The Far Country (21 page)

She laid her darning in the basket, and got out her cigarette-case, and gave Jennifer one; they sat smoking in silence for a little. “I don’t know what’s going to be the end of it,” she said. “This property would fetch about ninety thousand pounds at present-day prices, and it’s all free of debt. That’s heaps to leave the children when we die. We want them to work, not to live on money that we leave them. We want to go on working here ourselves; it’s what we like doing. And these enormous sums of money keep coming in. I don’t know what we’ll do with it, I’m sure.”

“Make a trip home,” suggested Jennifer.

“We’ve thought of that,” said Jane. “I don’t know that I really want to go to England now. I don’t think I’d know anybody there at all. Jack sometimes says he’d like to make a trip to Europe and go to Gallipoli, but he doesn’t really want to, I don’t think.” She sat smoking in silence for a minute. “If Angie goes next year, we might go home the year after to see her. But that wouldn’t take much money, not compared with what we’re making….”

Jennifer smiled. “You’ll have to buy another grandfather clock.”

Jane laughed. “I know it was stupid, Jenny, but I
did
like buying it. Made in Chester in 1806, before this country was even explored. It’s a lovely thing to have.” She spoke more seriously. “No, if things go on like this, some day I’d like to rebuild the homestead.”

“Rebuild this house?”

Jane shook her head. “I’d like to build another house down by the river, and turn this over to a foreman. I’ll show you where I
want to have it. A new brick house designed by a good architect, rather like an English house, but single storey; a house with English trees and an English lawn and a garden all around it, like we used to have at home. Leave the stables and the stockyards all up here, and let the men have their meals up here with the foreman’s family. I want a gracious sort of house, where Jack and I can slack off as we get older and not have to cook for the men. A house where one can have good furniture, and good pictures, and good china and glass, like we used to have at home when I was a girl.”

“An English country house,” said Jennifer thoughtfully.

“Like that in a way, but adapted to the country and the station.” She paused. “I believe a good many people’ll start doing that, if the money goes on like this.”

“So you’ll get a lot of English country houses here?”

“We might,” said Jane. “After all, the English country houses came when agriculture was doing well, and agriculture’s doing well here now. We all came out from England, and we’ve got the English way of doing things. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have the same sort of houses—adapted to the times and to the labour shortage.”

“Cut out the butler,” Jennifer suggested.

Jane smiled. “And the second parlourmaid. It’ll be different, of course. More cars and travel, and no servants. But it might be something just as good.”

“You mean, there’s something in what Granny was trying to say?”

“There might well be. Old people have a knack of being right, sometimes.”

Jennifer settled down at Leonora very happily. In recent years she had worked in an office, first in Leicester and then in London, and working so she had done little serious cooking or housework. It was no burden to her to take some of the cooking and cleaning off Jane for a few days; she rather enjoyed it, having nothing else to do and as a means of learning new techniques. She went out in the paddocks and the stockyards with Jack Dorman and the men whenever she got asked, and she found the management and care of stock and pastures interesting after her office life. She found a very great deal to occupy her at Leonora.

She would have found it even pleasanter if the weather had been cooler, and she came to realise the value of Jane’s insistence that she should avoid the city at the height of the hot weather till she was acclimatised. It was an exceptionally hot January. Each day the sun rose in a cloudless sky at dawn and set in a cloudless evening sky at dusk; each night Angela and Jennifer lay with few coverings in the somewhat stuffy little bedroom of the homestead, unable to sleep till midnight for the heat. Each day thin wreaths of smoke behind the mountains told of forest fires in the high country to the
south of them; each day Jack Dorman listened to the wireless weather forecasts, worried, for some news of rain.

“Don’t like the look of it at all,” he said more than once. “It’s a fair cow.”

He was too worried and preoccupied for Jennifer to bother him with questions, and Angela knew little about the station, and cared less. She asked Tim Archer to tell her what the trouble was, and he said that the boss was worried over the condition of the top paddock, bordering on the forest. The spring up there which usually ran all through the summer had dried up some weeks before and the paddock had got very dry; on account of lack of water they had moved the stock out. The paddock, in consequence, had been little grazed for some time and the grass was far too long for safety; if a fire should run through the forest to the Leonora boundary it would sweep across that paddock in a flash. The homestead would probably be safe enough, but fences would be destroyed; the dry wood of the posts would burn like tinder.

“The trouble is with these darn fires you don’t know where they’ll stop,” said Tim. “You can’t do much about it, either.”

It was on one of these cloudless days that Jane went into town with Angela in the Morris; to make a break for her Jennifer had volunteered to get the dinner so that Jane could dine at the hotel with Angela. She served the inevitable hot roast mutton with potatoes and vegetables competently, though she was dripping with sweat; Tim and Mario finished the meal, and helped her with the washing-up. Then they went out to their work, and Jack Dorman stood with her on the veranda looking at the wreaths of smoke rising almost straight up into the sky behind Buller.

He said anxiously, “I believe that’s nearer. Think I’ll run up the road a bit in the Ford, ’n see if I can find out where she’s burning. Like to come?”

She got into the car with him and they started up the road towards the mountain. They passed the Merrijig hotel and went on towards Lamirra and the timber camps. At Lamirra Jack Dorman stopped the car and went with Jennifer into the store, kept by an English couple who had recently come out from Portsmouth, but they knew little of the local conditions and were ignorant about the fires; they did not think that they were very near.

“Run up the road a bit to where they’re cutting,” Jack said when they got outside. “We’ll get a view over the ridge up there, and see for ourselves.”

They drove on up a broad, smooth, well-engineered road winding up the mountain-side; he told her that this was a timber road made for the passage of the timber lorries getting the wood out; it was designed eventually for use as a main highway. They went on winding up the hillside, and it was cool in the forest; the great trees met high over their heads and practically the whole road was in shade. From time to time they passed a trailer truck loaded
with tree-trunks coming down, sighing with air brakes; from time to time they passed a track leading off into the forest on one side or the other, and saw groups of men handling the fallen timber, who paused in their work to stare curiously at the new utility.

They stopped to ask the ganger of a group of road-makers what the fire position was. He was reassuring; he said that it had not crossed the King River and he did not think it would; the forest fire patrol were there and they had cleared a fire break three miles long to save the forest timber. Jennifer sat in the car while the men gossiped, understanding only about half of what they said; the names of mountains, rivers, people, and official bodies meant nothing to her and she did not fully understand what it was all about.

It was lovely sitting there in the car. They were at an altitude of about four thousand feet and in the speckled shade of the forest; for the first time that day she was cool and dry from sweat. She stretched luxuriously in her clothes. It was quiet in the forest, or it would have been, but for the distant and rhythmic rumbling of a bulldozer at work.

She sat listening to the bulldozer as the men talked. The noises repeated in a regular cycle; a roaring acceleration of the motor followed by a few seconds of steady running, then a period of idling, and then a few seconds of light running as the thing reversed, another idling period, and the cycle began again. It varied very little; she sat listening to it dreamily, half asleep in the coolness of the forest.

The cycle was disturbed, and woke her from her doze. A rumbling of heavy timber broke in and the roaring of the engine mounted suddenly to a climax, and then stopped dead. There was a noise of tumbling machinery and a continued rumbling of rolling logs; a few men shouted in the distance, their voices puny and lost among the greater noises. Then everything was quiet again.

Then men broke off their discussion of the fire and looked in the direction of the row. “What’s going on down there?” asked Jack.

“Bulldozer at work, shifting logs,” the ganger said. “Sounds like he’s got into trouble. Those bloody things are always getting into trouble. We had one bogged up to the seat last winter; took a winch and a day’s work to pull him out.”

They went on with their talk; down in the forest everything was quiet. Presently the ganger went on and Jack Dorman let the clutch in and the car moved on up-hill. “Sounds a bit better,” he said to the girl beside him. “We’ll go up to the top of the road and have a look. He says we can see the fire from there.”

A quarter of a mile further on, a track led down the hill to the right. As they approached they saw a man running up this track towards the road, a man in lumber jacket and dirty canvas trousers,
a rough man, running clumsily up-hill, half-foundered. He waved at the car when he saw it; they stopped and waited for him to come up to them.

“Aw look,” he panted. “Give us a run down the road to Lamirra. There’s been an accident in there, and two blokes got hurt bad. I got to telephone the doctor and the ambulance at Banbury, ’n find a bloke called Splinter.”

J
ENNIFER
opened the door of the utility and slid across the seat towards Jack Dorman; the man tumbled in beside her and slammed the door. He was panting and streaming sweat. Jack Dorman began to turn the car. “It’s a proper muck-up,” the man said urgently. “I got to get Splinter quick.”

The car swung round and headed down the road. “Where d’you want to go?”

“You know the office building, other side the bridge? They’ll telephone the ambulance from there. Maybe they’ll know where Splinter’s working.”

“Where it says the name of the company, on a big board?”

“That’s right. They’ll telephone from there, and then I’ll have to find Splinter.”

They did not speak again; Jack Dorman devoted his attention to the road as they went flying round the curves down into the valley. Once as they swung violently round a corner with a scream of tyres the man was flung heavily against Jennifer; he wrenched himself off her and said, “Sorry, lady.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “Who is this man you’ve got to find?”

“Who? Splinter? He’s the doctor here.”

Jack Dorman, eyes glued to the road, said, “Is that the chap that goes fishing at the week-ends?”

“That’s right,” the man said, “he’s just one of these D.P.s, working in the timber with the rest of us. He’s a doctor in his own country, like. He’s not allowed to be a doctor here.”

They came to the office building at the bottom of the stream, a small weatherboard shack of three rooms; the man flung himself from the car. “I’ll wait here a bit,” Jack Dorman called after him. “ ’Case you want to go back.”

They sat in the car for a few minutes, waiting. “Where is the nearest proper doctor?” the girl asked.

“Banbury,” he said. “There’s a hospital there with an ambulance, and there’s a doctor—Dr. Jennings.”

“How far is that from here?”

“About seventeen miles.”

She was a little shocked; accustomed as she was to city life it was difficult to realise that there could be no doctor close at hand. “How long will it take him to get here?”

He hesitated. “That depends. If he’s in Banbury and he’s free, he might be out here in an hour. But I believe this is his Woods Point day.”

“What’s that?”

“He goes to Woods Point once a week,” he said. “They haven’t got a doctor there. I think this is the day he goes there—Tuesday. I’m pretty sure it is.”

“How far is that from Banbury?”

“About forty miles.”

She said, “You mean, it could be hours before he could get here?”

“Too right.”

“But what happens, in a case like this?”

“Just got to do the best you can,” he said. “Most doctoring for accidents is common sense.”

They sat together in the car, waiting. Then the man that they had brought down from the woods came to the door of the office with the manager, a man called Forrest. Jack Dorman knew him slightly as an acquaintance in various local bars.

“Eh Jim,” he said. “Got a bit of trouble.”

Jim Forrest glanced at him in recognition, and then at the new Custom utility. He crossed the road to Dorman. “Aw, look, Jack,” he said. “Are you busy?”

“Not particularly.”

“Joe here, he says there’s two men got hurt bad, up where you picked him up upon the road. They’ll have to be fetched down and taken into hospital, unless we can get the ambulance to come out for them. Could you stand by a few minutes while we get through to Banbury? If we’ve got to send them in, they’ll travel easier in this utility than in one of my trucks.”

“Do anything I can. I’ll run them into Banbury if you want it.”

“Thanks a lot. I’ve got the call in now. Say, while you’re waiting, could you run Joe up to Camp Four, fetch a man called Zlinter?”

“I know him. That’s the chap that fishes?”

“That’s right. He’s a D.P. doctor, been working here for quite a while. I got him on the telephone and he’s gone down to his camp by truck, pick up his stuff. I’d appreciate it if you’d slip down there ’n pick him up. Joe can show you. By the time you’ve got back here I’ll have spoken to Banbury.”