The Stray found that her work included, not only the house, but odd jobs about the dairy. It was lucky she had never learnt to milk and was afraid of cows, or Mrs Marks would have seen to it that her spare minutes, if she had any during the night, were occupied milking. She seemed to think sleeping an undesirable vice. By the end of the day Dancy was so tired she could have wept. She was desperately anxious to keep this job, to show Snow, when he came out of hospital, that she had money of her own. But her legs ached, her back hurt her, perhaps from the weary hearing so much of Mrs Marks’s ‘little crawling pains.’
Mrs Marks sat about all day in a dirty, faded wrapper, and told Dancy what to do; and after tea, the Stray was too tired and dispirited to walk all the way back to the camp and find out what had happened about the sale of Horehound. When, she wondered, would she get time to go to the hospital to see Snow? She was timid about asking when she would have a day off. It might look as though she was lazy to ask so soon. From Mrs Marks’s programme, there did not seem to be any day off in sight. It was eight o’clock when she finished the last of the washing-up and wiped the damp hair back from her forehead. Now, perhaps, she could have a bath, and then it would be time for bed. It would be marvellous to sleep in a bed again, even in the rickety stretcher in the lean-to.
Charley, who had been watching her from his seat by the fire, a seat that he hardly ever vacated except to perform his self-appointed task of seeing the trains out, shifted aside as she staggered to the stove with a kerosene tin of water to heat. He watched the way she swung the heavy tin on to the stove top, then said: ‘You work hard, don’t you, Mrs Grimshaw?’
The name startled Dancy for a minute. The Marks family, all except Charley, called her by her Christian name. Then she answered: ‘Too right I work hard, Charley. A toiler, me!’ She congratulated herself on omitting the usual adjective and gave him a smile that embraced the clean kitchen, the plates she had washed, the comfort and warmth of walls and roof over and around her, and the thought of all her mates sitting tonight by some small fire, cold and unprotected. Charley liked her. She knew that from the way his eyes followed her as she bustled about. He said, almost in a whisper, with a glance towards the sitting-room where the rest of the family were congregated,
‘Would you like to be rich, Mrs Grimshaw?’
‘’Strufe, yes,’ the Stray responded with a chuckle. ‘You found a gold-mine or sumfin’, Charley?’ She sat down on the opposite side of the kitchen stove, perching on the wood-box like some queer hobgoblin with straggling fair hair and big blue eyes. ‘Halves, Charley. Tell me where it is.’
Charley refused to notice her chaff. ‘I like you, Mrs Grimshaw,’ he said seriously. ‘You’re good.’
This made the Stray feel awkward. Even from a poor idiot it sounded funny to hear such words. ‘Don’t you believe it, Charley,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s a rumour.’
But he refused to relax his earnestness. ‘I like you,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t tell Mum or Dad or Joe. They’re always worrying about having no money. They think about it all the time, they talk about it.’ He nodded mysteriously. ‘What would they say if they knew I was a millionaire, eh? That’d make them sit up, wouldn’t it?’ His eyes shone. ‘I’ve got plenty of money, plenty. But they’d only laugh if I told them.’ He bent forward to whisper. ‘It’s being the manager of all the railways. Hundreds of thousands they pay me. Well, they have to. The trains wouldn’t go without me.’ He shook his head; the proud confidence of his voice gave place to a doubtful tone. ‘But I have trouble with the banks. They don’t like to have all that money taken out of them.’
‘They wouldn’t,’ the Stray agreed, oddly stirred to pity by this wreck of a young man. Charley must have been a fine, handsome boy, she thought, before his brain went wrong.
‘I want to make you rich,’ he said impulsively. ‘I’ll give you a cheque for a thousand pounds if you like.’
‘Don’t you bother, Charley,’ the Stray said hastily. ‘I got plenty meself. True, I have.’
‘I’ll give you a cheque,’ Charley repeated, ‘for a thousand pounds. You don’t mind waiting to cash it until tomorrow, do you?’ He spoke so much better than the other members of his family. That part of his brain had remained unaffected. If it had not been for the wandering eye of him, you could almost believe what he said.
‘It’s kind of you to fink of it, Charley.’ She hoped the water would soon be ready to lift from the stove. She felt a sudden repulsion from Charley that made her move over to the other side of the kitchen.
Charley followed her, whispering urgently. ‘They get so mixed up at the bank. They write down how much money you have in a book and a man stamps it, and then they give you a piece of paper. That’s all money is. Even rich people like me — we’ve only got bits of paper, even managers of railways.’
He went over to the meat-safe for the account-book, which lay on top with a pen and a bottle of ink, and brought them over to the table. With a lordly disregard of what his father would say, Charley tore out half a sheet of paper and scrawled across it: ‘Pay Mrs Grimshaw a thousand pounds,’ and carefully signed his name ‘Charles Marks.’
‘There,’ he said, smiling proudly, ‘you take that to the bank — the white one on the corner of the main street — and they’ll give you a thousand pounds.’
‘Thank you, Charley,’ the Stray found herself saying. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good anywhere,’ Charley emphasised, coming so close to her that he was towering over her. ‘You only have to cash it.’ His fit of excitement seemed to pass, and he settled down again on his stool by the stove. ‘Rich,’ he murmured, ‘all of us rich.’
The repulsion that Dancy had felt so strongly only twenty seconds before passed from her and pity returned.
‘Gee, you’re kind, Charley,’ she said admiringly. ‘Look, I’ll show you what I’ll do. See, here’s a safety-pin. Well, I’ll pin that cheque of yours inside me dress like this, and then I’ll know, if ever I need it, it’s there. I won’t cash it right away, see. I’ll just put it by for a rainy day, and I’ll take it out and look at it, and remember how good you was to me.’ She beamed at his pleased expression.
‘You don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘You’re good.’
The Stray lifted down the heavy tin of water. Charley sprang up at once. ‘Let me carry it for you,’ he cried eagerly, almost snatching it from her hand, so that water slopped on the floor.
Again the Stray had that qualm of nausea at his closeness, but she only said: ‘Thank you, Charley.’ What else, she reproached herself, could she say? You couldn’t be unkind to a poor chap who had lost his wits. She was afraid of Charley, almost as afraid as she had been of the Horehound. In her little lean-to bedroom she had an uneasy feeling that he might prowl in when she was asleep; but she laughed herself out of that fancy. As she took off her dress, she looked again at that pitiful scrawl on the torn paper. ‘Pay Mrs Grimshaw a thousand pounds.’ She wasn’t Mrs Grimshaw, and it wasn’t a real cheque. Oh, well, she would keep it. She would wear it for luck. Life owed her something, and maybe the cheque would remind whoever the teller might be in the bank of life that Dancy, who wanted to be Mrs Grimshaw, was an unsatisfied creditor. ‘Pay Mrs Grimshaw … Pay Mrs Grimshaw … She ought to be paid … long-overdue account.’
12
Miss Phipps quitted Logan with the Tyrells. She did not particularly care for their society, but she felt that to travel unchaperoned with the busker would not be proper. Everything about the Tyrells she disliked except their van, and in this she ensconced herself, heaped round with bedding and children. The backs of Mr and Mrs Tyrell, broad and determined, shut out the view in front. The Tyrells did not mind her added weight, for they had a waggon with a pole and a pair of horses, dappled grey and ‘the best on the track bar none.’ They also owned a third horse which Dick considered his special property and which pulled the cart he drove, a cart the Tyrells were always going to sell or trade away and never did.
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br /> Deafy had intended to travel very slowly, out of consideration for his wife, but as the day wore on, her groans became increasingly agonised. Mrs Tyrell was not a woman to make any kind of fuss, and the fact that she groaned worried Deafy more than if another woman screamed. He made her lie down in the van, and gave Miss Phipps the baby to hold on the front seat, an imposition that Miss Phipps treated with hauteur. She was half tempted to remind him that she was a guest and wished to be treated as such, but Deafy seemed in rather a forbidding mood. As for his wife, Miss Phipps sincerely hoped the creature was not taken ill on the road. Not that it would not serve her right. Miss Phipps regarded Mrs Tyrell as ‘disgusting,’ not to be mentioned in company, and the anxiety that the woman’s grown-up son had openly expressed about his mother, the manner in which he had referred to her distressing complaint, as though the whole affair was not shameful in the extreme, struck Miss Phipps as just another example of the depravity of the lower classes. Here, she reflected, were people who obviously had no right whatever to children, even one or two children, and they were indulging in children to an extent that she considered bestial.
Deafy was nearly out of his wits with worry. They had covered half the distance to Gargendra and the road was harder if he turned back than if he went on. There was nothing for it but to go on; but would his wife last the distance? Her words to the sergeant returned to haunt him. ‘D’you want me to die on the track?’ He set his teeth. Not if he could help it! He’d get to Gargendra, and get there in a hurry.
‘Hang on, old woman,’ he said tenderly. ‘I’m going to put on a bit of pace.’ And he set the two dappled grey ponies that were his pride trotting rapidly. ‘If the old woman’s took bad,’ he yelled to Miss Phipps, ‘you’ll just have to stand by. I guess you know how it is. Got any kids of yer own?’
‘How dare you!’ Miss Phipps exclaimed. But Deafy did not hear her.
He nodded his head. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ll do me best to Gargendra, if I have to founder the horses, but if we don’t, I’ll jus’ have to leave it to you.’
It had occurred to Deafy that a woman might be handy, and he had made no demur about Miss Phipps accompanying them. She looked matronly.
‘Glad I got you with me,’ he yelled, cracking his whip over the backs of the startled greys. ‘Bringin’ kids into the world ain’t a man’s job.’
Never before had Miss Phipps regarded a man whipping horses with so much tolerance, not to say approval. As long as she did not have to act as midwife by the roadside she did not care how cruelly this dreadful man beat the horses. She was resolved never again to travel with a woman who was likely at any moment to have a child. Disgusting!
Always Miss Phipps’s ultimate standard of good and bad was ‘Would such a statement, such conduct, be allowed in the World Feminised State?’ This State, it must be remembered, was the one Miss Phipps intended to set up herself when her merits were recognised, and she was, solely by virtue of her qualities of leadership, benevolence and wisdom, acclaimed to the sole rulership of the whole world. This desirable state could not, of course, be brought about while there were men surviving to disturb the flow of ‘mental harmony and psychic value, rhythmic and purposive trends,’ which must ultimately triumph. To put it more bluntly, the presence of men jarred.
Worse even than those arch-horrors, men, were the creatures — she would not call them women — that would be staining the name, who had become so brutalised and degraded with the lower values of men that they had become even less than these much-to-be-despised beings. To these women Mrs Tyrell belonged. She would have been ruthlessly extirpated from the World Feminised State, not only for her moral corruption in bearing children — for Miss Phipps recognised that children were a sign that the woman had deserted psychic harmony for the lower values of male animalism — but because Mrs Tyrell was definitely unaesthetic. Only the beautiful, Miss Phipps often repeated to herself, deserved to survive. Did she not strive herself for perfect beauty in every detail of her person? Had she not cared for her skin and hair in the most trying circumstances? A Real Woman never forgot these details. It is the details that count.
As for Mrs Tyrell, Miss Phipps felt, of course, a certain pity for the creature as she lay there looking very unaesthetic indeed, with the sweat running down her face and her hair tumbled untidily. But she had brought it on herself, hadn’t she, by deserting The Higher Values for the low standards of a manmade world? She would have children. She ought to have learnt her lesson long ago; and with great repugnance Miss Phipps cast another furtive glance at the moaning creature.
‘Oh, Alf,’ Mrs Tyrell groaned, ‘I feel so bad.’
‘Stick it out, girl,’ her husband shouted. ‘We’ve got nine miles to go. Hang on to that damn kid for Chrisake.’
Miss Phipps had rarely prayed before, but now she put up a carefully worded petition as one potentate treating with another: ‘Please allow this dreadful woman to reach the hospital and spare me the nauseous details of a confinement and I will certainly endeavour to obtain work at the next town.’
The prayers of Deafy or Miss Phipps found a mark, for the greys were presently speeding towards a settlement that looked as though the small farms had drawn closer together. It was scarcely so much a town as the country congealed into a clot. The greys had foam on their coats, they were galloping now, and the old van swayed and pitched so that the children clung fearfully to their mother. Deafy drove as though he was pursued by wild Indians. He slowed down to yell at a man on horseback who was passing: ‘Where’s the hospital, mate? Quick! Me wife’s took bad.’
‘There ain’t no hospital,’ the man yelled back. ‘There’s the Bush Nurse. She’ll help. I’ll go and tell her.’ And galloped on ahead.
He was presently to be seen again as a dust-cloud rolling towards them. Wheeling his horse, he shouted to Deafy to follow, and with a reassuring wave of his hat, thundered ahead once more. Half the little township seemed to have appeared on its doorstep to watch their triumphal entry, and Miss Phipps was terribly discomfited as people pointed her out as the poor woman who was being rushed to ‘the Bush Nurse’s place.’
The tiny cottage in which the Bush Nurse resided had only about four rooms; but patients were hurriedly cleared out on to the verandah to give Mrs Tyrell one of the rooms to herself. The friend and guide trotted up where Deafy was waiting by the gate and asked sympathetically how the missus was. He heard the whole story of the Tyrells’ exodus from Logan, and his indignation knew no bounds. He went off to spread the tale, with the result that the small settlement could not do enough for Mrs Tyrell’s family left motherless. While Deafy waited anxiously, cheered by the remarks that the two patients on the verandah called to him comfortingly from time to time, a farmer came hurrying over to offer him the use of a paddock for as long as Deafy stayed. There was a shack that was not doing itself any good, the man explained, standing so long without anyone in it. The farmer’s wife would see to the children, and, if Deafy did not want to leave the ‘nurse’s’ place until his wife was over her trouble, then the farmer would drive the turnout over, get the horses out and give them a feed and good rubdown.
To all these words beating about him Deafy responded with nods dazedly. He stood switching at the grass with the whip that had brought the horses to Gargendra, he hoped, in time. The past few years his wife had not been strong. With his face set like iron, he nodded and murmured his thanks without really caring if the children were never fed or the horses fell in the road. He would always dislike this baby, even if it was a girl, because of that nightmare drive. ‘If ever I get back to Logan,’ Deafy vowed silently, ‘I’ll make that sergeant wish he hadn’t been born. I’ll smash him.’ Then he remembered that these were hopeless threats from a man whose wife and children would go hungry if he went to gaol or lost his dole, who, because of his deafness, could not get work any more.
The baby was a boy, a healthy infant of eight and a half pounds. But its mother was very ill. Deafy was allowed to tiptoe in to s
ee her, and that was all. She just said: ‘Hallo, Alf,’ in a dim way; and he said: ‘Good old girl,’ and stroked her hair with his rough brown hand as though she had been a horse.
‘I’ll get over it,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be all right.’
Deafy understood her. ‘You ought to be,’ he responded with a touch of his old spirit. ‘You’ve had enough practice.’
He felt as though he had wakened from an evil dream. It occurred to him that he should send word to Dick and Thirty-Bob, so he asked if anyone was going over to Logan. The baker was going next morning to see the manager of the Logan flourmill, and to him Deafy entrusted his message. Then he looked round vaguely.
‘There was a big fat woman come with us,’ he asked perplexedly. ‘Where the hell’s she got to?’
He had not heard Miss Phipps thank him for the lift and hastily gather up her goods and chattels — the dirty little black billy, her skipping-rope (‘so good for the figure’), her foodstuffs, and her face-creams — in a burst-apart handbag tied with string. She had slipped away as soon as the turnout drew up in the grove of gums before the Bush Nurse’s door. She had gone waddling away from that scene of shame as quickly as she could, while sympathisers half-carried Mrs Tyrell into the cottage. She coldly disregarded the questions the women asked her, as she made her way out the opposite side of the settlement to that which they had entered. She was so upset and demoralised by the horrors she had just escaped, that she allowed a friendly lorry-driver to give her a lift to Oriho, and did not reprove him more than three times for unseemly behaviour.
She shuddered frequently to think what she had endured. Those dreadful people! Ugh! They ought to be put into a lethal chamber. True to her promise, as soon as she arrived in Oriho she sought work. She did not even stop to find a camp. She found the local Labour Exchange instead and told a pitiful story of her sufferings while on ‘a walking tour.’ The agent was so impressed by her recital that, despite the fact that she had lost her references, he took her home to his wife, and next day solicited a position for her at the biggest of the local hotels, a position it would be an over-statement to call ‘pot-walloping,’ since it was, even more than Dancy’s job, connected with washing and scrubbing.
The Battlers Page 18
