Gripped By Drought

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “You are becoming quite melodramatic.” And when he fastened the third pair of windows: “Are you going to cut my throat?”

  “lt is about time, I think,” he said in metallic tones that gave the woman a first thrill of fear. He added, “I will, however, be merciful.”

  At the farther end of the room stood Old Man Mayne’s favourite writing-table, each end of which was fitted with spacious cupboards. These cupboards now contained all the valued relics of Frank’s father, and from among them he took out a beautifully plaited kangaroo-hide stockwhip, measuring from thong to short handle butt twelve feet and three inches. Gathering half the length of the whip in the hand that held the handle, there was left a striking length of about three feet. This adjustment occupied his attention whilst he walked the length of the room, coming to stand close before his wife. When he spoke Ethel did not recognize his voice.

  “In dealing with his recalcitrant wife the despised aboriginal displays real wisdom,” he said, his voice as cold and hard as his facial expression. “For the last time, what is the reason for your present mood? There must be a reason, because you are not mentally deficient. If by continued silence you refuse me an explanation, I am going to thrash you until you do give it.”

  Across the space of a few inches their eyes met and held with unwinking steadiness, ice-cold fury in his, haughty amazement in hers. At first the crisis was so astounding to one of her high culture that fear was non-existent. Common women, she knew, were sometimes beaten by their husbands; but she–Ethel Dyson! Yes, she was about to be ignominiously thrashed by the infuriated man now glaring at her–no longer docile, submissive-after all, not weak as she had thought, but whose patience and long-suffering she had strained to their limit.

  Climax was followed swiftly by anti-climax. Mayne saw the white mask confronting him melt as though from heat. The corners of the red mouth descended, wrinkles leapt into place either side of the long, straight, sensitive nose. The blazing dark orbs became swamped, extinguished by tears. Ethel dropped into her chair, her arms swept forward over the table, pushing away the china and the cutlery, and on them her head sank in a burst of violent sobbing.

  The black man’s wisdom was forgotten. The black man’s strength of mind became as water. Almost stupidly Frank Mayne looked down on the crouching figure of the woman he yet loved. From his fingers the whip dropped soundlessly on the carpet. On his knees he fell beside his wife, and one arm stole round her slender waist.

  “Tell me, old girl, just tell me what’s wrong,” he urged softly, his voice trembling, the soul of him undecided, wanting to reach hers and comfort it, fearing to be rebuffed. A long minute pregnant with emotion slipped by. Another passed before Ethel’s sobbing began to subside. Then, as suddenly as she had fallen into her chair, she turned to him, placed her hands on his shoulders and, with eyes still streaming tears and voice choked, burst out into speech long pent:

  “Oh, I am so sick of this awful life! There is nowhere to go, nothing to see. Doesn’t the eternal silence crush you down? Doesn’t the eternal sun become hateful with its searching glare? Cannot you understand how I miss the cold, and the rain and the fog; that my soul aches to hear the roar of the traffic and see the rushing people? What is there here? Nothing, nothing, nothing! The silent house, the wretched garden, the lonely tracks, the mockery of a river! That is all I have, and it all is an emptiness, a nothingness. Oh, I can’t stand it–I can’t stand it, I tell you!”

  Her hands were beating on his shoulders. Repeating over and over again, “I can’t stand it,” she buried her face once more in her arms when she again fell forward over the table.

  Mayne was aghast, astounded, because unable to understand. England, and all that for which England stood, was all right for a little while, a period of holiday. He could not understand, and, being an Australian, never would be able to understand, how an exile from Europe could be sick, soullsick, for lack of the climatic vagaries peculiar to the country in which the exile was born and reared. There was no climate superior to that of Australia, nor was there a country superior to the Island Continent. Sunshine! Open spaces! Freedom from cramping conventions! What more could man or woman possibly desire? Yet really it is no more difficult to understand the British exile’s craving sickness for rain and fog and snow than it is to appreciate the longing for sunshine in the heart of a South Sea Islander exiled in Scotland during the long winter months.

  Ethel was living through the dread second phase of the new-chum’s life in the Australian bush, one only in every fifty sufficiently determined to stick it out, ultimately to find a deep, complete happiness in the mysterious lure this bush reserves for its initiates.

  Frank Mayne recalled Feng’s sage counsel, given when they were on the Seat of Atlas. He felt the urgency of Ethel’s case, whilst understanding it not at all. There and then he decided to take her to New Zealand for the rest of the summer, show her new scenes, introduce her again to gaiety and action. There were matters he would first have to settle, when Feng would be able to drive Atlas as a well-tuned motor-engine. Say in two weeks’ time.

  An hour later, when he left his wife, she was radiantly smiling and happy.

  3

  Three days after the scene in the drawing-room, Frank Mayne went outback again to join MacDougall on an inspection of the western salt-bush country. The weather was hot, calm, and clear. At noon the thermometer hanging from a nail driven into the shady side of a post registered 110°, at two o’clock 114°, falling to 105° at six, and to 97° just before dawn. These readings did not much fluctuate over a period of six days.

  Ethel could not escape the heat, and she did not appreciate the fact that her position in Government House was extremely favourable. She tried to obtain lower temperatures by having every door and window open one day; and the next, acting on Feng’s suggestion, having all the doors shut and the blinds down, finally discovering that the coolest place was in the cane-grass bower-house flanked and shaded by date-palms at the bottom of the garden. Here, with Little Frankie to take up her attention, or, when he slept, with books loaned her by Cameron, and needlework, to amuse her, she spent most of the daylight hours the while her husband and MacDougall and the hands blistered in the sun and drank vast quantities of lukewarm water to fail in quenching a quenchless thirst. It was the fourth day of her husband’s absence, and the fifth day of the heat-wave, when that happened which strict obedience to convention all her life, the possession of refined, deeply rooted culture, clear reason, pride in loyalty, and an hereditary sense of honour, all failed to prevent.

  In the bower-house she reclined on a cushioned rustic settee.

  Little Frankie lay asleep on a folded rug on the floor. Outside in the heat of mid-afternoon not a bird broke the silence. She heard a man’s footsteps crunching on the cinder path before his shadow fell across the entrance, and her heart told her who had arrived, her pulses yet remaining normal. Her expression was one of calm, friendly welcome when she rose to meet Alldyce Cameron.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Mayne!” spoke the full-toned musical voice. “I was riding down the far bank of the river, and decided to cross by a fording place which invited me, and try to cheer you this excessively hot day. How are you weathering our Australian summer?”

  “Not very well, Mr. Cameron, I am afraid,” Ethel said, smiling into his big, handsome face, which she saw was cool and without trace of perspiration. “Won’t you sit down and tell me how you got home after our little card party last week?”

  The settee was long, and, sitting herself, she occupied one end. He saw that he was expected to be seated at the other end, where Ethel had pushed a silk-covered cushion.

  “Whew! It is hot in the sun, and this is delightfully cool.” Cameron flicked a handkerchief, slightly scented, across his massive brow and stretched his elegant legs, encased in English riding slacks. The silver, goose-necked spurs glittered at the heels of his polished and dustless boots. The romantic, wide-brimmed felt hat–romantic because the brim was
unusually wide–was tossed aside. The drawling voice began again.

  “You know, Mrs. Mayne, this is not a white man’s country during the eight summer months. Really it isn’t. The people who boast about Australia’s climate are those who would die of fright beyond the confines of a city. Doesn’t this heat make you long for a good old London drizzle?”

  “Yes, it certainly does.”

  He saw that she was looking beyond the entrance of the little house with narrow-lidded eyes which peered across the world. He knew, did this astute man, exactly what it was dragging at Ethel’s heart. How lovely then did she look in profile! So cool and slim, her face and figure as though carved by a master sculptor. Woman! And woman to Alldyce Cameron was as the scent of aniseed to a horse.

  “My uncle, old Josiah Bannerman, the shipping man, whom you once met, wrote me by the last mail, and his letter was full of complaints,” Cameron said conversationally, drawing her gaze to him. “He is an indefatigable first-nighter, and says the new season’s plays disappoint him. He’s worth pots of money, and more than once I have told him to buy a theatre and put on plays he himself likes. Then he found fault with London’s first real fog because his new chauffeur got hopelessly lost carting him to the Savoy, where he was to dine with Lord Wantford and Lady Rose, the daughter. Good God! Fancy writing about plays and fogs and things to a man who is sweltering in this fearful country!”

  “But are you not an Australian?”

  “Oh no! I was born in Londonderry, and came out here to Queensland it was–when I was twenty-two. How many years, do you think, that means I have been out?”

  He was smiling at her with all the magnetism of his personality in his smile, smiling at her as he had smiled at other women who had been conquered by it. Ethel smiled in return, whilst frankly examining his features to guess his age; her eyes, as the eyes of other women had done, for one long final second, gazing at his mouth and chin.

  “I––I find it hard to guess. Is it fourteen years?”

  “And plus two,” he corrected. “I am not an old man yet, am I?” “No-o!”

  Cameron shifted his position as though it irked him. Now he was sitting more square, and a little closer to his companion. With the damp handkerchief, not the scented one, he had previously dipped in the river water with which carefully to remove traces of perspiration, he negligently mopped his brow, on which perspiration beads were gathering. It was an occasion when a man must not perspire.

  “May I smoke?”

  Ethel started as though his request recalled her wandering thoughts. She bowed her head permissively. Cameron produced a case and matches. He offered the opened case, and she accepted a cigarette. He struck a match and held it out for her. He was intently watching every tiny movement of her face, electric fire coursing through his veins. Now…now! With all the force of his mind he exerted his power. Above the flame of the match their gaze met, held.

  She saw his brown eyes, wide and warm, compelling and penetrating. His masculinity swept over her as a cool sea breeze, and her body began to tremble with exquisite feeling. Here was man to her woman. The impressions and all the little secret thoughts a dozen social meetings had created appeared to gather into one momentous onrush of rainbow light which flooded her whole being, made her heart to pound and yet suspend her breathing.

  Watching her as no cat ever so intently watched a mouse, Cameron saw the flush dyeing her face and the soft cameo light spring into her now wide-staring eyes. He thrilled with the joy of anticipatory conquest. The match expired, burning his fingers, which parted to drop it without feeling the hurt. Holding her with his will, slowly he moved nearer, nearer still, until at last with gentleness his arms reached out, his hands touched her, and the next second she was being strained to him and was wildly returning his burning, ecstatic kisses.

  l love you–I love you–I love you!” came his low, whispered words. “Oh, my sweet I! want you for my very own, for always and always!”

  She stopped his words with her kisses, and then with gentle force he tilted back her head and kissed her throat and neck. From his lips there poured into her body, electrifying it, a feeling no man before him had ever awakened within her.

  A fallen twig on the cinder path snapped with a tiny report. Ethel stiffened. Memory swept back into her stunned brain. Determinedly she thrust Cameron back from her, but it was not difficult to free herself, for he rose quickly, and as silently as a shadow moved to the entrance and looked out.

  He did not see Feng Ching-wei concealed by the trunk of a date-palm, Mayne’s friend having entered the garden in search of Ethel to consult her regarding a household matter.

  “I thought I heard some one,” Cameron said softly, turning to her, to see her standing, her face aflame, her hands pressed to her bosom.

  “Go!” she whispered with difficulty. “Go! Please go!”

  “Very well–at once!” was his swift consent, satisfied with what he had already obtained from this peerless woman, and too wise to hurry the climax. Picking up his hat, he drew close to her, holding out his arms. “Au revoir! ” Only au revoir! ” he whispered thrillingly.

  But she seeing his invitation, shrank back against the settee, her face now white as death, her eyes big with self-reproach and revulsion.

  “No, no! Go–do please go!”

  Alldyce Cameron smiled his bewitching smile, bowed, and walked away. Once he turned from her, once he had passed out of the cane-grass house, he permitted the flame of triumph to surge to his face. He had cast his net, and he had at last caught the fish, the loveliest, the most glorious fish even so expert a fisher of women as himself ever had caught.

  Until the gong sounded calling her to her solitary dinner, Ethel Mayne lay full length on the settee in the bower-house, alternately crying and venting little moans, whilst hugging the boy to her in a tempest of self-accusation. By tightly shutting her eyes she tried to banish memory of the vision of his parted lips drawing ever nearer to her own. With all her might she tried to cast from her the memory of that leaping fire rushing throughout her body. Yet those memories she could not put from her, even when she hugged and kissed her husband’s child with feverish abandon.

  The carefully cooked dinner was almost untouched. The minutes were as long as hours whilst she waited for the stroke of nine, when she rang through to Feng at the office and asked to be connected with Forest Hill.

  “Is that you, Frank?” she said, unable to keep the tremor from her voice. “Oh, how are you, old boy? When are you coming home? Yes? But come home soon–please, please come soon. Oh, yes! I know. But do hurry through the work and come home. I am distracted with–with loneliness, and could scream with boredom. You must come back soon. Do you hear? Come at once! Yes, Little Frankie is asking always for you. We want to get away, far from Atlas. All right, Frank. Good night! Hurry back! Good night…good night!”

  Until the ring announced the conversation at an end, permitting him to break the connexion, Feng Ching-wei lay well back in his chair, his face upturned, his lips pursed, allowing perfect smoke-rings. His eyes were almost closed. There was a ghost of a smile about his lips.

  THE SECOND YEAR

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE PICTURE

  I

  IT was the last day of the year. Dressed for dinner, the manager of Atlas Station reclined in a wickedly luxurious chair on the east veranda of his bungalow, slowly smoking a cigarette, and gazing with the appreciative eyes of the artist across the track, beyond the lip of the river’s near bank, across the hundred-yard-wide empty channel to the farther bank gilded and blotched with amber by the light of the setting sun. The two stately red-gums in alignment with his position appeared to emit from their shivering leaves the greenish orange of opal fire, glinting and winking against the background of the agate-grey sky of early evening.

  There came to Feng Ching-wei his housekeeper-cook-guardian–and benevolent tyrant–Mary O’Doyle. Her greying hair was drawn back severely into a “bun” situated at the corner
of her large cannon-ball-shaped head. She wore a skirt of thick brown serge surmounted by a white muslin blouse with open V-neck, and the sleeves rolled to the elbows of her mighty arms. On her outsize feet were elastic-sided riding boots; in her face the look of one bowed beneath the yoke of pain. Her weight forced complaint from the veranda boards. On encountering Feng’s soft smile her expression changed to one of strange wistfulness.

  “That blackguard av a Todd Gray has only just started to make the pastry for them mincepies he promised to do for me,” she said belligerently. “I took special care over that mincemeat, an’ he’ll hear me tongue if he’s late in cooking of it. If he was my ole man, I’d put life into him, for sure I would; anyways enough life to make ’im forget his pore tender feet for once.”

  “There will be time, Mary,” Feng murmured, smiling up at her. “I cannot yet hear the Tin Tin car, and Harry has only just left to fetch Sir John.”

  Mary O’Doyle bent forward as far as her rigid corsets would allow, to say: “Is Sir John leaving to-night for another bender?”

  “If the word ‘bender’ you use is a synonym for business, yes, Mary. He goes to Menindee, as you know, at the end of every quarter to transact certain business.”

  “Humph! The kinda business me late lamented–I don’t think–husband used to–to transact. Well, Sir John won’t fall beneath the wheels av a table-top wagon. I ’ope not, any’ow. He’s a decent old pot, a proper gintleman an’ all. Would you come an’ take a bird’s-eye view of the table, Mr. Feng? I ain’t much of a ’and at layin’ la-de-da tables, and I mayn’t have got it just right.”

  “Very well, Mary. But we need not be too particular, you know.”

  Feng rose. Mary turned in her own length and, with the stately majesty of a liner leaving a wharf, led him to the dining-room, where the square table was set for three with polished cutlery, glinting glass, and snowy napery, revealed by the low-hung, crimson-shaded cluster of electrics. There were a few minor adjustments needed to the table, but not for the world would Feng point them out. After the examination he stated that everything was perfect.