The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  In the Apostle she found for the first time someone who did not say: ‘Cheer up, Ma. Dick’ll turn up.’ Instead the Apostle went into town and got on the trail of Dick. No one else thought of asking at the swimming-baths, but sure enough, when the Apostle enquired, the girl on the gate remembered a big fair boy who had ridden up and persuaded her to lend him a costume. She had even been curious enough to watch him ride off across the bridge, and the road in that direction led only south.

  The news cheered Mrs Tyrell immensely. ‘We could catch him up at the next dole,’ she cried. ‘He’s got to get his dole!’ Her first thought was to break camp and follow Dick. Then she remembered Dancy. ‘We can’t go until we know what’s to happen to Snow,’ she murmured, immediately subdued.

  ‘Nonsense,’ the Apostle told her. ‘You get the horses in.’ He had everything settled. Dancy could come with the Postlewaites. Or, if she wanted to travel with the Tyrells, she could catch up with them at the next dole-station. Thirty-Bob could drive the turnout for her, if that would suit Thirty-Bob. He had everything arranged.

  They took time arguing over this new idea, but the very fact that he had plans to offer, that he could see them going on, that he had lifted them all out of their ruin and despair, was something. While they were still discussing who would go there, the Apostle was off again to town.

  ‘Where this time?’ Thirty-Bob asked.

  ‘To see the priest,’ the Apostle responded.

  Nobody had thought of that either; but the Apostle, with a breadth that did him credit, had no scruples about asking help from any quarter, and within an hour he was sitting in the presbytery pouring out a tale to a big, red-faced old man whose powerful bulk overflowed his chair. From time to time Father Farrell nodded, but he let the Apostle tell his story uninterrupted to the end. Father Farrell was a power in Orion, a big Irish priest who had built a convent, a hospital and a school, where there had been nothing but a tiny chapel. He was reputed to be the one man who had put the fear of the Lord into Waldo.

  On one occasion he had alighted on Waldo’s doorstep unannounced. ‘I’ve come to stay wid ye,’ he declared. ‘And before I leave I want a hundred pounds for my hospital; it will be well worth it to ye to get rid o’ me. Ye’re rolling in money and mean as a louse.’

  For three days Waldo entertained him royally, and when he left Father Farrell took with him a cheque for two hundred pounds.

  If he was extortionate in his demands on the rich of his parish, he spent their money on the poor. No one went from the Father’s door without at least a hearing, and the help he had given to bagmen in his time had created a saying along the track: ‘Like Father Farrell, all tough hide and soft heart.’ But no one before had ever expected him to plead for an unknown sheep-thief.

  ‘And what d’ye come to me for?’ he demanded, with seeming irritability. The Apostle made no answer. ‘Am I to be bothered with all of them? Cursing the Church when they rise up, sneering at it every day? But ’tis to the Church they turn with a hard-luck tale when they want clothes or food or shoes to their feet. It’s Father-this and Father-that to me face, and ‘to the Devil with him’ behind me back.’ He tapped his hand on his knee. ‘What d’ye think I can do for your mate, eh?’

  ‘You could speak for him,’ the Apostle said confidently.

  ‘Speak for a man I’ve never seen?’ He dropped his pretended severity, and the look that was Father Farrell’s passport into heaven came into his face. ‘Ah!’ he cried, ‘and it’s speak for him I will.’ He gripped the Apostle’s arms. ‘The time I remember it was no crime for a man to take a sheep. Why, ’twas no crime at all! Help yeerself, they’d be saying. And now a man goes with his heart in his mouth and his hat in his hand to ask for a drop of water, let alone a bit of tea. ’Twill be getting to the stage when we’ll be transported for trapping a rabbit, as in the old days in England.’ His voice descended from prophecy to reproof. ‘And them that owns the sheep, they’re that mean they’d put a bent threepence in the plate. Sure I’ll speak for your friend.’

  ‘I knew you would,’ the Apostle smiled.

  ‘And his wife and boy? What’s to become of them?’

  ‘My wife will look after them.’

  The priest nodded courteously. He knew the people of the road and their strange fear of supervision, whether of Church or State. ‘Tell the woman to come and see me if she’s in need, and bring the boy. I’ll speak for the man.’

  If it had not been for the ‘chance’ meeting Father Farrell had with the visiting magistrate and the luncheon that followed, Snow would have received the eighteen months he expected. For a man with Snow’s record three months in Goulburn Gaol was a light sentence.

  The anxiety with which Snow greeted the news that Father Farrell was taking an interest in Jimmy surprised the Apostle. ‘What the hell did you want to drag a priest into it for?’ Snow snarled at his advocate. ‘Now he’ll be getting in touch with Molly and putting the kid in a home.’ He gripped the Apostle by the shoulder. ‘You tell Dancy to get out of this, hear me? Tell her to get on the move and keep on the move till I come out. Don’t let Molly get Jimmy again. Tell Dance to keep Jimmy. Tell her that.’ His tone was savage. ‘Tell her I’ll meet her down at the cannery and she’s to look after Jimmy till I come.’ He controlled himself with an effort. ‘Thanks for everything, Harry. I know you thought you was doing me a good turn.’

  ‘I was,’ the Apostle said gravely. ‘Snow …’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Why don’t you try to think more kindly of your wife? Why not send Jimmy back to her?’

  ‘Hell! no.’ And that was all the Apostle could get out of him.

  He returned to camp with Snow’s message to Dancy, and found everyone still at cross purposes. Mrs Tyrell kept deciding to go on, and then to stay and see what happened to Snow. Deafy refused to ‘chase after’ Dick. If Dick wanted to come back, he could, but what was the use of running after him? Let him cool down and come to his senses first.

  The Apostle’s wife, as usual, went quietly about her own affairs. She seemed particularly abstracted. When the Apostle asked her what was the matter, she merely said: ‘It’s that poor Mrs Tyrell. That brute of a boy! I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘What, Millie?’

  ‘Nothing.’ The Apostle had brought back a letter from her brother, and as she read it, he noticed her thoughtful expression had deepened to worry. ‘Anything wrong, my dear?’

  ‘No, Harry, nothing.’ She passed him the letter, which was full of small items of news and the usual urgings that she should come home.

  The Apostle handed it back and went off busily to see how the Tyrell baby was progressing. It had shown disturbing signs of a rash. All in all, the Apostle was in his element, helping, advising, doctoring, and, as Thirty-Bob would say, ‘generally interfering.’

  ‘There’s some men,’ Thirty-Bob always declared sarcastically, ‘who can sit down and eat their dinner with a murder going on. But all I can say is Harry ain’t one of ’em. It’s a wonder he ain’t been a bloody deceased corpse himself before now, the way he butts in.’

  Mrs Postlewaite, as she watched him, could not help a sad little smile. Harry never minded giving himself away. That was one of the differences between them. She would always want to retain her reserves, her own mental privacy, but Harry never minded how foolish or odd he might look to other people. He gave away everything he thought and felt with the same unconcern with which he would have dressed in public had that been necessary. He lived in the open.

  Her mind went back to that time, it seemed so long ago, when she first met him. He had been speaking of missions, and she had always been fired with the idea of the mission-field. To go out and give your life in the service of God in a strange land! She dreamed of jungles and deserts and tropic islands where she, as the helpmate of some worthy man, might minister to the souls and bodies of the natives. Perhaps it was something of the glow in her eyes, as she listened to him, that had attracted Harry Postlewaite, t
hin, shabby and always in trouble with his rector, to the sedate sister of the senior churchwarden. And when Harry Postlewaite wanted to make friends with anyone, he was as difficult to repulse as a stray cat. Then, she knew, he had been sorry for her, sorry for the dreary monotony of her life, the round of small domestic interests and church socials. He had married her in the same impulsive and determined way that he always rushed into trouble; and ever since she had been good to him, she had cared for him even after she ceased to worship him, and discovered that he was … well, erratic and strange at times.

  She had been a good wife to him; she had left her home, her elder brother, everything, just as she would have done had Harry felt a call to a far tropical island. At first she had believed that Harry was doing a missionary work, even if there were no tropical palms and white duck suits to go with it. She had set her teeth when they had no food and the water was bad, when the truck broke down, when, penniless and ashamed, she had to ask help of strangers. She had put up with the foul talk and fouler jokes and ways of the people he moved among, even when the foulest of these jests were directed against themselves. Scowls, threats, even open brutality, she had faced; but those words of Mrs Tyrell had opened to her a nightmare from which she half feared she might not wake. ‘How would you like it if it was your boy? I’ve tried to keep them decent. But you can’t. It’s just the life on the road beats you in the end.’

  Suppose that it had been Bryson or Whitefield who had beaten his father unconscious and gone away without a word? Oh, no! Not her sons! Anything but that!

  It was true, she told herself, facing the fear that lurked at the back of her mind ever since Mrs Tyrell flung the words at her. It was true that you could not keep decent in the conditions these people endured. You grew old and dirty and didn’t care. The Tyrells had started out, just a working man and his wife looking for the means of a livelihood, and when they hadn’t been able to find them and settle down, they had tried to keep decent. Their children had not even the standards with which their parents started out. What of her own baby who had never known a home? Suppose she and Harry went on wandering in this way for years? Oh, it wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair to the boys, and Harry asked too much when he took it for granted that she should drag the children along, sacrificing them to his passion for missionary endeavour.

  On a tropical island you were at least not expected to live like the natives. You had your suit of clean clothes, your own standards, your own bungalow and church into which you could retire when the degradation of a savage existence overwhelmed you. For herself, she did not care, but for the children, never … never … never. She must make Harry see that he was wrong. He had brilliance; he could get some work in the city surely: writing, perhaps; speaking over the radio; her brother would find him something. What was there for him if he went on as he was going? Only to get old and mad and dirty and degraded. And again her mind came back to the centre of the whole tornado of her revolt. She must save her boys.

  She nerved herself to have it out with Harry, although she knew in her heart what the outcome would be. Harry was as inconsiderate to his own as he was considerate to strangers. He was hard on his family as he was hard on himself. As a Good Samaritan he might be all that was to be desired, but as a father he was impossible. ‘How would you feel if it was your boy?’ No, she would not see her boys ruined, brought down to the level of the people of the road. They must have an education, a chance in life.

  ‘Harry,’ she said quietly, when the Apostle came back. ‘I’m going home to Ted.’ She said it as casually as if they had been out for an afternoon’s stroll instead of years of aimless travel.

  ‘I knew that was it.’ The Apostle sat down and regarded her with a slight, anxious furrowing of his forehead. ‘I knew it was coming. Just what decided you, Millie?’ He did not protest. Sooner or later, he thought, it was bound to happen.

  ‘That woman, Mrs Tyrell. Oh, Harry, I couldn’t bear Bryson or Whitefield to grow up like that.’

  ‘But there’s no reason why they should,’ the Apostle returned.

  She was holding her baby in her arms, and now she clutched it to her, fiercely maternal. ‘No reason? Why, that poor boy — and you’d say it yourself, Harry, at any other time — was just the result of his surroundings. I want Bryson and Whitefield to have good food and clean clothes and baths. Look at all the children you see along the track. Stunted, burnt-up little animals with bad teeth and sandy blight and hollow chests. I don’t want my boys like that.’

  ‘And how about their minds? You’ll take them back and bury them under the ruins.’

  ‘Ruins?’

  ‘Books, business, and banks. Stale ruins of other men’s minds left for hundreds of years. Towns, streets, churches, all the things that make life easier and thinking harder. Cluttering up their lives and their minds. Softening in corners. Air-conditioning their flesh, getting them accustomed to accepting aeroplanes, cars, machines for building more machines. Crawling about in a stinking, swarming city. Bah!’ He recovered himself. ‘Even at the risk of sandy blight or bad teeth (which they haven’t had so far), I wanted them away from that.’

  ‘But you came out to lead these people to a better way of living.’

  ‘I know,’ the Apostle admitted. ‘Poor fool that I was! But I’m not a missionary now. I’m a refugee. I’m fleeing from a civilisation that drops bombs on its cities and fouls its nest. Give me the road any time.’

  Mrs Postlewaite could be out-talked, but not convinced. ‘If that poor Tyrell boy had had a good home, and been able to meet nice girls at tennis parties …’

  ‘Mary is a nice girl,’ the Apostle suggested.

  ‘But she’s …’ Mrs Postlewaite could not say it. She knew that for her husband there was no such thing as a colour bar. But to her, natives were natives, and blacks were blacks, and no amount of talk could ever reconcile her to the vision of Bryson in a like situation to Dick’s. Infatuated with a half-caste! Impossible! Or one of these terrible girls they were always meeting, swearing, smoking, depraved. No!

  ‘It’s the boys,’ she said breathlessly. ‘You see that, Harry? It isn’t for myself.’

  ‘I know that, dear.’

  ‘Oh, Harry, come with me.’

  The Apostle shook his head. She knew this parting was hurting him. ‘You go home. Go back to good old Ted.’ Ted was her brother. ‘Then, when you’ve had a holiday, you can see how you feel.’ He knew that if she left him, it would be for ever, but he preferred to give her this excuse. ‘You take the boys and the baby and have a good rest. Ted will be pleased. He’s a lonely man, and I … well, I’ll miss you.’ He had not realised before just how much his wife and the boys had meant. Into their loyal circle he could retire, when the misery of things almost overcame him. They were like a shade-tree in the heat, like a civilised outpost in a foreign land. Perhaps, he thought, that is why they should go. So that I may rely the more fully upon the Blood. So that I may have no temptations to separateness.

  ‘I’ll sell the truck,’ he announced suddenly, ‘and walk.’

  This matter-of-fact reception of her ultimatum hurt Mrs Postlewaite more than anything else could have done. She had known that there was a hard streak in Harry, but he seemed almost glad to get rid of them. Tears came to her eyes.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘haven’t you any feelings? Haven’t you any real love for the children? You’re unnatural … that’s what you are … unnatural.’

  Had she been another type of woman she might have screamed and cursed and thrown plates at him. ‘Unnatural,’ she repeated through stiffened lips. So might she have reproached a missionary who had deserted his high calling to civilise the savages and had descended instead to their level of sitting under a tree all day, lotus-eating. It must be that Harry’s aberrations were slowly crumbling his moral fibre.

  The Apostle made a movement almost as though he saw the terrible prophecy in her mind of his gradual disintegration into a dirty, drooling idiot; as though she had tried to s
trike him.

  ‘Whatever you may come to think of me, my dear’ — his voice was sad — ‘remember that I love you and the boys more than anything on earth.’

  More than anything on earth! That was it. They didn’t count. Mrs Postlewaite for the moment was jealous of God. To her husband, his family did not count, except as part of the earth, to him a temporary Hell, a bubble rolling along in the dark stream of the purpose of God. She would not have minded so much if her husband had lost his faith. That was something she could understand. Instead, that faith had grown in him like some enormous cancer eating out his normal life, leaving it a husk without savour. All his intensity had turned from human beings; he did not try to convert them, believing in a personal revelation when the subject was ready for it; he just showed them affection. His kindness to the lost and forgotten people was more in the nature of something to occupy himself, as a priest might tell his beads while he meditated. It was just a religious exercise. It did not really matter. Nothing really mattered to him that ordinary people felt.

  An even more horrible idea came to her. He was wanting to die. All the time he was so cheerful and busy, ‘poking his nose into other people’s business,’ the dark lust to be carried away, to be sunk fathoms down, drowned in his Eternal, was his real aim. The green hills were a coloured bandage wrapped around his eyes, and he would tear them away, and the light as well, gladly, to see into that terrible torrent beyond the light.

  ‘When will you be going, my dear?’ The Apostle broke the silence that had fallen while she stared at him so intently.

  ‘It doesn’t matter when.’ She could hardly speak.

  ‘I could sell the truck and give you the money to take with you.’ He looked at the poor, battered little truck speculatively.

  ‘I’ll write to Ted for money,’ his wife said. ‘You’ll need what you can get for the truck, if anything.’ She forced a little smile.

  The Apostle, who admired bravery and knew just what a struggle it had cost her to make this decision, tried to smile back. For a moment their eyes met, and in that moment the shabby little man and the plain woman knew such agony of grief as it is not often given to human beings to endure.