The busker did not answer for a minute. Then, ‘The old firm,’ he mused fondly. ‘Only Snow missing, and after all there’s his son to take his place. I was sorry to hear about Snow. I …’
‘Cut it out,’ the Stray ordered. ‘You’ve got somefing up your sleeve.’
‘Well, it’s this way,’ the busker admitted. ‘I’ve always felt that if I had a bit of a turnout and a good little team to travel with, I could make a mint of money, just going from town to town and putting on a bit of a show. Shove up a bit of a tent. Posters. Me singing and playing and Dora doing her stuff, and you could tell fortunes, or run a dart-board, or …’
‘And me?’ Jimmy demanded eagerly. ‘What could I do?’
‘Oh, all sorts of things. Take the money or play a drum.’ The busker waved his hand grandly. ‘There’s money in it, and what you want is a guy like me that knows the game, see?
‘You’re still the busking bum,’ the Stray said in the tolerant tone of a grandmother. ‘Still going to make a fortune, ain’t you?’ She became sardonic. ‘But what you want the turnout for, and us? Why don’t you go on your own, the way you always said you got along better?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ the busker said frankly, ‘there’s times when even a wise guy like me can see there’s safety in numbers.’ He turned and beckoned, and from the shadows stepped Betty, a bundle in her hand and Bitsey on her shoulder. ‘Dance, you remember Betty in Logan — Sharkey’s daughter?’
‘We’re going to be married,’ Betty said, her head high.
‘And I’m not too keen on travelling with Sharkey. If you could give us a lift to Boswell …’
The Stray eyed Betty kindly. ‘Anuvver mug,’ she grumbled. ‘Anuvver mug that’s found a man to work for all her life.’ And then generously, ‘Course you can come. Why!’ A thought struck her. ‘The ’Postle ’ud marry you.’
The busker considered. ‘I want things shipshape,’ he said virtuously.
‘Aw, what you worrying about? You can pay for a real legal turnout later, can’t you? I guess the ’Postle ’ud do to go on with. Hey!’ The Stray stood up and yelled: ‘Ma! Thirty-Bob! ’Postle! Guess who’s here. C’mon over. I want you.’
Miss Phipps was not the woman to see Betty throw herself away. She persisted in unwanted warnings while the rest of the gang overwhelmed the pair with congratulations.
‘I suppose so,’ the Apostle said doubtfully, yielding to persuasions. ‘I can give you a religious ceremony, but it won’t be legal, you know.’
‘That’s all right, ’Postle,’ the busker said contentedly. ‘We can’t get a legal ceremony anyway until Betty turns twenty-one, and that’s a long way ahead. Old Sharkey turned dog on us, didn’t he, Bet? Said he’d get me for abduction. So get a wiggle on you, ’Postle, I may as well be illegal one way as another.’
26
I
They left Orion, travelling in what Snow would have called ‘a big mob’: the Tyrell family, ‘Snow’s gang’ — as the others called Dancy, Miss Phipps, Jimmy, the busker and Betty — the Apostle and Thirty Bob. With them went a crate of fowls Thirty-Bob had obtained by barter, Bitsey, Snow’s dog, Bluey, Thirty Bob’s Rex, Dick’s greyhound, and two cattle-dogs belonging to Deafy.
Thirty-Bob had put the big bay gelding he had just received by exchange in Dick’s cart. The Apostle, having failed in his tentative efforts to sell the truck, was persuaded to drive it to a bigger town and find a better market. ‘Some of these fruit cockies down on the irrigation might come at it,’ Thirty-Bob advised. ‘You leave it to me.’
Thirty-Bob had overheard the Apostle explaining the truck’s manifold defects to a possible purchaser; and thereafter he would frequently break into an imitation of Harry selling the truck. This never failed to send his audience into fits of laughter, so that going along they would shout gaily to each other in the Apostle’s voice: ‘And remember, the differential’s also faulty.’ They needed something to cheer them up, for it was a silent, thoughtful party that took the road.
The most thoughtful, as far as her nature would allow, was the Stray. She had reached one of those crises when the brain wearies and a dull, heavy cloud settles over all speculation. Perhaps it was the effect of her recent illness. Whatever it was, her thoughts went round and round: Snow, the future, Snow, the past, what was to become of her, where could she go, what was the use of living?
What was the use of wandering and wandering, never reaching any place of rest, coming to a town as strangers, and leaving it unwanted? Always going down the fenced road where the mountains, shivering in the heat or misted in rain, kept pace stealthily beside the van. Camped uncertainly on the edge of a settlement, on the edge of the road, hustled on, loitering, hungry, shrinking back from suspicion and words that hurt like a flung stone, or from the cold ignoral of safe, comfortable people who had houses about them, fences and walls and gates, who never knew what it was to lie or plead for a mouthful of meat, a stale bit of bread, and have it grudged and refused. Surely, surely, there must be a purpose that kept them so, that kept the travellers walking the treadmills of a God who ground His bread of human passions as slowly as the waggon wheels turned; whose step followed deliberate as the iron hoofs of the mountains keeping pace with the crawling cart. She thought of things like this, while her fingers flicked the gay threads, the scraps and beads in her lap. For the Stray had taken to the old stand-by of the road, ‘faking’ jug-covers. Her back ached sometimes with sitting; but she must have jug-covers to sell at the next town, taking them from house to house, from door to door, while her broken looks, her shabby clothes and shoes, pleaded for the shilling the jug-covers would never be worth.
‘We going out selling today, Dance?’ Jimmy would ask, and Dancy, wiping her hair back from her forehead with the same gesture that Mrs Tyrell used, would reply: ‘Sure we are, Jimmy love. I’ll get these finished.’
Sometimes a storekeeper would refuse to let her have beads and net on her dole coupon, and she learned to keep a few shillings in reserve for such a mischance. It was all to the good, the Stray reflected a little bitterly, that she wasn’t well-dressed or had false teeth or her hair cut and waved. She was more sure of fending for herself and Jimmy as she was. People liked to despise you. It was a sort of luxury to look down on someone, if it was only Miss Phipps, who was so fat and useless. At least, she, Dancy, was a good battler, she could ‘fake’ with the best of them. She could care for Jimmy and herself, making a penny here, getting a little food there, some old clothes perhaps — anything that charity bestowed.
‘We been lucky, Jimmy,’ she would point out, ‘that the police ain’t asked no more questions about our dole.’
For dole-day was an ordeal. She went in dread until it was over, never knowing when some officious sergeant might not pounce down on her feeble tissue of lies and rend it from her. She had almost come to believe the Apostle when he said that ‘it was so much less trouble to tell the truth. People never believe you; they admire you because they can’t find you out.’ But the habit of a lifetime was against Dancy making a change. A good, extravagant lie was to her like a briar bush to a rabbit. You could always slip into it and hide, then scutter and run for another patch of cover.
After leaving Orion they had turned south-west into a part of the country that had little to give, no matter how ingenious or pitiful a tale was told. While there had been heavy rain farther north, in this area there had been little rain for nine years, and now the heat of the summer was upon the place again. Already, the trees, the grass, had a dusty, ashy look, and the earth was but an anvil upon which the light beat and beat. It was a hard country, worn bare by winds as hot as a furnace-blast, only the jagged flints jutting above the surface; and the people in the same way were worn bare, grated down until only the hardest parts of them were left showing. Sometimes a gust of hot perfume would rise from the dust, as though the savour of dead herbs was in it, as in mummy-dusts. The country lay in a shroud of light, wrapped in the yellow, wrinkled cerecloth o
f gullies and hills.
There was no green, no gold; only the grey-brown of a scrub-turkey, the grey-black of a goanna, the black and white of a magpie. Here was a land that did without colour, did without water, did without everything but life, and that it snatched from some other creature. A place for the great black snakes, the thorny lizards, the trees and bushes hard and dry as stone.
The yellow liquid in the dams was not good for drinking, but they drank it for want of anything better. If they camped within a mile of a homestead, the women would tramp wearily up to ask for water. The Apostle had remonstrated at the sight of Mrs Tyrell or the Stray staggering half a mile with a heavy kerosene tin of water in each hand; but Thirty-Bob and the busker told him not to be a mug. ‘What chance would you and me have of getting water?’ Although he might turn away a man, no farmer, however hard his heart or low his water supply, would refuse a woman or child.
‘Look here,’ one farmer’s wife said almost desperately. ‘We’re not mean people, but this place hasn’t had any real rain for years. Unless we get some in the next few weeks, we’ll be drinking dam-water ourselves.’
Over a hook by the water-tank hung the bodies of three monstrous black snakes, victims of a thirst for water that they had never quenched. The Stray eyed them and shivered. How that woman could live here in a place where snakes came, could even, as she admitted, kill snakes, passed her comprehension. The Stray slept in the van with Miss Phipps for fear of snakes.
‘It’s all right for you,’ the farmer’s wife went on, seeing the Stray stare at her so dumbly. ‘You can go on. We’ve got to stay here. Here!’ She almost snatched the tin from the Stray’s hand. ‘Just this once you can have the water. Just this once, mind.’
The Stray said timidly: ‘This is a hard country, missus.’ She could see that the woman was nervous. Her thin face was taut with worry. ‘I guess it ain’t much living here.’
‘We could be worse off,’ the woman answered brightening. To her loneliness the Stray was a precious opportunity to talk. ‘The soil’s that rich it’d grow anything with rain. Why, one year we had the wheat so high, so full in the ear, we used to come out and sit in the evening and think how many bags it’d go to the acre.’
‘Well, that was fine,’ the Stray agreed heartily.
‘It wasn’t so fine,’ the woman said grimly. ‘A week before harvest a hailstorm came. It started just one side of our fences and finished the other. Not another property got it but ours. The wheat … there wasn’t any wheat.’
‘Oh!’ The Stray did not know what to say.
‘I sat down and wrote to my sister. I’d been having a real good cry. And I said: “We’ll have just enough to buy a pair of socks and we’ll pull them up and go on”.’
‘It’s a hard country,’ the Stray said again, for want of something better.
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Now the woman was quite bright and cheerful. ‘But it isn’t. I haven’t finished telling you.’ The Stray paused and set her tin down politely. ‘We were cleaned out, you see. Nothing. My husband says: ‘Come on, old woman,’ but we’d been counting on that wheat. And everyone knew it — all the men farming out this way knew, and they were sorry. Do you know what they did? They got together down at the siding, and they held a little meeting and said: ‘One bag off every load for Jim Baker, chaps.’ And do you know, everyone in the district put a bag from each load to make up for our loss? Why, when they’d finished, there was more wheat for us down at the silo than we’d have from our own crop. Now wasn’t that a wonderful thing?’
‘It was that, missus.’
‘People can be so kind.’
‘They are when they know,’ the Stray agreed.
Trudging back to the camp, she reflected sadly how those farmers, so kind to their own people, had sat up nights to see that the travellers took nothing, had rung each other up to say that a ‘big mob’ of travellers was coming through. Where one van, or a solitary bagman, might slip past without attracting attention, such a community of bad characters as themselves met with constant suspicion.
As the little troop filed past a farmer’s fence, it would be made aware that just inside the owner was loitering to shepherd them past his property. He might even have a rifle across his saddle. When he wasn’t visible, they were uneasily conscious that he was riding along just the other side of the hill, ready to pounce on them in any wrongdoing. They knew, and he knew, that it was the law of the track that ‘a man must battle for his horse,’ by fair means or foul his horse must be fed, though he go hungry. And the grass on this route was a vanished dream. There were a few tough thistles and a bit of salt bush, sometimes not even that.
Thirty-Bob and the busker would go out by night foraging in the wheat-fields, taking one sheaf from every stook, and, with a nice sense of delicacy, only from those stooks farthest from the road, where the depredation would not be noticeable. There was no sense, as Thirty-Bob said, in ‘cruelling the game’ for the next comers.
At Combingal the Tyrells had expected news of Dick. They went to the post office to see if there was a letter waiting for them, they combed the hotels and the camps for news. But the town seemed to be interested in nothing but the send-off to the troops who were going away to Sydney next day. It was in a whirl of patriotic enthusiasm and over-run with young men in ill-fitting uniforms and big boots.
A little sadly, the travellers stood to one side of the street to watch the troops marched down to the park, where they were to be addressed from a flag-draped platform by the mayor and other notables. There was to be a band and a roll-up of Boy Scouts and little girls from the Junior Red Cross, and proud, tearful mothers and sweethearts and sisters in their best dresses. The sunlight glittered on the silver and brass of the band, on the leaves of the trees, the waving flags and bunting.
‘Arr, come on,’ Thirty-Bob snarled. ‘What the hell’s it got to do with us?’
The little main street, the little town in its pride and stir, reminded him too much of the town from which he came, and a pang of impotent fury and contempt shot through him. As these young men were, so he might have been, raw, simple, proud. He could not go back to the simplicity of these boys in their hot, mustard-coloured uniforms. He was outside all that, ‘on the outer,’ as they would say. He didn’t want to go back. Why, it hurt him even to watch ‘a lot of mugs looking like sheep in a sale-yard.’ But dimly he wondered why it hurt him, whether somewhere there might not be in his case-hardened person a remnant of the lad he had left behind when he marched off so young to battle with life. He could laugh at these kids, but they had something he had never possessed: a belief in the purpose of their lives, a belief in something bigger than themselves. And even if the belief was a mistake, what of that? It was the feeling that you had a purpose that mattered.
‘Come on,’ he said again impatiently. ‘Let’s get back to camp.’
His companions refused to stir. Their lives were not so exciting that they could miss the interest of a free show. There were the officers, chipper young cubs from the militia with smart uniforms, throwing their weight about, and ordering the police sergeant to clear the way; while the impassive old sergeant, who had known most of them when they were little boys, refused to be bullied and made his own arrangements with an unhurried air. There was the rank and file, as rough and tough a body of men as ever growled about their officers; old ‘diggers’ who had seen service in the last war, veterans with seamed faces and work-hardened frames; young men who thought of the ‘jaunt overseas’ much as they would of ranging off to the Gulf country to shoot alligators and buffaloes or of a droving trip with cattle. They saw no reason why these smart sprigs of ‘cockies’ sons’ should order them about, and they let their officers know it in no uncertain manner.
They were seething with wrath, not only at the insulting airs the young militiamen gave themselves, but over the confusion and muddle of the whole business. A good part of the district’s unemployed had joined in a body, joyous at the thought of good f
ood, good clothes, self-respect and money to spend. They found themselves issued with old uniforms that had been left over from the last war; the very same coats that, dyed black, had been issued to them with their dole as clothing relief. They found that no sooner had they signed up than they lost their dole; and their pay did not begin until they reached camp near Sydney.
In the middle of the mayor’s peroration about ‘this land we love which you are about to defend from the horrors of tyranny and oppression,’ there was a shout from the ranks: ‘Hey, what about our dole?’ and a chant of ‘We want our pay!’
A murmur of disapproval and amazement went through the crowd. The mayor, put off his speech, concluded hastily and signed to the band to strike up. The officers glared furiously. The girls tittered. And Mrs Tyrell, in a piercing shriek, cried: ‘It’s Dick! It’s Dick’s voice, I tell you!’
She was with difficulty restrained from breaking through the ring of Boy Scouts and little girls in fluttering white, and flinging herself on Dick’s stalwart figure in the ranks. ‘It’s Dick,’ she kept repeating. ‘Oh, my God! He’s gone and joined up.’
Sure enough, as soon as the parade was dismissed, Dick made his way towards them, a smile all over his big, stupid face; and hugged his mother just as if nothing had happened. He seemed to think that now he was in training for a hero, it wiped out any little misunderstandings there might have been. He even patted Deafy on the shoulder to show he forgave him.
His small brothers and sisters clung about him; the busker shook him by the hand and dragged Betty forward proudly. Only Thirty-Bob held aloof.
‘I always told you it was a mug’s game,’ he growled. ‘And you go and fall for a lot of guff. You’ve got a fat lot of land to defend, ain’t you?’
The Battlers Page 37
