't be silly. He's got over it by this.”

  “He hasn't mentioned your name for ten years,” James said solemnly.

  “You couldn't expect it. You treated him badly.”

  Harriet sniffed. “I had my own life to lead.”

  “Exactly,” James said. “YOUR own life.” It annoyed him to see Harriet so well, so satisfied, so unchastened. “My dear Harriet, you must remember that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Others. . . However, leaving that aside, I hope you'll grant I may know what should and should not be done in my own house.”

  Harriet shook his hand off her arm and went on without another word. The clatter of their feet on the veranda steps shook the house and awakened Cabell. He stirred and began automatically to complain in a wavering voice, “Who's that? Tell that woman of James's—it's time for dinner.”

  Harriet gathered the pop-eyed children and looked at her father. It was fourteen years since the night she tiptoed across this veranda. “Father,” she said gently, “I've come to see you. Harriet. It's me.”

  “Time for dinner,” the old man complained. “They're starving me here.”

  Harriet knelt and touched his hand. “Harriet, Father. Don't you remember? Harriet! I've come to be with you.” She repeated it slowly, stroking his hand.

  James noticed that there were tears in her eyes. Really, after all these years, after what she'd done—if that wasn't rank hypocrisy! He moved off to the end of the veranda to avoid looking on a—well, to say the least—disgusting scene.

  One of the children began to cry and his eldest brother, a thin, tall, freckled boy with a long face, a long fine nose, and a heavy under-lip, nudged him into silence.

  The old man pulled his hand away. “Eh? What's this? Harriet?” He put his fingers out vaguely and touched her face, streaking a tear across the grime of travel on her cheek, lowered his head against the frayed cane back of the chair, and murmured, “Yes, she died in Owerbury last year—no, a long time ago.”

  The flies buzzed back into his beard and crawled over his face, over the hairless, atrophied eyelids, like old sea-shells. Harriet brushed them with her handkerchief. A faint perfume of heliotrope overlay, for a moment, his smell of an old man. His head jerked erect. “Eh? Harriet? What's this? What's this?”

  “YOUR Harriet,” she said. “Don't you remember?”

  He struggled half-out of the chair and sat, with his head tipped back and sid
eways, as though listening to a sound far, far away, a thin whisper barely audible under the jabber of resurrected voices. “Harriet? Harriet?” he muttered, as though the distant faint sound was gradually taking a shape he could recognize.

  James came back. “This is really most inopportune, Harriet. You see how you're upsetting him. He's hardly out of a sick bed.”

  The new voice cut across the weary darkness and scattered the blurred pictures laboriously lifting themselves into the light. The old man's lips worked and he began to complain again, “No food for hours. Tell that fellow James. . .”

  Harriet stood up and wiped her eyes. “How old he is, Jimmy. I'd forgotten.”

  “It seems that he's forgotten you too,” James said condescendingly. Duty and self-abnegation had been rewarded!

  By the time Harriet had bathed herself and the children and eaten a late lunch the old man was back in bed sleeping. It would be dangerous to disturb him, the doctor said.

  Harriet wandered around the empty house with the children, looked into the kitchen and saw her mother crouching over the fire-place where still a few charred sticks lay, remnant of the very fire, perhaps, which Emma had nursed as they spoke together that day. Out in the yard she found Sambo sitting under the flame-tree, looking not so forlorn as utterly dumb-founded by some VOLTE-FACE of mechanical laws.

  He recognized her at once, jumped up, took off his hat, and stood shyly treading on his toes. “Lor', Miss Harriet, you got some condition on you. Come back to see the old man, eh?”

  “Yes, Sambo. ISN'T he old though? Oh, so old. I'd forgotten.”

  “Don't know about him being old. What gets me's him falling offera horse like that. Cripes!” He hastened to refute any suggestion of lesemajesty. “Course I know that chestnut taffy ain't much of a horse. One of them things young Jimmy there breeds up. But still 'n' all, Miss Harriet, the boss falling offera horse like a new-chum—you can't tell me that's a nateral way to die.”