The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  And sure enough the burly figure of the young constable broke into the circle of light.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you’ — he was rather breathless and awkward; by nature a polite young man, a trial to his superiors — ‘but I’m afraid there’s going to be a flood.’

  Angus glowered at him. ‘It’s just another dodge of the sergeant’s,’ he said savagely. ‘Well, it won’t work. We’re staying here, and you can shift us out by force or not at all.’

  The young constable began to lose patience. ‘I tell you we’ve just had word through from Jasmine. There’s been a cloudburst.’ He did not relish this job of reasoning with so many stubborn, angry travellers. ‘You’ll see for yourself soon enough. They’ve flashed a slide on at the picture show. Look.’ He pointed to the road bridge. ‘Look at the cars going home.’ And sure enough a stream of cars were spanking away in procession as fast as cars could go. The farmers who lived along the Gunnar River were racing madly home.

  Angus was still obdurate. ‘We know the sergeant ’ud dig up the river if that was the only way to stop people camping on it.’

  Mrs Tyrell could bear it no longer. How dare they stand arguing there wasting time! ‘Oh, the children!’ she screamed. ‘The children! Never mind standing there talking your heads off. Deafy, Dick, Thirty-Bob, get the horses in.’

  There was something so piercing in the terror of her cry that it, more than anything the young constable had said, carried conviction.

  ‘I tell you, you’ve got no time.’ The policeman seized his advantage. ‘It’s coming down now. Now, I tell you. It’s a flood.’

  All in a minute the meeting was broken into its several elements of worried fathers snatching up stray infants and rushing off down the bank, their wives beside them, running swiftly, frenzied with fear. Few of them did not know the terrors of a flood or, in their fevered imaginations, could not envisage a great wall of water roaring down what had been but a shallow trickle, hurling great logs, boulders, debris before it as it came.

  ‘Oh, the children! the children!’ Mrs Tyrell screamed again. ‘Dick, Tom, get the horses in. For God’s sake! get the horses in.’

  Now, above the crying of the roughly-awakened children, the shouts of the men, working with nervous haste to bring down the tents, there came the stamping and snorting of startled horses, the chink of hobbles, the jingle of harness, and the whinnying of the Horehound, who objected to being separated from a sociable group of her own kind. She had had everything else happen, and to be put into harness at nine o’clock at night was too much for her temper.

  ‘I ain’t going to drive her,’ the Stray muttered in the busker’s ear. ‘Not if I know it.’

  ‘We’ll shove her in the van. I’ll drive the cow.’

  ‘If she smashes up the van, Snow’ll kill you.’

  ‘Will you shut up!’ Duke growled.

  He was trying to do three things at once, and all Miss Phipps did was stand by and say: ‘Really, this is preposterous. I refuse to be disturbed.’

  ‘Where to, ’Postle?’ the busker shouted, as he heaved his hard-won firewood into the van, and threw in on top of it, helterskelter, the tent, tarpaulin, the cooking-pots. From force of habit he found himself putting out the fire, then remembered that the flood would soon put it out for him.

  ‘Up to the show-ground, I suppose.’ The Apostle’s tone was doubtful. ‘We’ll just have to camp along the side of the fence.’

  The Apostle’s little family worked much more efficiently than the others, Bryson and Whitefield busily gathering up trifles that are so apt to be overlooked where there are no methodical small boys. Thirty-Bob was cursing Adelaide’s intricate wire harness, and poor Adelaide, whose van had stayed so long in the one spot that it was stuck, was dancing about impatiently from one foot to the other.

  Now and then they all cast panic-stricken glances at the river. Already it seemed to be lapping higher. The young constable, reinforced by a body of citizens who were helping the Flahertys to move their furniture, went from one group to another, hurrying them, encouraging, even lending a hand.

  ‘Won’t the sergeant cheer!’ the Dogger said bitterly.

  ‘Ar! what do we care? Come on.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Show-ground, I s’pose.’

  ‘We’d better give a hand to those horse bagmen. Poor cows! Listen to the kids crying.’ They turned in a body up the river-bank, and were soon busy taking in Mrs Jones’s washing, pushing Adelaide’s van, helping bring down the Tyrells’ big tent.

  The Horehound, rearing and snorting and plunging, had been taken over and driven as far as the road by Thirty-Bob. Then the Apostle’s truck refused to start. He had his wife and children packed in and was frantically turning the crank-handle while the efficient Bryson trod on the accelerator. Nothing happened. Men clustered round the truck. The river was visibly higher now.

  ‘There’s nothing for it, Harry,’ the Dogger said grimly. ‘We’ll have to push her.’

  A team of bagmen set their shoulders to the truck.

  ‘Heave.’

  They heaved. The truck did not budge.

  ‘There’s something wrong.’ The Dogger looked inside. ‘Why, damned if he hasn’t got the brake on.’

  The next effort started the truck rolling towards the highway with the bagmen pushing and Angus steering. The Postlewaite family trudged behind their helpers, Mrs Postlewaite nursing the baby, and the Apostle apologising gently for his forgetfulness.

  When they reached the road, they found the busker and the Stray waiting, and after three more attempts, the policeman, who was a bit of a mechanic, succeeded in starting the truck.

  ‘You want to clean those plugs,’ he advised, taking back his torch from the bagman who had been playing its light on the engine. He swept it round. ‘Everybody off?’

  ‘Yeah. Looks like it.’

  Having gone once more down the bank to make sure, the constable was able to chivvy Miss Phipps away from the fire where she was sitting with a blanket round her and every intention of imitating Canute. He was only just in time. The waters did not come down in a cream-lipped welter, but silently, swiftly, treacherously rippling up higher and higher, swirling faster and faster, mounting the roots of the she-oaks and willows, rising, as though the trees helped them, in little swirls round the trunks, running up slopes of the bank and coming round circuitously from the rear to attack the fires, that hissed a defiance and spat from their white ash.

  Men who had gone to warn the Chinamen came back to the raised safety of the road to report.

  ‘How about old Jim?’ someone asked.

  ‘He won’t come. Said to leave him alone. His hut’s on a bit of a rise.’

  ‘That won’t help him much. How high does it come?’

  ‘One year,’ Mr Flaherty told them, ‘it was four feet in our place.’

  ‘Here,’ Thirty-Bob announced, ‘I’ll fetch the old cuss. Come on, Dick.’

  Jack Tyrell was driving the cart, so Dick sprang up in Thirty-Bob’s sulky.

  ‘Where you going?’ Mrs Tyrell called. ‘The water ’ull be over here soon.’

  ‘You go on, Ma,’ Thirty-Bob shouted back. ‘We’re going for old Jim.’

  They swung off the road and drove along the bank through the water, which was now swirling deeper and deeper. As they leapt from the sulky and, heedless of Jim’s dog barking around them, pushed into the hut, the water was already across the clay floor.

  ‘Jim!’ they shouted. ‘Hey, Jim! You’ll be drowned!’

  Old Jim was lying in his bunk, and although he was awake, he regarded them indifferently.

  ‘Come on. Get your stuff. Quick! Hurry!’

  ‘The Chinamen ain’t gone,’ Jim argued, ‘and I guess if a Chow can stay, I can.’

  Thirty-Bob and Dick, cursing furiously, bundled him off his bunk and dragged him to the door.

  ‘What about that?’ Dick howled, pointing to the darkness. ‘Water all the way and getting deeper every minute.’<
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  ‘What’s the use?’ Jim said slowly. ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go. I might just as well stay.’

  They shoved him into the sulky, grabbed his dog up, bumped it down under the seat, and leapt in, swearing at Jim and each other.

  ‘Should have let the old bastard drown,’ Thirty-Bob contended. ‘He ain’t worth getting our feet wet.’

  The sulky swayed and lurched over the uneven ground, and had it not been for Thirty-Bob’s driving, would have overturned and flung them into the river. He wheeled his big red horse in a narrow space, and brought it trembling and snorting along the bank, and up the incline to the road. Even when he was drunk, Thirty-Bob could drive better than most men.

  A little group of townspeople greeted the local weather prophet.

  ‘Thought it wasn’t going to rain much, Jim?’

  ‘This water ain’t ours,’ Jim retorted. ‘It come down from Jasmine. Won’t rain properly till tomorrow night.’

  As the sulky rattled towards the show-ground, Thirty-Bob asked: ‘Where was you thinking of staying the night, Jim?’

  ‘How the hell do I know? Come dragging a man out of his bed. Might as well have left me where I was.’

  Thirty-Bob cut in on his grumbling. ‘Well, I guess you can share my nap, Jim. ’Tain’t everyone,’ he admitted liberally, ‘I’d allow to do it, and if you was, say, a pretty little sheila’ — he leered wickedly at the disgruntled Jim — ‘I’d like as not let you get rheumatism and plant your carcase under a shop verandah. But seein’ as it’s you, Jim …’

  11

  I

  All the next day the town was full of an unusual friendliness, levity and excitement. The population had only half a mind on business, and all conversation was about the flood. The river swept people from their everyday life, as though they had been straws along its edge. They swarmed out like excited ants across the railway bridge that now remained the only link between the beleaguered town and the higher slopes. Cars spanked in with excited tales of escape over the only road left uncovered; and, as the flood deepened, a group of stalwarts set off in a boat to rescue a family who were sitting on their roof, congratulating themselves that they had shifted their sheep to higher ground.

  The unsettling thing about the flood was its movement. The old landmarks — trees and windmills and houses — were still there; but between them, the land, seditiously mingling its red-yellow with the alien flood, had got up and was rolling away. The warden fences, that had laid their wire knouts across the backs of the fields, were drowned; lucerne stacks floated on the current as carefree as icebergs, masterless and anonymous. It was landscape reverted to anarchy; and the town, isolated on its eminence, had the look of a fortress taken by surprise. The spirit of defiance and lawlessness, instigated by the mutiny of so much mud, spread imperceptibly to the human beings. Small boys took a delight in pushing off such lucerne stacks as stranded on the shore, so that the full stream should bear them away and submerge them. Nothing, if they could help it, would be salvaged, unless it was edible or loot. They waited hopefully for hours to pounce on someone’s property, but nothing valuable came floating by.

  ‘Remember the time she was in flood when all the watermelons was ripe?’ one freckled infant shouted. ‘Gee! we was eatin’ water-melons as if we was doin’ it for a bet.’

  ‘Wish they were water-melons ’stead of lucerne,’ another boy responded.

  ‘You come off there, son,’ a railwayman advised one of the crowd, who had just jumped down on to a stack of lucerne. ‘Nobody wants to get wet dragging your body out.’

  The river’s flood would be a fixed date in the slow-moving mind of the community. Men would say: ‘That was six months after the river rose over the bridge and the Bartons were washed out.’ There was a superstition current in Logan that if the river rose, it would be a ‘good year.’

  ‘There’s going to be some work cleaning up, anyway,’ a bagman called Dark remarked to his mate Jim, the same who had commented on Miss Phipps’s dancing.

  ‘Aw, the locals ’ull get it all,’ his mate responded disgustedly.

  Even with the excitement and friendliness engendered by the flood, the bagmen still held aloof from the residents. They talked among themselves of other rivers they had seen in flood, of washaways out beyond Bourke, and the monsoon rains of the Gulf country. This was not, for them, The River; it was only a creek temporarily swollen to self-importance. But, for the townspeople, those brown waters encircled the world, as eternity encircles time; and the greatest thing in life for them that day was the arrival or non-arrival of the only train, due at three-thirty — a toy train, known as the ‘Tin Hare’, which always came in growling and panting and bristling with the self-importance of a Pomeranian dog.

  When the ‘Tin Hare’s’ whistle was heard in the distance, even those conscientious citizens who had pretended to carry on as usual, dropped everything and ran. The train shunted very dubiously to the far side of the bridge, and the driver and guard came forward to confer with the station-master and porter. They met in the middle of the railway bridge, and they made an effective group with the misty sun behind them. The police had cleared everyone off the bridge and the railway line; but the people crowded up the flour-mill siding; they stood on the back verandah of Harrison’s Hotel; they shouldered and edged forward so that they might miss nothing should the train plunge to its doom.

  The water was a couple of inches below the bridge, and after a further discussion the driver and guard walked solemnly back to their charge, and a murmur of surmise rose from the crowd. It would be too disappointing if the train just backed away. But the train had no such intention. It grunted belligerently, trembled, crept forward and came rattling across as if nothing had happened.

  A cheer broke out. Men waved their hats, women their handkerchiefs. The few passengers waved back in a proud, aloof way, admitting all the dangers they had been through, but deprecating public ostentation.

  After that there was nothing to do but go home. The river would not rise much higher, and if it did, would not look very different. It would begin to go down tomorrow, and all this delicious tension would be over. The townspeople of Logan knew their river. It might venture into their backyards, but it had never yet come boldly down the main street.

  Amid so much excitement who was there to notice the sad little procession that had wound its way out of town early that morning by the only road that still remained open, the road that led up through the hills? First, Adelaide, with his appalling harness and his decrepit van, soon overtaken by the turnout of the Tyrells; and with them, Miss Phipps, a fat cuckoo in a nest of children, her face turned disdainfully from Logan, a town she was leaving behind, she hoped, for ever. Then the Joneses worrying about the rim-bound wheel. Past the humble procession roared the great truck on which the busker had got a lift that would take him to his destination, to the far-looked-for goal of the tent-shows.

  Where the road branched, the Joneses with Adelaide and his family went one way; the Tyrells, with cries of farewell, another. Far away behind them, at the foot of the mountains, lay Logan, the water-logged, self-satisfied, rich town, which had never known they existed. Only Dick and Thirty-Bob had stayed, camped together in a back lane, defiant survivors of the cataclysm which had sent the travellers wearily journeying on, pacing the treadmill of their lives, going out to loneliness again, as unnoticed as the green grass-parrots that are one day in the wheat, then vanished no one knows where.

  II

  The farewells of the busker and Dancy had not been long drawn out. It was just: ‘So long, Dance, might see you down at the fruit-picking. Anyway, I’ll be at the cannery for Christmas. See you then for sure. Tell Snow I couldn’t wait.’ Miss Phipps merely said: ‘I’ll have those stockings back, if you don’t mind, deah. Don’t be unkind to the horse, and try not to swear. It is most objectionable.’

  The busker helped Dancy harness Don and put him in the van before they parted. The dawn was cold and grey, and there was a drizz
le of rain. Horehound, now so gladly resigned to the care of Thirty-Bob, was with the Tyrell horses, her hobbles chinking, her nose worrying at the grass-roots. She did not even lift her head to see Dancy go. The ridiculous bunch of tail that was all the horsehair pirates had left her, stuck straight up and waggled derisively, as though she was pleased at some wicked jest of her own.

  The dairy was already busy when Dancy put the horse in the paddock that had been pointed out to her yesterday. Charley Marks came running out and helped her to chock up the wheels of the van in a corner of the same field. How long, Dancy wondered, would the van stay like that, patiently waiting? It was Snow’s van. The Horehound was his, and the sulky too, for he had bought them; but he had never seemed to care much, and had told her that any money that came from their sale would be hers, so that she had left them with Thirty-Bob untroubled. It was a good thing she had left Bluey behind with the Apostle. The dairy dogs included a nasty big Alsatian, all teeth and suspicion.

  The Stray was aroused from these idle thoughts by the sharp voice of her new employer: ‘You’re late,’ Mrs Marks snapped at her.

  ‘It was the flood, Mrs Marks, and seein’ me mates off.’

  ‘Well, now you’re here, you might as well start on them dishes. Then there’s the kitchen and the rest of the house, and the washing piled up that I ain’t been able to touch because of me back …’

  ‘Right-o, Mrs Marks,’ the Stray responded cheerily enough; and applied herself with vigour to a large pile of greasy plates that the flies had already found.

  All day long there were men tramping in and out wanting food; and Mrs Marks’s voice going on and on like the buzzing of a blow-fly, settling first on one topic, then on another, and always ready with some suggestion for further toil.

  ‘Now, when you’ve finished that pumpkin, Dancy, you might clean out the separator. I don’t believe Harry’s done it. After that there’s the wood and all them big cans.’