They were landed at Leuraville on the evening of the fourth day. A
tender took them off with the mails--as it happened, they were the only
passengers for that small sea-township. Ordinary business folk going
north, preferred the smaller coasting steamers which put in at every
port. The postmaster, the portmaster, the police magistrate, and a few
local notables were waiting to receive them at the wharf. McKeith
greeted them all heartily and rather shyly introduced them to his
bride. The local men were shy also. They mostly addressed her as Mrs
McKeith. The police magistrate--Captain Halliwell, lean, dark, sallow,
with a rather weak mouth, but more carefully dressed than the others,
and with an English voice, called her Lady Bridget. He was a retired
officer of the ROYAL ENGINEERS. She had been told and now remembered
that men in the ROYAL ENGINEERS were popularly said either to be
religious or cranks. This man was a Christian Scientist which he
announced when apologising for not offering the hospitality of his
house, a new baby having arrived the day previously, ushered into the
world, he explained, by prayer and faith and without benefit of medical
skill.
Bridget knew something about Christian Scientists. She plunged at once
into faith-healing ethics with the police-magistrate, while Colin saw
about getting the trunks off the tender. How odd it seemed to be
talking about London and Christian science in a place like this!
Leuraville too seemed part of a dream. But her face soon lost its
bewildered look. She became interested in her surroundings, although
there was no suggestion here of savage freedom or romantic adventure.
Leuraville showed low and hot and ugly. A red sun near its dropping,
drew up the miasmic vapours from the mangrove-fringed reaches
stretching on either side of the wharf. Some light crafts were moored
about. A schooner was loading up with cattle--wretched diseased beasts.
Bridget watched them with shuddering repulsion--being hoisted up and
slung aboard with ropes. The men at their task swore so abominably that
the police-magistrate stepped up to them and remonstrated on the plea
of a lady's presence. Bridget had never heard such swear-words. She was
used to the ordinary 'damn,' but these oaths were so horribly coarse.
Colin, who was asking local questions of the other men appeared to take
it all as a matter of course. The men stopped their work to stare at
Lady Bridget. They wore dirty corduroys hitched up with a strap over
flannel shirts that were open at the neck and left their brawny breasts
exposed. There were other loafers in flannel shirts, hitched up
trousers and greasy felt or cabbage-tree hats, and there were two or
three blacks of the demoralised type seen in coast townships. Now, one
of the bullocks got loose and rushed blindly down the wharf, and
Bridget shrieked and clung wildly to her husband's arm until it was
headed back again.
Colin laughed at her terror.
'It's all right, Biddy. But how's that for a Bushman's wife. You'll see
lots of cattle up at Moongarr.'
Moongarr was the name off his station which was to be her future home.
'I hate cows. Once I was charged by a wild cow and I've been afraid of
them ever since.'
'That isn't a cow. It's Mickey Field's poley-tailed bullock being
shunted off to the Boiling-Down Works on Shark Island,' said a local
man.
The police-magistrate found his opportunity.
'You wouldn't be afraid, Lady Bridget, if you realised that cow as an
expression of the Divine mind.'
Bridget laughed. Her sense of the queerness of it all was almost
hysterical. She had the Irish wit to make the men grin at her prompt
answer, which when it became bruited up and down the Leura, earned her
the reputation of being sharp at repartee.
'But do you think,' said she confidingly, 'that the cow would be after
realising ME as an expression of the Divine Mind?'
'Eh, you needn't think you're going to knock spots off my wife, any of
you,' cried Colin delighted at the sally. And now he walked and talked
like a man on his own soil again, as more of the townsfolk came
about--extraordinary people, Bridget thought. Loose-limbed bush-riders,
really trim, some of them, in clean breeches and with a scarlet
handkerchief doing duty as a belt, unkempt old men, a Unionist Labour
organiser addressing a knot of station-hands out of work--even a
Chinaman--a Chinky, McKeith called him, who, it appeared kept a
nondescript store. That was in the days before the Commonwealth and the
battle cry of 'White Australia.'
All of them showed the deepest interest in the small, pale, picturesque
woman walking by Colin's side.
It seemed incredible to Biddy that she should be walking like that
beside the big Bushman, in this sort of town, and that he should be her
lawful protector.
The street they walked up began from the wharf with two-storied
respectable buildings--the Bank, the Post-Office, the
police-magistrate's residence, some dwelling houses, within palings
enclosing gardens--clumps of bananas, pawpaw apple trees, a few flower
beds, bushes of flaunting red poinsettia, and so forth. There were
stores, public houses, meaner shanties straggling along a dusty road
that lost itself in vistas of lank gum trees.
The Postmaster hoped that Mr McKeith's lady would not find the hotel
too rowdy. It was one of the two-storied buildings, and had a bar
giving onto the street, and a veranda round both upper and lower
storey. A number of Bushmen and loafers were drinking in the bar, and
others were on the edge of the veranda dangling their legs over it into
the street. All of them stopped their talk and their drink to stare at
Lady Bridget. The landlady--a big, florid Irish-woman in black silk,
with a gold chain round her neck came out onto the veranda and greeted
McKeith as an old friend, holding out her hand to Lady Bridget. She
took the husband and wife up to their rooms, a parlour opening on the
balcony, a bedroom over the bar and a little room at the back of it.
'It's a rough sort of shop, Biddy,' said Colin, when the woman had
departed. 'But it will do for a shake-down for to-night. If the steamer
had come in earlier I'd have taken you straight up to Fig Tree Mount,
where the buggy will be waiting for us; and after that we'll begin our
camping out, and you'll be in the real Bush. But we've lost the train,
and must wait till daylight to-morrow. You'll be tired my dear--and you
must be feeling strange,' he added kindly. 'I'll go and have your traps
brought up and leave you to fix yourself. I want to see one or two
chaps and find out whether my drays are down as far as Fig Tree for
stores and what's going on up along the Leura.'
Bridget noticed that the change in McKeith seemed yet more accentuated.
His manner was more curt and decided--rougher than before. He appeared
to have taken on the tone of the Back-Blocks. Yet she admired him. She
did not dislike the roughness.
But she felt a womanish aggrievement at his having left her to undo her
own things. And the rooms were horrible--the meagre appliances--the
course cotton sheets, the awful Reckitt's-blue colouring of the painted
walls. And then the dreadful noise of the men drinking below in the
bar! If this was the Bush! But Colin had said it was not the Bush.
He left her again after dinner which was horrible likewise--burned up
steak, messy fried potatoes and cabbage, an uneatable rice pudding. He
did not seem to mind. The result of his enquiries had left him grim and
preoccupied. Yes, he had taken on the Bushman, and had more or less
dropped the lover. The practical Scotch side of him was uppermost, and
he appeared more disturbed over station affairs than at her want of
appetite. She resented this unreasonably. She had not wanted him to
play the lover in these surroundings, they would have been fatal to
romance, but she had not bargained for his glumness. He was angry at
the non-arrival of his draymen and the probability that they were
drinking at a grog-shanty on the road. He would certainly sack them, he
said if that were the case. And he had disquieting news from Moongarr.
Pleuro had broken out among the cattle. What was Pleuro? Lady Bridget
wondered, but she was not sufficiently interested in cattle to ask the
question. And the Unionist labour men were making themselves a
nuisance--going round the stations burning the grass of squatters who
employed non-Union stockmen and shearers--in one instance, threatening
to burn a woolshed. And there hadn't been any rain on the Leura for a
month past, and weather prophets were predicting a drought.
It was dreadfully prosaic and boring. After he had gone out again to
transact further business, Lady Bridget went to bed and squirmed
between the cotton sheets, remembering ruefully the luxuries of
Government House. Never in all her life had she slept between cotton
sheets or washed herself in an enamelled tin basin. The noise in the
bar became intolerable. She could hear the swear-words quite
distinctly. They were disgusting. She tried to stop her ears .... Oh
what a dreadful life this was into which she had plunged so recklessly!
Her thoughts went back to the old-world--to the luxurious veneer
covering the younger Gavericks' petty economies--stealing the notepaper
at country-houses for the sake of the address--cadging for motors and
dinners--'keeping in' with the people likely to be of use; pulling
strings in a manner which Bridget knew would have been too utterly
galling to Colin McKeith's self-respect. And she thought of her father
and his financial unscrupulousness! But none of these could have
conceived of life without certain appurtenances of that position to
which they and she had been born. The only one who was self-respecting
among the lot was old 'Eliza Countess' as they designated her. It
struck Bridget that Eliza Countess and Colin McKeith had points of
character in common--it was true they both came from Glasgow. She
thought of the parsimonious rectitude--which had of course included
linen sheets and fine porcelain and shining silver--of old Lady
Gaverick's establishment, of its stuffy conventionality--though that
had been soothing sometimes after a dose of Upper Bohemia; and Bridget
wept, feeling rather like a wilful child who had strayed out of the
nursery among a horde of savages.
At last she could bear it no longer. They were singing now--a terrible
thing with a refrain of oaths and GEE-UPS, and whistling noises like
the cracking of whips--a bullock drivers' camp ditty. Bridget
shudderingly decided that a row in Whitechapel could be nothing to this
in the matter of bad language. She got up and paced the sitting-room in
her dressing-gown, wondering when her husband would come and rescue her
from these beasts. Watching for him she could see through the
uncurtained French windows the starry brilliance of the night, and the
moon now in its middle quarter. And down below, the houses and shanties
along the opposite side of the street, the fantastic tufts of the
pawpaws, the long white road stretching away into the ragged blur of
gum-forest.
Presently a firm step sounded on the veranda and came up the stairs.
When Colin opened the door, he saw standing by the table, which had a
kerosene lamp on the red cloth, and, even at this time of the year,
winged insects buzzing around, and sticking to its greasy bowl--a small
white figure like an apparition from another world, in its wonderful
draperies of lace and filmy white, the little pale face framed in a
cloud of shining hair, and the strange eyes wide, scared, and with
tears glistening on the reddened lids.
She cried out at him.
'How could you have left me alone here with those horrible drunken men
down there making such a noise that I thought every minute they would
break in on me? And swearing! I've never dreamed of such dreadful
language; and I can't stand it--I won't stand it a moment longer.'
'You shan't. It's abominable, I've been a thoughtless beast.'
He swooped out through the open door, down the wooden stairs which
creaked under his wrathful steps. Bridget heard him call the landlady,
'Mrs Maloney! Come here!' in a voice of sharp command. Presently she
heard him speaking to the men in the bar, not abusively, indeed almost
good humoured tone, but imperatively.
'Look here, mates.' The uproar stopped suddenly. 'You're decent blokes
I know, and you've all had mothers if you haven't had wives. Well,
there's a lady up there--she's my wife, and she's never heard
bullock-drivers swear before, and you've scared her a bit. Just you
stop it. Shut up and be off like good chaps.'
Some dissentient voices arose; an attempt at drunken ribaldry, strident
hisses, 'Sh! Sh!' Cries of 'Shame.' 'Chuck it!' Then again, McKeith's
voice, this time like thunder. 'Stop that I say--one more word and out
you go, whether you like it or not.'
On that, came the noise of a scuffle and the fall of a heavy body
across the veranda. And of McKeith, once more breathing satisfaction:
'All right! I haven't killed him--only given him a lesson .... But just
you understand I'm not taking any of your bluff. You've GOT TO GO. If
you don't, it'll be a case of the lock-up for some of you. And if you
do--quietly mind, there'll be a shout all round for the lot of you
to-morrow. Drink my health and my wife's, d'ye see? Here Mrs Maloney,
chalk it down.'
In five minutes he was back in the sitting room, looking rather
dishevelled, and with his coat awry. But there was silence below except
for the putting up of shutters, the sound of shuffling feet along the
road and snatches of the bullock drivers' chorus which gradually died
away in the night.
McKeith went up to his wife who was still standing by the corner of the
table, and put his arm round the little trembling form.
'Oh! Biddy--my darling. I've been a brute. I'm not fit to take care of
you. I ought to have thought of all that. But one gets used to such
goings-on in the Bush, and they aren't bad chaps--the bullockys, and
you've got to discount their lurid language a bit. I don't know whether
it is that bullocks are more profane than most animals, but it's
certain sure that you can't get them to move without swearing at them.'
Then, as she said, half crying, half laughing, 'I see. So this is my
baptism into the Bush! You should have taught me the vocabulary, Colin,
first.'
'Don't be too hard on me. You won't have this kind of thing at
Moongarr. That's the worst of these cursed coast townships. I shouldn't
have left you alone, but if I hadn't, we couldn't have got off properly
to-morrow, and I'd set my heart on having things ship-shape for our
first camping out. Everything's fixed up now--I've been wiring like mad
up the line .... The buggy's at the Terminus all right, and I've got
the black-boys there, and the tent and all that. It's going to be an
experience you'll never forget. THAT'S to be your baptism into the
Bush, my dear .... If only there's water enough left in the Creek yet
.... But if there isn't we can dig for it. Oh, Biddy, think of it--a
night like this--moonlight and starlight--MY starlight--MY star, that I
used to look up at and wonder about, come down to earth. No, no, I
won't maunder, I won't be a romantic zany--not till to-morrow night--I
know the very spot for our camp ....'
He began to describe it--a pocket by the river bed--pasturage for the
horses--then pulled himself short. No! He wanted it all to be a
surprise .... She was to have just the very thing she had often said to
him she would like best .... And now it was getting late and they must
be up in good time to-morrow. Would she go to bed and try to sleep....
He took her to the door of her room .... Was she as comfortable as she
could be here, anyhow? .... He knew it must seem cruelly rough to her;
but it wouldn't be his fault in the future if she didn't have things as
she liked them--so far as conditions would permit .... And after all,
there women who enjoyed a wild life with their husbands. There was Lady
Burton--and scores of other women--Biddy had asked him to have
patience--and he meant to be patient--he worshipped her too much not to
be patient. Well, she must be patient too with him, and with this queer
old Bush which she would get to feel as much at home in as he did
himself--in time.
He left her at her bedroom door, kissing her hand with the native
chivalry that sat well upon him, and went back to his pipe and the
waking dreams of an ardent but self-restrained lover who had practical
as well as romantic considerations to weigh. Bridget went to sleep with
the smell of his tobacco--and yet did not seem to mind it in the
least--coming in whiffs through the door cracks and filling her
nostrils. She too dreamed--a vivid dream, but by some law of
contrariety, not of any idyllic camping ground in the Never-Never Land.
She dreamed that she was seeing the Carnival at Nice--a medley of
dancing waves, azure sky, palms, gold-laden orange trees and white
green-shuttered houses--flowers, CONFETTI, masks, grotesque pageantry,
the merry music of the South. And though he had never been with her at
Nice, Willoughby Maule came into her dream. They were doing impossible
things--dancing together in the Carnival crowd, flinging confetti,
bobbing and grimacing before the comic masks. Then the carnival scene
seemed to turn flat, and to become a painted picture on the drop
curtain of a stage, and she started up at the sound of knocks such as
one hears before the curtain rises in a French theatre.