Books: Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land
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Rosa Praed (1851 1935) >> Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land
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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.
CHAPTER 5
Her husband was at her door calling her in the grey of dawn. He had
everything ready he said. She dressed fumblingly as if she were still
in her dream, and they walked to the station-shed whither the baggage
had already gone. The sun was only a little way above the horizon when
they took their places in the bush train that was to bear her on the
second stage of her journey into the Unknown. Such a wheezy, shaky
little train, and such funny, ugly country! Sandy flats sparsely grown,
mostly with gum trees, where there were no houses and gardens. Near the
township there were a good many of these wooden dwellings with
corrugated iron roofs--some of the more aged ones of slab--and with a
huge chimney at one end. They were set in fenced patches of millet and
Indian corn or gardens that wanted watering and with children perched
on the top rail of the fences who cheered the train as it passed.
Sometimes the train puffed between lines of grey slab fencing in which
were armies of white skeleton trees that had been 'rung' for
extermination, or with bleached stumps sticking up in a chaos of felled
trunks, while in some there had sprung up sickly iron-bark saplings.
Now and then, they would stop at a deserted-looking station, round
which stood a few shanties, and the inevitable public house. Maybe it
had formerly been a sheepfold, abandoned when the scab had destroyed
the flocks; and there were enormous rusty iron boiling-pots to which a
fetid odour still clung, and where the dust that blew up, had the
grittiness and faint smell of sun-dried sheeps' droppings.
At one of the more important stopping places, they had early lunch of
more fried steak, with sweet potatoes and heavy bread and butter and
peach jam. Most of the other passengers got out for lunch also.
There was a fifth-rate theatrical company cracking jokes among
themselves, drinking brandy and soda at extortionate prices, and
staring hard at Lady Bridget. Colin pointed out to her a lucky digger
and his family--two daughters in blue serge trimmed with gold braid,
and a fat red-faced Mamma, very fine in a feathered hat, black brocade,
a diamond brooch, and with many rings and jangling bangles. There were
some battered, bearded bushmen who seemed to be friends of Colin's,
though he did not introduce them to his wife, and who talked on topical
subjects in a vernacular which Lady Bridget thought to herself she
would never be able to master. There was a professional horse-breaker
whom McKeith hailed as Zack Duppo, and to whom he had a good deal to
say also. There were some gangs of shearers or stockmen or what not,
who appeared to be the following of two or three rakish, aggressive
looking males upon whom the bushmen scowled. Union delegates, Strike
Organisers, McKeith explained.
After that station, marks of civilisation diminished. The Noah's Ark
humpeys in their clearings became few and far between, and the long
lines of grey two-railed fences melted into gum forest. Now and then,
they saw herds of cattle and horses. Once, a company of kangaroos
sitting up with fore paws drooping and a baby marsupial poking its head
out of the pouch of one of the does. Then, taking fright in a second,
all leaped up, long back legs stretched, tails in air, and, in a few
ungainly bounds they were lost to sight among the gum trees. Early in
the afternoon the train reached the temporary Terminus, for the line
was being carried on by degrees through the Leura district. This was a
mining town called Fig Tree Mount--why, nobody could tell, for there
were no fig trees, and not a sign of a hill as far as the level horizon
--except for the heaps of refuse mullock that showed where shafts had
been sunk. A good many years ago, Bridget was told, there had been a
rush to the place, but the gold field turned out not so good as had
been expected, and it was only lately that the discovery of a payable
reef had brought the digging population back again. From one direction
came the whirr of machinery, and there was in the same quarter a
collection of white tents and roughly put up humpeys. Otherwise, the
township consisted of a long dusty street cutting the sandy plain and,
out of the two score or so of zinc-roofed buildings, twenty were public
houses.
Lady Bridget had been very silent all day. To Colin's anxious enquiries
she answered that it was enough to take in so many new impressions
without talking about them. Through the crude blur of these impressions
her husband stood out definitely, a dominant influence. She seemed to
be only now beginning to feel his dominance. Yet all the time, she
could not get away from the sense of living in some fantastic dream--
an Edward Lear nonsense dream. The sight of the kangaroos in the Bush
brought a particular rhyme of her childhood to her mind. She half said,
half sang it to an improvised tune:
'Said the Duck to the Kangaroo,
"Good gracious! how you hop!
Over the fields and water too,
As if you never would stop!" '
She caught her husband looking at her in a fascinated, puzzled way, and
paused and gave him her funny little smile.
'That's a very pretty song,' he said. 'But I can't make out what it
means. What is it about a duck or a kangaroo? They're nonsense words,
aren't they?'
'Nonsense--oh yes, frightful nonsense. Only it struck me that there's
sometimes a lot of truth in nonsense. Listen now,' and she went on:
'"My life is a bore in this nasty pond,
And I long to go out in the world beyond.
I wish I could hop like you!"
Said the Duck to the Kangaroo.'
He still looked puzzled--but adoring.
'You've got no sense of humour,' she said, 'Don't you see that you and
I are as incongruous as the duck and the kangaroo?'
'That is so,' he answered gravely. 'But I'll be a kangaroo with
pleasure if it makes the Bush more attractive to you.'
She fell suddenly silent again, and sat gloomy and staring at the
endless procession of gum trees as the train lumbered on through that
fantastic forest, which made her think of all kinds of ridiculous
things. And she was conscious all the time of his furtive watching from
the corner opposite, and of his readiness to spring forward at the
least indication of her wanting anything. It bewildered her--the
strangeness of being alone with, entirely dependent upon this big man
of the Bush, who had the right to look after her, and yet of whom she
knew so little.
He did look after her with sedulous care. He had natty bush dodges for
minimising the discomfort of the hot, dusty train journey. He
manufactured a windsail outside the carriage window, which brought in a
little breeze during the airless heat of mid-day. He contrived to get
cool drinks and improvised for her head a cushion out of his rolled up
poncho, a silk handkerchief and a large cold cabbage leaf against which
she leaned her hot forehead. In all his actions she watched him with a
curious blend of feelings. There was a satisfaction in his largeness,
his commonsense, his breeziness. She liked hearing his quaint Bush
colloquialisms, when he leaned out of the window at the small stations
and exchanged greetings with whomsoever happened to be there--
officials, navvies, miners, even Chinamen--most of whom saluted him
with a 'Glad to see you back, sir!' . . . or a 'Good-day, Boss. Good
luck to you,' as if they all knew the significance of this wedding
journey--which no doubt they all did.
Bridget kept in the background and smiled enigmatically at it all. She
was interested in her husband both in the personal and abstract sense,
and was a little surprised at herself for being pleased when he paid
her any attention or sat down beside her. At moments, she even hankered
after the touch of his fingers, and had a perverse desire to break down
the restraint he was so manifestly putting upon himself. Once, when he
had been sitting very still in the further corner, thinking she was
asleep, she had looked at him suddenly, and had found his eyes fixed on
her in a gaze so concentrated, so full of intense longing, that she
felt as if he were trying to hypnotise her into loving him. She knew
that if he were, it must be unconscious hypnotism on his part. There
were no subtleties of that kind in Colin McKeith. No, it was the primal
element in him that appealed to her, dominated her. For she was
startled by a sudden realization of that dominant quality in him as
applied to herself. In their courtship it had been she who dominated
him.
He reddened guiltily when he caught her eyes. His long upper lip went
down in obstinate resistance to impulse. But if he had kissed her then,
she would not have rebelled.
'Colin, what are you thinking of?' she said, and he answered in a tone,
husky with pent emotion.
'I was thinking of our camp to-night--of how we should be alone
together in the starlight. . . . And of how I want to make you happy
and of how wonderful it all is--like some impossible dream.'
'Yes. I've been feeling too that it is like a dream,' she replied
gravely.
'A bit of nightmare so far, I'm afraid, for you, Biddy,' he said
shaking himself free from sentiment. 'But this part of it will soon be
over.'
He got up, pulled the blind down behind her, and readjusted the cabbage
leaf under her head. Just then, the train pulled up at a station where
there were selectors' holdings, and a German woman was lugging along a
crate of garden produce. He jumped out and bought another cabbage from
which he shredded a fresh cool leaf for her pillow. And at that they
laughed and he relapsed into normal commonplace.
When she got out at Fig Tree Mount, he took her across the sandy street
to the nearest and largest of the public houses which had 'Station
Hotel' printed on it in big blue letters--a glaring, crude,
zinc-roofed box with a dirty veranda that seemed a receptacle for
rubbish and a lounge for kangaroo dogs, to say nothing of drunken men.
The dogs took no notice of the male loungers, but started a vigorous
barking at the sight of a lady. There was the usual bar at one end, the
usual noise going on inside, and the usual groups of bush loafers
outside. Several riding horses were hitched up to the palings at a
right angle with the Bar, and a bullock dray loaded with wool-bales--
on the top of which a whole family appeared to reside under a canvas
tilt--was drawn up in the road. The beasts were a repulsive sight,
with whip-weals on their panting sides, their great heads bowed under
the yoke and their slavering tongues protruding. Bridget looked at
everything with a wide detached gaze, as she followed her husband along
the hotel veranda. McKeith, motioning to his wife to proceed, stopped
to peer at the faces of two men lying in a drunken sleep on the boards.
'Not my men, anyway,' he said, rejoining her. 'But that will keep.' The
place seemed deserted and in disorder. There were glimpses through the
open windows of unmade beds within, and, on the veranda, lay some red
blankets bundled together. Colin took his wife into a parlour, where
flies buzzed round the remains of a meal and some empty whisky bottles
and glasses. After considerable shouting and knocking at doors along
the passage, he succeeded in arousing the landlady, who came in,
buttoning her blouse. Her obviously dyed yellow hair was in a
dishevelled state, her eyes were heavy and her face sodden. She had
evidently been sleeping off the effects of drink.
'Had a night of it, I suppose, Mrs Hurst?' observed McKeith glumly.
'This is a nice sort of place to show a lady into.'
The woman burst out on the defensive, but McKeith silenced her.
'That'll do. Clear away all that mess and let us have a clean cloth and
some tea. And I say, if you have got a decent room for my wife to wash
the dust off and take a bit of a rest in, I'll be obliged.'
The landlady blinked her puffed eyelids, muttered an uncourteous
rejoinder and went off with some of the debris from the table. Bridget
laughed blankly. She looked so small and flower like, so absolutely
incongruous with her surroundings, that the humour of it all struck
McKeith tragically.
'Good Lord! I wonder what your opinion is of this show! Here is the
beginning of what is called the Never-Never Country, my dear. Do you
want to go back again to Government House?'
'No, I don't,' and she touched him to the heart's core by putting her
little hand in his.
'That's my Mate,' said he, his blue eyes glistening. 'But I'll tell you
what I think of your splendid pluck when we're quit of these beastly
townships, and have gone straight into Nature. Now, I've got to go and
see after the buggy and find my boys, and I shall have all my work cut
out to be ready in an hour. You just make the best of things, and if
the bedroom is impossible spread out my poncho and take a rest on that
sofa there, and don't be frightened if you hear any rowdiness going
on.'
The bedroom was impossible, and the sofa seemed equally so. Bridget
drank the coarse bush tea which the landlady brought in, and was glad
that the woman seemed too sulky to want to talk. Then she sat down at
the window and watched the life of the township--the diggers slouching
in for drinks, the riders from the bush who hung up their horses and
went into the bar, the teams of bullocks coming slowly down the road
and drawing up here or at some other of the nineteen public houses 'to
wet the wool,' in bush vernacular. She counted as many as twenty-four
bullocks in one of the teams, and watched with interest the family life
that went on in the narrow space between the wool bales and the canvas
roof above. There were women up there and little children. She saw
bedding spread and a baby's clothes fluttering out to dry, and tin
pannikins and chunks of salt beef slung to the ropes that bound the
wool bales together. Then, when the wool was wetted, or when some other
teams behind disputed the right of way in lurid terms which Lady
Bridget was now beginning to accept as inevitably concomitant with
bullocks, the first dray would proceed, all the cattle bells jingling
and making, in the distance, not unpleasant music.
It was the horses that interested Lady Bridget most, for, like all the
O'Haras, she was a born horsewoman. Though she was moved almost to
tears by the spur scars on the lean sides of some of them--spirited
creatures in which she recognised the marks of breeding--and by the
unkempt condition of some that were just from grass, she decided within
herself that there could never be a lack of interest and excitement in
a land where such horseflesh abounded.
Presently she had her first sight of the typical stockman got up in
'township rig.' Spotless moleskins, new Crimean shirt, regulation silk
handkerchief, red, of course, and brand new, tied in a sailor's knot at
the neck, leather belt with pouches of every shape and size slung from
it, tobacco pouch, watch pouch, knife pouch and what not. Cabbage tree
hat of intricate plait pushed back to the back of the head and held
firm by a thin strap coming down to the upper lip and caught in two
gaps on either side of the prominent front teeth--there are very few
stockmen who have kept all their front teeth. Stockwhip, out of
commission for the present, with an elaborately carved and beautifully
polished sandal-wood handle hanging down behind, a long snake-like lash
coiled in three loops over the left shoulder.
Lady Bridget knew most of the types of men who have to do with horses--
huntsmen, trainers, jockeys, riding masters and the rest, but the
Australian bush-rider is a product by itself. She liked this son of the
gum forest-tanned face, taut nerves, alert eyes piercing long distances
--a man, vital, shrewd, simple as a child, cunning as an animal. And
the way he sat in his saddle, the poise of the lean, lanky muscular
frame! No wonder the first stockman seemed to the wild blacks a new
sort of beast with four legs and two bodies. And the clean-limbed
mettlesome creature under him! Man and beast seemed truly a part of
each other. Lady Bridget O'Hara's soul warmed to that stockman and to
his steed.
He was looking at the windows of the bar-parlour. As soon as he saw the
lady, the cabbage tree hat was raised in a flourish, the horse was
reined in, the man off his saddle and the bridle hitched to a post.
Now the stockman stepped on to the veranda.
'Mrs McKeith--or is it Lady McKeith I should say--I haven't got the
hang of the name if you'll pardon me--Mr McKeith sent me on to say
that he'll be here with the buggy in a minute or two. . . . I'm
Moongarr Bill. . . . Glad to welcome you up the Leura, ma'am, though I
expect things seem a bit rough to you straight out from England and not
knowing the Bush.'
Lady Bridget won Moongarr Bill's good favour instantly by the look in
her eyes and the smile with which she answered him.
'I'm from Ireland, Moongarr Bill, and if we Irish know anything we know
a good horse, and that's a beauty you're riding.'
'Out of a Pitsford mare by a Royallieu colt, and there's not a finer
breed in the Never-Never. My word! you've struck it there, ma'am, and
no mistake,' responded the stockman enthusiastically. 'I bought 'im out
of the yard at Breeza Downs--that's Windeatt's run about sixty miles
from Moongarr, and I will say that though it's a sheep-run they've beat
us in the breed of their 'osses. . . . Got 'im cheap because he'd
bucked young Windeatt off and nearly kicked his brains out, and there
wasn't a man along the Leura that he'd let stop on his back except me
and Zack Duppo--the horse-breaker who first put the tackling on 'im.'
After the interchange of one or two remarks, Lady Bridget had no doubt
of being friends with Moongarr Bill, and Moongarr Bill decided that for
a dashed new-chum woman, Lady Bridget had a remarkable knowledge of
horseflesh.
The quick CLOP-CLOP of a four horse team and a clatter of tin billys
and pannikins--as Lady Bridget presently discovered slung upon the
back rail of an American buggy--sounded up the street.
'There's the Boss,' said Moongarr Bill. 'Look alive, with that
packhorse, Wombo.'
Lady Bridget now perceived behind the stockman a black boy on a young
colt, leading a sturdy flea-bitten grey, laden with a pack bag on
either side. He jumped off as lightly as Moongarr Bill and hitched his
horses also to the veranda posts. Except that he was black as a coal,
save for the whites of his eyes and his gleaming teeth, he seemed a
grotesque understudy of the stockman--moleskins, not too clean and
rubbed and frayed in places, fastened up with a strap; faded Crimean
shirt exposing a wealed and tattooed breast; old felt hat--not a
cabbage tree--with a pipe stuck in its greasy band; an ancient red
silk handkerchief with ragged edges, where whip crackers had been torn
off, round his neck, and a short axe slipped among a few old pouches
into the strap at his waist. He jumped on to the veranda, clicked his
teeth in an admiring ejaculation as he gazed at Lady Bridget.
'My word! BUJERI feller White Mary you! . . . new feller Mithsis
belonging to Boss. My word!' Then as McKeith drew up his horses in
front of the hotel, Wombo and Moongarr Bill sprang to the heads of
wheelers and leaders.
It seemed to Bridget that there was a change in her husband even since
he had left her. He looked more determined, more practical, wholly
absorbed in the unsentimental business of the moment. He had changed
into looser, more workmanlike rig--was belted, pouched, carried his
whip grandly, handled his reins with a royal air of command, as if he
were now thoroughly at home in his own dominions, had already asserted
his authority--which she found presently to be the case--and intended
the rest of the world to knock under to him. There flashed on Lady
Bridget an absurd idea of having been married by proxy--like the
little princesses of history--and of being now received into her
lord's country by the monarch in person. Her face was rippling all over
with laughter when he joined her in the veranda.
'What! Another delicious black boy! He looks like a Christy Minstrel. I
thought you hated blacks, Colin.'
'So I do. You've got to have 'em though for stock boys, and I keep my
heel on the lot at Moongarr. Wombo and Cudgee aren't bad chaps so long
as they are kept clear of their tribe. How do you like the new buggy,
my lady? A dandy go-cart, eh?'
He looked as pleased as a child with a new toy carriage. The buggy was
quite a smart bush turn-out--comfortable seats in front--a varnished
cover, now lying back; a well behind, filled with luggage; a narrow
back seat whence Cudgee--a smaller edition of Wombo--sprang down.
Cudgee, too, stared at Lady Bridget and clicked his teeth in
admiration, exclaiming:
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