Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  He wandered into the drawing-room. Miss Montaulk was there alone. “Where's Harriet?”

  “She's locked up in her room.”

  “Locked up? Why?”

  Miss Montaulk's wide, virgin eyes went up in pious, virgin horror. “She disgraced herself.”

  “What d'you mean?”

  “She tried to run away with a man.”

  “What? What man?”

  Miss Montaulk told him with lavish, loving detail. The assignation in the garden—the letter—the hat—the scene at Government House—the scandal.

  “I always said she was bad,” Miss Montaulk confided. “She gets it from your mother. Your brother Geoffrey's the same. And your brother Larry—just like your mother's cousin who was a bushranger, everybody says. And you—you had some scandal with a girl, too, didn't you?”

  James shut himself up to think about the awful calamity. First he thought of what Miss Montaulk had said, confirming all his worst fears. Yes, there must be something in them, something bad, inherited from his mother and from his father who had been corrupted by life in the early days. This proof of it was so sensational that James turned with disgust against his own passionate, illicit feelings. He must kill this corruption in himself. He must. He must.

  Then he thought about the scandal and how everybody would be whispering, simpering, pointing fingers, and in a rush of grateful feeling for a pitfall narrowly avoided, he realized that it might have been about him they were whispering if he had run away with Jennis. But this was nearly as bad—his own sister, writing letters, making assignations! Would he ever live it down!

  Then, as he paced his room, another thought came to him. Of course, this was what Father meant when he spoke about Harriet letting him down. Of course. And that was why he looked so old and tired. And that was why he was so changed towards James. It wasn't a trick. He meant it. He was turning to James for sympathy. James's heart swelled again. Poor old devil! He'd built so much on Harriet and she'd failed him. She'd failed them both, the little beast! Very soon this great discovery that his father had turned away from Harriet to him made James forget that but for the grace of God he might have been the one in trouble, and filled him with a mighty moral indignation.

  He went to Harriet's room and knocked urgently on the door.

  “Who's that?” her hostile voice answered. “Go away. I don't want to see anybody.”

  “It's me—James. Don't be a fool. Open the door.”

  “I don't want to speak to you.”

  “I can understand that,” he hissed through the panel.

  The door flung back and Harriet confronted him with her jaw out and her eyes blazing. “What d'you want? I'm not frightened. Say what you like.”

  The maid sweeping the passage moved her broom energetically in one spot and looked out of the corner of her eyes. “Don't scream,” James said and skipped into the room, but as soon as the door was shut he raised his voice. “What's all this about you and Doug Peppiott?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “It is my business. I'm your brother.”

  Harriet's face was bony and ugly with defiance. “I don't have to account to you. I don't have to account to anybody. Leave me alone.”

  “You've disgraced us,” he said, and added grandly, “You've broken father's heart.”

  She laughed. “What's that to you? You were going to marry Jennis Bowen against Father's will, only you hadn't the courage.”

  “There's such a thing as duty. I hadn't considered that.”

  “Well, I considered everything. I always told you what I'd do if I fell in love and Father tried to stop me. I sold my jewels and I was going to run away with Doug if you want to know. There, I don't care who knows.”

  “It's a good job he had a shred of decency,” James said, then thinking of the stories he demanded, “Is it true you wrote him a letter making an assignation?”

  Harriet reddened. “How did you know that?”

  “Everybody knows. He gave it to his mother and she's showing it all over the town.”

  “Oh, he couldn't have done that?” Harriet said, and the colour ebbed from her face again. Some foolish hope against hope this destroyed, some last obstinate illusion, leaving her nothing behind which to hide from the jeering face of the world. She put her hand on her breasts where she still kept the shred of cloth Doug had left on the fence. “Oh, no, he couldn't.”

  “Of course he did. You behaved like a common tart. He had to save his face. So they've made your name mud.” The defiance flagged in her eyes, which filled with tears, and his own strength and vindictiveness grew, fed by his eloquent picture of her disgrace and her weeping confession of it. “They're talking about you in bars, I don't doubt. The servants are talking about you. And probably the women in Frogs' Hollow.”

  “I don't care,” she said brokenly.

  “They're saying the filthiest things. God knows how true they are. You'll never be able to hold your head up again, anyway.”

  “I don't care,” she repeated over and over miserably. “I don't care.”

  “I don't suppose you do, you selfish little beast. You don't care what WE have to put up with. You don't care about Father. You've taken ten years off his life. You might have remembered how he spoilt you. You might have had the decency to remember that he's surrounded by enemies who only wait for an opportunity to invent new slanders against him. You didn't think what he'd feel going about town with people pointing fingers at his back. You let him down. That's what you did. Let him down!”

  “I don't know what you're saying, Jimmy,” Harriet protested, “but I didn't do anything wicked.”

  “Pleased to hear it,” James said, “but nobody else will believe it.”

  Harriet leant against the wall and wept through her fingers, bowed before James's wrath. Her self-respect crumbled to pieces. “Oh, I must be wicked. I must be. I must be,” she wailed, trying to coax some sign of pity and forgiveness with her grief.

  But James turned his back. “I leave that to your conscience.” He opened the door, and after an anxious glance up and down the passage, strode out.

  Harriet wept all day and all night, not in her tempestuous way but with a miserable, prideless ooze of tears, while over her swept ghoulish memories of her abasement, revived by James. All the convictions she had stood by so staunchly went with her self-respect. She grovelled in her unworthiness, lacerated herself with Miss Montaulk's old tirades about the vileness of men and women. Even the girls in Frogs' Hollow looked down on her, James said. She was lower than Queenie even. “I must be putrid, filthy,” she told herself, turning her passion in on herself now as James, also frustrated, had turned his strength.

  On the second day after James's interview, when the maid carried down another untouched tray of food, Cabell was frightened out of his resolve to be offended till Harriet chose to come and ask forgiveness for “betraying his confidence,” as he had put it to her during the stormy scene after the ball. He hurried to her room and demanded, with threats and entreaties, that she should open the door, but the only answer he got was the sound of her weeping. Finally he sent for an axe and battered the door in.

  Harriet was sitting up in bed with her legs doubled under her, hair down, dress torn, one stocking concertinaed round her ankle, staring vacantly out of hollow, ringed eyes from which all colour had faded. The lustre had gone from her hair, her skin was yellow. Her tears had dried up and a harsh sob, like a hiccup, shook her every few seconds. She took no notice of her father till he sat down on the bed and said, “I was a mongrel talking like that. Come and be like you were before.” Then she lowered her head and the tears flowed in an unquenchable drip-drip-drip on her folded hands.

  He sent for a doctor, who said diplomatically, “I don't know what's the matter. She's had a nervous shock. Get her away from town and when she's well send her on a long trip where she'll see something new. A little port wine and iron will help.”

  “I'll take her back to the valley and se
nd her home to England next year,” Cabell said, and urged on by the doctor's serious, “You couldn't do better, except find her a husband. Women are—er—flesh and blood, too, you know,” he sat down and wrote a letter to his sister in Owerbury, breaking nearly thirty years' silence. He asked whether she would take Harriet in at Owerbury and see she was “piloted where she might find some young fellow with a bit of gumption and gentlemanliness about him, if the two go together. . .”

  Miss Montaulk was packing. They were due to leave in a few hours. Harriet nerved herself to go downstairs for a last walk in the garden. As she entered the drawing-room, where the maids had already put dustcovers on the furniture, reminders of her shame rushed at her. She shut her eyes and hurried towards the veranda.

  She was stumbling blindly across the disordered floor with one hand stretched out when she heard a footstep. She halted and a rough hand closed over hers and pressed it. She opened her eyes. Cash was standing before her.

  “Having a game of blind-man's-buff?” he said with a strenuous effort at a chuckle, then looked almost hang-dog. “I was waiting for your father. If I'm in the way I'll push off. I. . .” He licked his lips till they shone with spittle.

  Harriet stood off and stared at the floor, not wishing to speak but unable to run away.

  “Here, I brought this.” Cash pushed a parcel into her hands. “Your jewels. I thought your pa might be asking to see them. It was me advanced Geoffrey the money. I thought he might have stolen them and I didn't want to see you lose them and him get into hot water. I misjudged him for once.”

  “You mean you misjudged me.”

  “No, no, Miss Harriet.”

  “You despise ME now. You didn't think I could be so low, so mean. Oh, yes, you said it the other night. You said I was doing something mean to Father.”

  “Me despise you. God's truth, Miss Harriet, how could I look down on any one. I've been as low as a snake's belly in my time.”

  But Harriet's mind was made up. They all despised her, even Cash. From Mrs Peppiott to Cash, she thought, putting Cash at that base extreme as she recalled Mrs Peppiott's horror when once, in a pique, she had said that she might be in love with a man and that man Cash. And remembering how she had run to him after the fiasco of the ball she stamped and cried, “You helped me to make a show of myself the other night. You let me throw my arms around you. I suppose they thought I was one of your Queenies.”

  But Cash, who certainly knew nothing about “thoroughbred ladies,” tried to comfort her by saying heartily, “To hell with the whole dingo pack of them. Who cares what a Government House push thinks—it makes no difference to me,” and stood staring, sadly puzzled, up the stairs long after she had fled back to her room.

  Part IV: Shearers' War

  Chapter One: Trouble in the Air

  One evening Coyle and Larry were talking at the gate. “Still working for your old man, Larry?” Coyle said with his thin smile. “He thrashes you like a dog and you still graft to fill his pockets.”

  “It's my ma,” Larry said morosely.

  “And because of your ma you'll help skin your mates. Or what you call your mates.”

  “They are my mates.”

  “Garn. Wait till the strike and he brings in scabs. Where'll you be? With your mates or with the scabs because your ma wants you to be?” Larry rubbed his big, cross-grained hands on the top bar of the gate. “You'll be with the scabs and the kanakas and Chows.”

  “What Chows?”

  “Think too high of your old man for that, eh? Well, what does the new agreement say? Labour's got to be free. That means no union labour need apply. No jobs for those you call your mates, for Berry and Goggs and Wagner. Let them starve. That's the idea. The free labour he wants is the free labour he had in the convict days—labour you don't pay for.” His quiet voice was almost caressing. “But he won't get that far, don't worry. Something will happen to him soon.”

  Larry looked into the blue, dazed eyes. “What?”

  Coyle winked. “Something fatal. To him and all his gang of landjobbers and log-rollers.”

  Larry shivered. Coyle's lost gaze, the gentleness of his voice, so reasonably emphatic of an irrevocable dedication to hate, brought gooseflesh out on Larry's back. Against his, will he smiled. He felt himself sinking into an agreeable hypnosis which yielded him up to a mind that found words to express the deep, unspoken desires of his own blood. “How?” he half-whispered, as though there were other ears than the ears of Coyle's horse, grazing along the fence, to hear them.

  “If I told you there'd be no going back?”

  “I'm not a scab.”

  “Listen, then.” Coyle began to roll a cigarette. “There's only one way. New agreements and sending men to parliament—that's no use while your old man lives. He can give us bread and take it away. He can bring in enough immigrants to have us working for rations, like the old lags, and if we kick he can bring in coolies by the million from China and India. And he will. Wait till the boom busts and it's harder to make profits. It'll be the triangle and redcoats again, if he has his way. And is that the bushman's way? No. But it's his way, because he's a different blood and flesh from us. Look at your brothers and sister—and you. Can't you see a difference. Flash duds and carriages and umbrellas to keep their complexions from getting spoiled—that's not us, that's not Australia. That's England.” He gestured at the landscape, baked white by the early summer heat, which shimmered on roofs and trees and the backs of the cattle. “Where do satin shoes and silk dresses fit in here?”

  Larry repeated the words which the fanatical oratory of old Gursey had fixed in his mind, “There are only two kinds—men and bosses.”

  “That's right. Two ways—the English way and our way. Our way is the Australian way and they'll never learn it because they've got English skins and English eyes and the sun hurts them and the bush scares them. They hate it and so they'll do any dirt on it and on us who belong to it. They want England and a soft life and art and all that bullsh, and it's us who pay for it.”

  His matter-of-fact voice swayed Larry more than any flight of rhetoric could have done. He felt, as he always felt when Coyle spoke to him, as though a great light had broken on his darkness, dissolving the doubts with which his mother's nagging and beseeching confused him. Impatiently, twisting his beard, he waited for Coyle to come to the point.

  “That's England, see? Aristocrats, and a soft life, and blokes in kid shoes, and paying ten thousand pounds for an oil painting like a chap named Todhunter in Brisbane did the other day. And this is Australia—the bush, and graft, and your mates, and a man proving what he is by what he can do, not by who his grandfather was or how much he's got in his roll, and the wind off open, empty spaces that scares them behind their painted pictures of England. The two don't mix, see? One battens on the other. And that's why we've got to get rid of all that flesh and blood like your old man.”

  “How?” Larry said, hardly aware that he spoke.

  “Ever heard tell of a man named Stelkski, Rudolph Stelkski? There was a bloke, Gross, in Pennsylvania, a steel boss. His hands lived worse than rats. A couple of years ago Stelkski walked into his office and shot him. Ever heard of anarchists and the bombs they threw in Chicago? That's how. By the extremest means.”

  “Did it change much when this joker was shot?”

  “No, not much yet. They ain't followed it up yet. But it'll be different here. We've got ten thousand loyal bush-men, all sharp-shooters. We'll have twenty thousand quids' worth of ammunition planted along the central railway. When it's time we'll strike and grab the railway and take over the telegraph and stop news getting out, go to Rockhampton and declare a commune in Central Queensland. When the unionists outside hear they'll chuck in their bundle and that'll be the end of the silken bonds of empire and Lord Muckstein's steady five per cent.”

  “Say they don't chuck in their bundle.”

  “They'll come and shoot us down like rabbits. Scared, are you?”

  “I ain't
scared.” Larry bit his nails. “When will it be?”

  “I'll be around seeing you,” Coyle promised. . .

  When Larry went back to the yard Emma put her head out of the kitchen doorway and demanded, “What were you doing with Coyle?”