by Jean Devanny
Old Bill started up. “Well, yer arstin’ me!” he cried. “Yer arstin’ me!” He stepped over quickly and took up the axe. “A true mate, yer said, George?” he queried, standing bent up with the axe gripped in both hands, staring at the prostrate figure of his mate.
“A true mate, I said, Bill. Do fer me, I tell yer. They’re comin’ again.”
Old Bill gripped the axe, stood above his mate, swung it, and brought the blade’s edge down with all his force upon the thin, scraggy neck.
The blow must have killed the old fellow instantly. His body jerked once or twice and then lay still. The throat burst open, gurgling sounds issuing forth with the gushes of blood. Old Bill went mad at the sight. Had he only mutilated his friend? Was he suffering? Feverishly he hacked at the flesh until the head fell off the body entirely. Horrid sight! Human shambles! George’s moustaches dipped into the blood and sucked it up! Bill watched the crimson flow. How it smelled! that warm blood! Its reek overpowered that of the spirits. It cloyed the already vile atmosphere of the hut.
Bill was stunned to sobriety. He trembled and muttered timidly to himself. He made a mighty effort to collect himself. George had had the “dingbats”; he (Bill) had been drunk. He blinked down at the headless thing upon the floor. A body without a head was a silly thing. He shifted his bleared gaze to the decapitated member. It looked peculiarly horrible. Useless, too. He could not imagine it ever being of use, possessed of a working brain.
An immense sorrow suddenly took possession of Old Bill. He realised that those mutilated remains had been his mate. He had deprived himself of his mate, his “cobber” for twenty and odd years. Oh, desolation! He staggered to his bunk, dragging the axe after him, and for an hour he sat there feebly sobbing and muttering occasionally: “He arst me ter do it. He arst me ter do it.” By and by, when reason prompted him to go off to the homestead, he walked through a pool of blood to the door. George’s blood clung darkly to his hobnailed boots.
The legal aspect of the situation never once struck him. When the police came to the station for him his profound despondency denied him apprehension of the purport of their presence. The good offices of a now thoroughly sobered and frightened Margaret, waiting on him with vague words of comfort, failed of any effect. A lugubrious “Ay?” “Yes, Missis,” was all the interest she could evoke.
Of course, Messenger arranged for his defence by a leading lawyer. Nevertheless, he got ten years with hard labour, despite the obvious fact that his trouble had unhinged his reason.
On Margaret it had a deep effect. Murder had been done, and yet no sin had been committed. For the groundling folk around her the affair was merely a rather comic, sensational criminal case. Had it happened far away from her perhaps she would have felt the same about it; but being right under her nose, so to say, its principals her friends, her own interests so bound up in it, it involved her deeply. It affected her so deeply and strongly as to colour her whole attitude towards human actions and established institutions; the humbug and injustice of legality, the fallibility of common judgments, the illogicality of taking things at their face value. Never again did Margaret take the Absolute as a standard in anything. Her youthful precision, laying down definite lines of demarcation between this and that, she discarded as so much flim-flam.
Things were not what they seemed. Kindness, sympathy, love, the gentlest attributes of human nature, could be productive of atrocious results. No doubt about that. Thenceforth criticism of human actions, if justified at all, must pass through the crucible of an understanding wide as the world. Man’s passions, his faults, foibles and virtues, were of one piece.
A touch of gravity descended upon Margaret, affecting even her gayest moods, an adumbration of the majestic womanliness that had mantled her by the time she was twenty-six years of age.
CHAPTER XI
Angus Glengarry came to the station as its manager when Margaret reached her twenty-seventh year. His arrival presaged a sort of longdistance preparation for the world voyage so long projected by Messenger and Margaret. It also established the emancipation of Barry from the hard, soul-deadening toil of the range-man, the shepherd, the station hand. For years Margaret’s common sense had hammered at his reluctance to loose his habits of toil. Of what use their wealth, if he were going to toil all his day like the veriest proletarian? Out all day superintending, lending a hand here and there.
Margaret’s four children (her youngest at this time of Glengarry’s arrival was four months old) engrossed her almost entirely. She needed her husband’s help to ensure her some time to herself for reading, recreation, thought. Acutely sensitive to the responsibilities of parenthood, she would not resign any part of the care of the children to hired help. Harry, for one, now eight years old, needed her constantly.
In appearance the boy was the picture of health and beauty: sturdy-limbed, upright and lithe, his father’s own son. Margaret and Messenger, both so dark, had produced in him a blonde. Somehow their strain had defaulted. Hair of richest auburn, eyes exactly matching its colour, with black lashes so startlingly long as to intrude continually; an expression in those eyes of perfect candour, not child-like at all, of adult impeccability. His nose was a perfect nose, even so early, his mouth, too, purely chaste for aught but a mother’s kisses. His round cheeks glowed with the ruddiness of pure blood.
In sunlight the pure brown of his hair, his eyes, the glow upon his cheeks, the gleam of his teeth, his first set, and yet astonishingly perfect, gave him a burnished appearance. Golden light seemed to dance about him. In the mysterious firelight in the nursery on winter nights when he sat with his sisters before the moderate fire he looked, to Margaret, supernal. His pure gaze would cling to her face with expression of an earnest love too profound for his tender years. His mother was his life. He seemed to draw from her presence about him all interest in living. He drank from her lips the sap of life. He loved his Dad. Oh, yes, and Jimmy, too; but Barry and Tutaki respected his love for his mother for what it was, something worshipful, wondrous and altogether extraordinary.
So how could Margaret bear her responsibilities lightly? Sitting in the nursery dusk on those winter evenings, as was her habit, she would expound to the children her conception of a true and real propriety, trying to inculcate in their minds the fabric of a moral philosophy that would endure.
The sheer gold and grace of her maturity had enslaved them all—Messenger, Tutaki, the women about her and the station hands. Her little ones regarded her, naturally, as the fountain head of all wisdom and knowledge, and they would hang upon her words, absorbed, on those evenings when she sat in the speckled dust of their room, the youngest upon her knee, and unfolded to them the tale of the precious mystery of their own beings.
Harry was outwardly, indeed, the picture of health and beauty. But to anyone whose hand rested upon his torso anywhere, the fierce thump, thump, and sucking of that defective heart was startling. It was as though some infernal machine were dredging the sands of his life from their bed. Each year the trouble increased in violence. To Wellington, the capital city, to Auckland, the Queen city of the North, even down to Dunedin, the Edinburgh of the South, Margaret and Barry had taken the boy in search of the best doctors and their opinions regarding his condition. But to no purpose. One and all declared: Acute valvular trouble that must get worse. At present the organ has compensation. It is doing its work. If it breaks down it must be built up with medicines.
Little Harry was forbidden exertion. He must not go upstairs. He must not run or tumble. Imagine Margaret’s task. Herculean! For Harry, despite his ethereal beauty, was sturdy-limbed and possessed of an activity urge far beyond the average. Margaret knew moments of terrible fear. “He must get worse.” Well, anyone knew what must be the outcome of that process. Her beautiful boy! Her first-born! These moments of fear would have overborne her, would have sapped her vigorous stamina, made of her benign graciousness a thing of rags and tatters, had they persisted. But her common sense and Barry’s helpful atti
tude steadied her to a thought-out proper course of conduct.
Until Harry was six years old they had not realised the seriousness of his heart trouble. Margaret’s chief concern and worry had been to meet the demands of his temperamental obliquity with anything like satisfaction. She strove hard for perfection. But gradually the increasing violence of his heart throbs had forced attention and consequently realisation. The first weeks of realisation had been a prolonged nightmare to parents and child. The boy had been extraordinarily active; his days had been one long rough and tumble. Then, all of a sudden, no exertion; no rushing upstairs to slide down the banisters; no galloping round the orchards, the big kitchen garden, astride of a stick. The boy moped himself thin and pale; he could not understand his mother’s anguished explanations of a weak heart.
How carefully she and Barry talked to him! Activity was his need. He tried his little best to please his mother, hanging to her skirts the live-long day, carefully explaining to her any infringement of her wishes. His dolefully eager: “I forgot, Mummy, I weally and twuly forgot. I won’t run again.” How it tore her heart to pieces!
Till one day she could bear it no longer. She had the three children who comprised her family at that time in the cherry orchard. It was early spring. Row upon row of sturdy cherry trees flung soft scent from their garniture of pinkish bloom to the imploring whispers of the spring zephyrs. The orchard was surrounded by high hawthorn hedges, then thick with new leafy clothing and choked with growth of flowering currant. Little Margaret and Heather, a wee child, rolled in the dry grasses, amused with the leaping of the grasshoppers.
Harry played gently for a while, and then subsided quietly beside his mother who was sitting upon a box reading. Margaret put out a hand unconsciously and let her fingers wander in his auburn hair, but continued to read. Harry looked all around: at the pale blue of the high sky, the waving clumps of bloom upon the cherry trees; at the small birds pecking at the insects upon the juicy bark. He watched the numerous starlings stealing grass for their nests in course of construction in the chimneys. He knew well enough of the trouble caused to the household by those persistent little beggars. Time after time the kitchen chimney was fired, season after season, but each morning would find it blocked again by the persistent, indefatigable little scamps that simply could not understand why they should be so robbed of the fruits of their labours.
Harry admired the bluish-greeny sheen of the male starling. He knew the sexes. His mother had explained to him that the shiny bird was the male and the drab plain creature the female that laid the eggs that were the colour of the sky. How swiftly they flew! What pleasure in flight! If he had only been born with wings! His weak heart would not matter then.
The little man grew sad. He did not know that it was sadness he felt, of course. He only knew that he wanted to cry; he wanted to bury his face in his mother’s breast and sob. He turned suddenly to her. “Mummy!”
Like a shot his mother’s arms were round him. She had heard the misery in that cry. “Darling! What?”
“Mummy, I want to play.” His head pressed into her breast.
Margaret’s misery of soul! She could not bear it. “Darling, you shall play! You shall play!” She soothed him. She poured a bounteous stream of love upon him, and then she played with him herself. Played hide-and-seek, rounders, any game he liked.
Did it harm the boy? He beamed again. He recovered his lost bloom. The parents discussed the matter. Said Margaret: “He would fret himself to death, Barry. You saw it. If he is to die, he shall die happy.”
“Yes. I don’t think he will die. As you say, his life has been a misery to him. His heart is no better. Nature will provide, I believe. Let him be reasonably active. Don’t be silly. If you see any signs of undue tiredness make him rest. I don’t attach too much importance to medical advice. Let us use our own common sense.”
Nevertheless, Harry was still a source of worry and anxiety. Margaret had an idea that the world voyage would not materialise until Harry was old enough to accompany his parents. She could not imagine herself leaving him. But she had not spoken to Barry about it. Probably he had given no thought to it at all. There was plenty of time, for their family was still increasing. But after Jane came Margaret declared laughingly to Barry that the house was getting fairly cluttered up with babies; she was thinking she would have to put her foot down. At which Barry blushed like a boy, ran his fingers over his hair and stammered: “Just as you say, dear, of course.”
After nearly ten years of wedded life they were pretty well acquainted and settled down. How otherwise? Messenger’s acceptance of the lines his life’s course had run in was almost absolute. His one regret and disappointment was little Harry’s trouble. He stood square-on to life. Placid, unsecretive and settled as the limpidity of a shallow, sheltered lake he lived along the years, resting on the bosom of Time. So solid, so trustworthy, so “sound.” His love for his wife was still undimmed; pre-marital chastity disallowed one roving thought. The glory of her splendid womanhood was ever about him; her humour intrigued his fancy; her impetuous temper and impulses, often foolish, from the results of which he was often called upon to extricate her, kept him so interested. No quiet where Margaret was. The station life was lively enough with her about, always experimenting, poking here and there, pleasurably taking advice, even seeking it, on all manner of subjects, from all and sundry, the “know-alls” and the men of meanest estate. Her gracious, friendly interest never so manifest as when in contact with the lowliest of her “hands.” Equals all in her eyes, and from her guests she exacted the same consideration.
And Messenger thought her motherhood divine. He never ceased to feel astonishment that Nature had so richly endowed one woman with so many good qualities and so few bad ones. Like many another, he had still to learn the inadequacy of civilisation’s flimsy veneer in the face of primitive passions. Life was not very complex to Messenger. The mischievous stuff that makes of life a field of battle was not in him. He was happy.
But Margaret was of different stuff. Nature herself, in sex differentiation, had set the ban on a workable covenant with life for her. The high and mightiness of the tasks Nature demanded of her had a mercurial effect upon her. They bred in her unquiet conceptions of life. She was happy, certainly, but the sorcery of the woman essence, which, being the mother of the race, must be man as well as woman, child with adult, disallowed even the conception of a reposeful philosophy.
In the first years, Barry’s placidity had irked her, but the soul-discipline inseparable from parenthood had chastened her to an understanding and an acceptance of him as being a proper foil for her exuberance. The ardour of her love had not out-lasted the first few months of her wedded life, but Margaret had not considered this anything extraordinary, even though there seemed no limit to the growth of Barry’s love for her. It must be woman’s way and man’s way, she thought. Her love had been so different from his all along. She was so fond of him; she respected him; as time went on and she realised his fine honour, she reverenced him. And what a friend he was! She knew no disappointment through vanished ardour in bodily contacts. Rather a pity, that was all. There was certainly a great deal more in man’s love than in woman’s, but that evidently could not be helped. She looked for his coming as eagerly as ever. The intimacies of their life together, though not sweet to her as to him, yet were not displeasing to her because the flavour of her love ever clung around them. Her inward grace, urged to expression by the deepest affection and an innate understanding of his love’s necessitous stress, kept intact the circle of their communion.
There were no might-have-beens in Margaret’s life. Though not simple, she was pure. And so very human. With her babies, now growing out of infancy, the usual superior overlordship and faultless attitude of parents she condemned and disdained. “The little hearts that err” knew “Mummy” as one of themselves who had committed their own little faults and learned through experience to do better. No “angel” philosophy that had been tried
and never found wanting. Margaret, once having seen a guest vigorously thrashing a little one for some childish misdemeanour, told Barry and Tutaki that Nature made a terrible mistake in not providing little children with some means of revenge on cruel, ignorant parents who cowardly assaulted tiny people possessed of no means of defence.
Had Margaret analysed her mind in regard to Barry, to her life in general, after nearly ten years of married life, she would have found little incompleteness. She would probably have told herself that the one thing missing in the complete whole of her happiness was Harry’s trouble. How many times had she lain awake in the night and prayed to God (for Margaret believed in God’s actuality) for a miraculous cure of that terrible heart?
Her sex-life with Barry she would probably not have reckoned up at all. It loomed little in her scheme of things. Its biggest aspect was its relation to the begetting of children. The accounts of passionate sex-love as manifested by woman in the novels she read she simply regarded as the product of an erotic imagination pandering to vulgar sensationalism for the sake of a sale.
When Glengarry arrived at the station to usurp the more arduous of Barry’s labours, Margaret was in Wellington visiting her mother with all four children. She was expecting her husband to come to her after settling Glengarry at his work. The manager, who was to bring his widowed mother with him, was, as is usual, to live at the big house.
