The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘Thasso,’ the Stray agreed, moving away. ‘Thanks.’

  The more she thought over the novel idea, the more it pleased her. She had always regarded all forms of settled employment with deep suspicion, but it couldn’t do any harm just to see the Marks woman. Besides, Dancy thought, suppose she did get a job? How proud she would be boasting to Snow. This would show him she was worth something. A girl who could go into a strange town and land a job was worth travelling with.

  ‘A bloody toiler, me!’ the Stray murmured to herself.

  She went back to the camp and dressed carefully, borrowing some face-powder from Mrs Jones, and darkening her eyebrows with a piece. of charcoal from the fire. She twisted up her straw-coloured hair under her hat and borrowed Miss Phipps’s stockings.

  ‘If I only had me teef,’ she mourned.

  A wistful vision of that beautiful trunk full of clothes rose before her eyes. If only she had them now, instead of these old things she had been given by the Methodist minister’s wife! It was a bright, windy afternoon, and the gusts fluttered her badly fitting dress so that she had to hold it in her hand.

  The dairy’s nearness to the camp was one reason why Dancy decided with so little hesitation to ask for work there. It was only over the next rise, a mere quarter of a mile’s walk. She trotted away without saying a word to any of her campmates, her heart full of fear and hope.

  The house stood back from the road under some pepper trees. The land round it had the bare, worn look that feeding cattle give the most luxuriant pasture, if it is overstocked. A thin, hard-faced woman opened the door.

  ‘You Mrs Marks?’ the Stray asked. ‘I ’eard you was wantin’ someone, and me old man’s in hospital, so I thought I’d come up. ’Orse bloody near kicked his face in.’

  She regretted the adjective, but it had just slipped out. She won’t have me, she thought sadly, she won’t take me now.

  Mrs Marks regarded the figure on her doorstep narrowly. Girls were hard to get. She opened the door a little.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  The Stray took heart. ‘Thank you, missus,’ she said, stepping across the threshold.

  The kitchen had an air of being over-worked, as though one meal were no sooner finished than another was in progress of preparation. The flies were as much at home as at the travellers’ camp. It was hot and smelt of stove-polish and bread.

  Dancy had a feeling that this woman wanted her to work there, but at the same time disapproved of her, suspected her, was peering for a vulnerable place through which she could dart on some hidden weakness.

  ‘The place is in a bit of a mess,’ Mrs Marks said, as though it was the kitchen’s fault that this was so. ‘Men tramping in and out all day and night. And I been sick a good while.’ But lest the Stray take advantage of this admission, she added: ‘I’d only reckoned on paying ten shillings and keep — of course you not staying long would make a difference — if you was regular, now …’ Her voice was toneless as she went on adding one set of words to another dully, as though she were washing dishes or drudging at some job she did not like. ‘ … And how long would you be here, did you say? Ah, your husband’s sick. Well, well, and you don’t know when he’ll come out? Of course, you mightn’t suit, not having the experience … Yes, you could put your horses in the paddock, I suppose. If you like to try, I’ll see what my husband says.’

  The woman was obviously calculating that she could get more out of this wreck of a girl than from someone with more resources. The Stray was so near to unemployable that she needs must be remarkably cheap. It was only when Mrs Marks spoke of her own ailments that she really showed much interest.

  She spoke lovingly of the ‘pains in the back and kidneys.’ What Dr Alfred said last time he came was that she should just drop everything; but with George short-handed and managing as best they could … When the cows go dry, you’ve got all the cost of feeding them, and nothing coming in … She seldom finished a sentence just as, the Stray was to discover, she never finished a household job, dropping it in the middle, or pushing it negligently out of sight, as she pushed the thin, greying wisps of hair that fell round her face.

  Dancy knew that, if she came to this place, she would be underpaid and over-worked. Everything she saw told her so, but the realisation did not offset her triumph at the thought of announcing to Snow that she had a job. The fierce possessiveness she had displayed towards Snow had deepened since he went to hospital. She would show him she was worth travelling with. She would save those ten shillings … It was almost an insult to be offered such a sum, but she would take it and save it as a surprise for him. Perhaps he would not want to take it and would give it back to her to get her teeth. That was if she stayed long enough. She gave the woman before her a long look, and a flicker of power ran through her. She could manage this frayed old dish-rag of a woman, she had no doubt of that. Mean and a whiner, was the Stray’s verdict.

  They agreed that the Stray was to start early next morning. She could move her belongings, on wheels and hoofs, into the paddock as soon as she liked. She was shown her bedroom, a lean-to built on to the side of the scullery. Back in the kitchen, she looked round with the eye of possession. It did not matter that the kitchen officially belonged to Mrs Marks, if she, Dancy, were in occupation. She had not realised that she had craved a house ravenously, as though it were some desirable food, that she had a longing for four walls about her and safety. Tomorrow night, she planned, she would heat water and have a real bath. She listened with only half a mind to Mrs Marks’s reiteration of the sudden stabbing pains that she got in the small of the back so she couldn’t bend, and the slow aching pains that came on ‘something terrible’ when she lay down at night.

  A figure rose from a stool by the fire as the women reentered the kitchen, a tall lad with a vacant look who edged towards the opposite door as though the stranger frightened him.

  ‘This is Mrs Grimshaw, Charley,’ the lady of the house explained; and as soon as the lad had mumbled something and slouched out, she turned to her new employee. ‘He was always top of the school,’ she remarked drearily. ‘Such a clever boy! But it comes of working too hard, if you ask me, though they say the meningitis did it.’ She nodded after her son, as though accepting his lack of sanity, just as she accepted the dreariness of the kitchen. ‘He’s gone to see the train out,’ she explained. ‘Maybe you’d like a cup of tea, Dancy? Was you christened that? Funny name, ain’t it? I known a lot of Nancies, but never a Dancy before.’ Her voice trailed across the name, seeming to leave a track behind it, such as a snail might leave. ‘Yes, poor Charley … ever since he got that meningitis he thinks he’s in charge of all the trains. It don’t do no good to keep him at home, because it makes him worse. Down to the station he goes to wave them out. Thinks they can’t start without him. The men have got that used to him they just say ‘All right, Charley,’ and he says ‘Right. Let her go,’ and pretends to blow a whistle and wave the flag. It’s good of the station-master not to mind.’

  She turned from the trouble of Charley to a grievance against a neighbour who had borrowed a horse and had an accident in which the horse broke its leg and had to be shot, and to a complicated piece of litigation between the Marks family and the owner of a market-garden into which their cows had strayed. Over these topics the woman’s voice left the same faint trace of its passing as though they wilted.

  She might have continued to talk until darkness fell, had not her other son Joe and her husband, big men, loud-voiced and impatient, come in demanding a meal. They looked at the Stray with a half-insolent appraisal, as they might have regarded a heifer that was not good for much. Dancy went away from the dairy with an angry feeling that she had known all too well of old, a feeling that people were trying to ‘down’ her. Snow had not tried, nor the busker, nor the Tyrells, nor that queer old ’Postle. But as soon as you came near people who had houses or shops or businesses, they looked at you as though you ought to fade off the earth. They made you feel small an
d not worth the money.

  ‘Ten shillings!’ the Stray growled, spitting vigorously. ‘Ten bloody shillings!’

  There was no mention of this humiliating underpayment when she boasted at the camp of her success in getting a job.

  ‘She says to me: “That’s a lot to ask, ain’t it? Thirty-five bob?” and I says, “You can take it or leave it, missus. It don’t matter to me.” ’

  They all listened respectfully to her, and if there was a flicker in Thirty-Bob’s eye, the Stray refused to see it.

  ‘You ought to let me sell that jib of yours, Dancy,’ he suggested. ‘I’ve got a chap coming up first thing to look at that stallion of mine, and I’ll see what I can do with the Horehound.’ Dancy looked obstinate. ‘Stands to reason, girl, you can’t manage both of them. I’ll get rid of the sulky for you too.’ Then at the cautious look of Dancy, Thirty-Bob lost patience. ‘Christ Almighty!’ he exclaimed. ‘Anyone ’ud think I was trying to pinch the filling from your back teeth instead of doing you a good turn.’ The fact that the Stray had no teeth rather spoilt the poetic metaphor, but his sincerity was obvious. The Stray repented her harsh thoughts.

  ‘All right, Thirty-Bob,’ she replied: ‘You sell ’er.’ And then handsomely: ‘I don’t mind.’

  Thirty-Bob reflected that you should never expect gratitude from a woman. He had taken a liking to Dancy, and had already remarked in her hearing that ‘a man travelling was always out of luck unless he had a woman to battle for him.’ This tender sentiment left the Stray cold, as Thirty-Bob’s previous remark had been to the effect that he thought he would get him ‘a good little gin; they beat the white ones holler when it comes to work.’ For this statement he was unmercifully guyed by his friends who pointed out that Thirty-Bob, if he ever did get a wife, would probably swap her away for a good-looking mare, and ask ‘thirty-bob to boot.’

  II

  Burning Angus, man of action that he was, would not tamely creep away. He called a meeting of the travellers that same night. They all came, the men with families, the men without families, and they listened in silence while Angus laid before them his plans for a Bagmen’s Union.

  ‘What kind of a life is it for men like us? The sergeant can order us off the river, and there is no other place for us to camp. They can order us out of town, and we’ve got to go, like slaves, like dogs. Here’s a man so inhuman that he can turn a woman away from the town just when she needs the things that civilisation can give her. For all the police care, we can die on the road; yes, and we do die on the road — of starvation, and cold, and despair. If it wasn’t for the help of other men and women, who’ve got nearly as little as we have, there’d be more notices of old men — unidentified, destitute, died of malnutrition, which means starvation …’ His voice rose. ‘I tell you there’s no one cares a damn about the men on the track. It’s up to us, ourselves, to do something about it; and the only thing we can do is to make ourselves heard … appeal to the townspeople …’

  Mrs Tyrell rose from the audience in great indignation. ‘If you think you’re going to make a show of me in the town, Angus, I’ll let you know I’ve got a good name on the road, and for all the sergeant says, this is the first trouble we’ve been in, barring a bit here and there …’ They pulled her back and soothed her down. ‘Well, I won’t have him going around the town talking about me,’ she was heard to declare indignantly. ‘I’d sooner just go away at once.’

  ‘Now that’s just where you’re wrong, Mrs Tyrell,’ Burning Angus argued, with great politeness. ‘We’re all ready to stand behind you, aren’t we, chaps? The police can’t do anything to ye, Mrs Tyrell, and if they send us to gaol — well, we’re used to it. It’s a matter for direct action. What’s more, if we can get some of the men in the town to take up our case …’

  ‘Crawlers, the lot of ’em,’ from somewhere in the audience.

  ‘I’m saying if we can get them to take it up. And tomorrow we’ll go round to all the clergy and see if we can’t enlist their help.’ Burning Angus positively steamed with energy, so that his glasses grew moist and he had to take them off and wipe them. His hard blue eye shone with the light of the crusade. ‘We want to show that this union — our union — the Bagmen’s Union, can take up a case and enlist public opinion — and win. We’ll beat the police by simple passive resistance. It’ll bulge the walls of the sergeant’s gaol if he tries to arrest the lot of us.’

  ‘I remember once in Orion,’ the Dogger said reminiscently, ‘the sergeant said to a young cop who’d just brought in a batch of train jumpers: “What d’you think this is — a gaol or a boarding-house?” ’

  There came a murmur of agreement. ‘He’s got to feed us. In or out. It don’t matter to us.’

  ‘Why, the best tucker I ever ate,’ Snake chimed in, ‘was in a little gaol back of Condobolin. When I’d done me week, the sergeant’s wife asked if I’d like to stay and do some gardening. So I occupied me cell another week, and she gave me a quid and a mother’s blessing when I left.’

  ‘Was that the place where they put up a slide at the pictures: ‘Will all prisoners please return to gaol? Inspector arriving any moment’?’

  The audience was ready to illustrate, with a wealth of experience, just how gaols differed in towns from the borders of one State to the next. Burning Angus waited impatiently. He knew that, once started on the subject of sergeants, it was hard to stop his little following.

  ‘As I was saying’ — he raised his voice — ‘as I was saying, it may not come to a show-down. It’s just a matter of resisting this high-handed police action some time. And now we have as good a chance as any.’ His eye swept the little circle like a blue searchlight. ‘I’ll take a vote on it, duly and in order. Will someone move a motion?’

  The Dogger proposed a long-winded and very complicated motion which had been written out beforehand so that he would not get tangled up in the clauses. The ‘inner group’ — as he proudly termed himself, Angus, Uncle and Snake — had been composing the motion all that evening on a scrap of wrapping-paper. It wound on and on, through ‘whereas’s’ and ‘fascist tactics of the local police’ and ‘we, the undersigned’ and grand statements about ‘justice’ and the ‘demands’ of the ‘travelling unemployed for shelter, decent treatment and the right of localisation.’

  ‘Put in we need firewood,’ someone suggested.

  The Dogger ignored the amendment. ‘We therefore are determined to resist the order to vacate the river-bank, and we hereby affirm our resolution to stay on the river-bank in a body until next dole-day.’

  ‘And raise hell,’ from another interjector.

  ‘And do all in our power to enlist the sympathy of the townspeople in the present harsh and unsympathetic tactics of the local police.’

  ‘Is that all?’ someone asked, wondering whether the Dogger had merely paused for breath.

  ‘Anyone second that?’ Burning Angus snapped.

  ‘I will,’ purred Thirty-Bob.

  Angus turned, startled, for he had arranged that one of the inner group should second the motion. Uncle, as usual, had fallen into a kind of dream, and was probably back in the seventeenth century.

  ‘I will,’ Thirty-Bob said again, hitching up his disreputable trousers and leering at the assembly. ‘And because why? Because I’m going to see the sergeant’s got something more to put me in for than just sitting on me arse on a river-bank. When I was in Bourke once,’ Thirty-Bob grew reminiscent, ‘the John took me up for tearing his uniform and using insulting words. And I hadn’t called him a thing! I told the magistrate that. I says: “Yer honour, what I should of called him was a …” ’ Thirty-Bob reeled off a horrifying genealogy that traced the constable’s lack of ancestry for several generations. ‘And I damn well said to meself, “That’s the last time a cop puts me in for nothing.” So I’m all in favour of us sitting on the bloody river-bank till we put down bloody roots.’

  ‘Motion seconded,’ Angus snapped. ‘Anyone against?’

  ‘I am,’ Mr
s Tyrell said decidedly. ‘I told you before, Angus, that I’m not going to be made a by-word in this or any other town.’

  Her husband pulled her down, trying to soothe her in an undertone.

  ‘It’s not only you, Mrs Tyrell,’ Angus said in his most conciliatory voice. ‘It’s the principle of the thing. And, I may say, while I’m on the subject, that the seconder of the motion seems to have forgotten that this is to be a peaceful demonstration. We don’t want any violence. We’d have a much better case if a few of those here tonight had remembered that earlier.’

  ‘They picked on us,’ Dick Tyrell said indignantly. ‘How would you like to have a lot of blacks jump on your ribs?’

  ‘I’m not talking about the rights and wrongs of it. I’m saying it looks bad. Anyway, let’s get down to the motion. Where were we? Oh, yes, I’ll put the motion. All those in favour?’

  ‘How about reading it over again?’ Deafy called, propping his hand to his ear. ‘I didn’t get it the first time.’

  Angus gave a weary sigh. ‘Read it again,’ he ordered.

  The motion was read again in all its unwieldy length, and when the Dogger concluded, the audience sat silent, as though dazed.

  ‘Well, I’ll take the vote,’ Angus announced. ‘All those in favour of staying right here on the river-bank?’

  ‘Aye.’ Those who did not agree did not vote.

  ‘Against?’ There was only a silence.

  Angus rubbed his hands. ‘Now, while we’re here,’ he went on, ‘I’ll ask Comrade Simpson’ — that was the Dogger — ‘to give you some idea of the aims and objects of the Bagmen’s Union, which is officially taking up this, its first case of victimisation.’

  The Dogger rose in grim dignity. ‘Friends,’ he began, ‘all those here present know the rotten conditions we are up against on the road. They know …’ He stopped dead. Bobbing towards them along the river-bank was a circle of light from an electric torch. ‘I’ll bet it’s those Johns again,’ he said resignedly.