The Far Country (4 page)

The manager took it and glanced at it with an expressionless face; for the last week he had been receiving one or two like it every day. “I’ll give you the receipt slip outside, Mr. Dorman,” he said. “What do you want done with it? All into the current account?”

“That’s right.”

“If you think of investing any of it, I could write to our investments section at head office and get up a few suggestions. It’s a pity to see a sum like that lying idle.”

“I’ll think it over,” said Dorman. “I’m going down to Melbourne in a month or two. A good bit of it’ll go in tax, and there’s one or two things wanted on the station.”

The manager smiled faintly; he knew that one, too. “I expect there are,” he said. “Well, let me know if I can do anything.”

Dorman left the bank and went to the post office; he bought stamps and an air mail sticker for Mario’s letter and handed it to Elsie Peters for the post. “I was to tell you that Tim Archer’s coming to the Red Cross dance, with Mario,” he said.

“Goody,” she replied. “He was in this morning, but he didn’t know then if he’d be able to get in to it.”

“Aye, they can have the car. If that Mario gets into any trouble they won’t have it again. I said I’d get the tickets for them. Where would I do that?”

“Mrs. Hayward, up by Marshall’s. She’s selling them. I’ll get them for you if you like to give me the money, Mr. Dorman, and send them out with the mail.”

He handed her a note from his wallet. “Thanks. Anything more happened about you going home?”

She nodded, with eyes shining. “I’ve got a passage booked on the
Orontes
, fifth of May. It’s terribly exciting, I just can’t wait. Dad did well out of the wool this year.”

“Fine,” he said. “What part of England are you going to?”

“Ma’s people all live in a place called Nottingham,” she said. “That’s in the middle somewhere, I think. I’m going to stay with them at first, but after that I want to get a job in London.”

“London’s all right,” he said. “I was in England with the first A.I.F. and I don’t suppose it’s altered very much. From what I hear they don’t get much to eat these days. We’ll have to send you food parcels.”

She laughed. “That’s what Ma says. But I think it’s all right. People who’ve been there say there’s a lot of nonsense talked about food being short. It’s not as bad as they make out.”

“I never heard of anyone send back a food parcel, all the same,” he observed.

“I don’t think they’ve got as much as all that,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean, they do like to get parcels still. I’m going to take a lot of tins with me.” She paused. “It’s going to be a beaut trip,” she said thoughtfully. “I just can’t wait till May.”

Jack Dorman went out of the post office and got into the car, and went to see the builder. He stayed with him some time talking about the three-roomed house for Mario, and arranged for him to come and measure up for the timber and weatherboarding required. This all took a little time, and by the time he got back to the dressmaker to pick up Jane she was ready for him. They did a little more shopping together, put the parcels on the ledge behind the driving seat, and drove out on the road to Buttercup.

George and Ann Pearson lived on rather a smaller property of about fifteen hundred acres; they had no river and they got the water for their stock from dams bulldozed or scooped out to form catchment pools at strategic points upon the land. They were younger than the Dormans, and they still had a young family. The youngest child was Judith, only eight years old, but old enough to catch and saddle her own pony every morning and ride six miles to school with her satchel on her back. Because this was the normal way of going to school the schoolhouse was provided with a paddock; the children rode in and unsaddled, hung their saddles and bridles on the fence, and went in to their lessons. After school they caught their ponies, the schoolmistress helping them if there were any difficulty, saddled up, and rode six miles home again.

George Pearson had rigged up a diving-board and a pair of steps to turn his largest dam into a swimming-pool, and the children were bathing in it as the Dormans drove by. They had evidently brought friends on their way back from school, because three ponies grazed beside the dam with saddles on their backs. Weeping willows seventy feet high grew around the pool, and half a dozen little bodies flashed and splashed with shrill cries from the diving-board in the bright sun.

“I’d have thought it was too cold for bathing still,” Jane observed. “It’s only October.”

“It’s warm in the sun,” Jack said. “It was up to eighty, dinnertime.”

“It’s cold in the water, though,” she replied. “George told me that it’s twelve feet deep, that dam. It’ll be cold just down below the surface.”

“They don’t mind,” he said. He took his eyes from the track and looked again at the dam. “I often wish we’d had a dam,” he said. “Those kids, they get a lot of fun out of that.”

They drove on to the homestead and parked in the grassy yard. Ann Pearson came out to meet them; she was Australian born and spoke with a marked Australian accent, in contrast to her husband, who had come out as a farmer’s son in 1930 and still retained a trace of Somerset in his speech. “Didn’t you see George?” she asked after
the first greetings. “He went down to the dam, with the children.”

“We didn’t stop,” said Jane. “He’s probably down there.”

“Just dropped in to see if George had got his wool cheque,” Jack Dorman said, grinning.

Ann said, “Oh, my word.” There seemed no need for any further comment.

Jack turned to Jane and said, “It’s all right. They’ve got enough money to give us tea.”

“Give tea to everybody in the shire,” said Ann. “How long’s it going on for, Jack? I tell you, we get sort of frightened sometimes. It can’t go on like this, can it?”

“It’ll be down next year,” Jack Dorman said, “Not real low, but down to something reasonable, I’d say. It can blow a blizzard after that, for all I care.”

They got out of the car and went with her to the wide veranda, and sat down in deck-chairs. “That’s what George thinks, too. I’d be quite glad if it went down a bit. It doesn’t seem right, somehow. It’s not good for the children, either, to see money come so easy.”

She told them that they were sailing for England in April on the P. and O.
Strathmore;
the children were going to stay with their grandmother at Nagambie. “George booked the cabin six months ago,” she said, “but I never really thought it’ld come off. Still, now we’re going, definitely. His dad and mum, they’re still alive at this place Shepton Mallet where he was brought up. I never thought I’d meet them, but now it looks as if I shall.”

She turned to Jane with a question that had been worrying her a good deal. “When you go on those P. and O. boats travelling first-class,” she said, “what do you wear at night? Is it a low evening dress every night, or is that just for dances?”

George Pearson came back presently with six hungry children, and they all sat down to tea at the long table in the kitchen, eleven of them, counting the hired man, a Pole from Slonim, who spoke little English. They ate the best part of two joints of cold roast mutton with a great dish of potatoes and thought nothing of it, topping up with bread and jam and two plum cakes, and many cups of tea. Then the men went out into the yard and put the three visiting children on their ponies and saw them off so that they would be home by nightfall, which comes early in Australia.

The two graziers talked quietly for a time on the veranda while their wives washed up indoors. “Going home in April, so Ann told us,” Dorman said.

“Aye.” George smoked for a few minutes in silence. “See the old folks once more, anyway. I don’t know what it’s going to be like there, now.”

“I asked Jane if she’d like to go back home, but she didn’t want to. She said it’ld all be different.”

“Aye. I want to see my brother, see if he won’t come out. There’s still land going if you look around a bit.”

“Ninety pounds an acre.” They both smiled. “Forty-five or fifty, if you look around,” said George. “He’d get that for the land he’s got at home.”

“All right while the wool keeps up.”

“I want to see what things are like at home,” George Pearson said. “They may not be so bad as what you read.”

“They don’t have to be,” said Dorman. “I see where it says in the paper that you can’t have a new car if you’ve had one since the war, and now they’re selling squirrels in the butchers’ shops. What’s a squirrel like to look at? Is it like a possum?”

“Smaller than that,” said George. “More the size of a rat. It’s a clean feeder, though; I suppose you could eat squirrel. Gypsies used to eat them, where I come from.”

There was a slow, bewildered silence. “I’d not know what the world was coming to, if I’d to eat a thing like that….”

Everything foreign in the newspapers was puzzling to them, these days. The murders and the pictures of the bathing girls were solid, homely matters that they could understand, but the implacable hostility of the Russians was an enigma. Fortunately they were seven or eight thousand miles away, and so it didn’t matter very much. Korea and the Chinese provided another puzzle; Australian boys were fighting there for no very clear reason except that a meeting of the United Nations nine thousand miles from Buttercup had said they should. Mr. Menzies made a speech sometimes and told them that all this was terribly important to Australians, and failed to convince them. The only thing from all these distant places that really touched the graziers was the food shortage in England; they did not understand why that should be, but they sent food parcels copiously to their relations at home, and puzzled over their predicament. They could not understand why English people would not come to this good country that had treated them so well.

The two wives came out and joined their men on the veranda. Jane said, “Ann’s been telling me about Peter Loring falling off his horse, Jack. Did you hear about that?”

Her husband shook his head. “That one of the Loring boys, from Balaclava?”

She nodded. “The little one—eleven or twelve years old. You tell him, Ann.”

Ann Pearson said, “It was a funny thing, Jack. I had to go into town early on Friday, about nine o’clock. Well, I got just up to the main road—I was all alone in the utility, and there was a pony, with a saddle on and bridle, grazing by the side of the road, and there was Peter Loring with blood all over him from scratches, sitting on the grass. So of course I stopped and got out and asked him what was the matter, and he said he fell off the pony; he was on his way to school. So I asked him if he was hurt, and he said it hurt him to talk and he felt funny.” She paused. “Well, there I was, all alone, and I didn’t know what to do, whether to take him home or what.
And just then a truck came by, with a couple of those chaps from the lumber camp in it.”

Jack Dorman said, “The camp up at Lamirra?”

“That’s right. Well, this truck stopped and the men got down, and one of them came and asked what was the matter. New Australian he was, German or something—he spoke very foreign. So I told him and he began feeling the boy all over, and then the other man told me he was a doctor in his own country, but not here in Australia. He was a tall, thin fellow, with rather a dark skin, and black hair. So I asked him, ‘Is it concussion, Doctor?’ I said. Because, I was going to say we’d bring him back here, because this was closer.”

She paused. “Well, he didn’t answer at once. He seemed a bit puzzled for the moment, and then he made little Peter open his mouth and took a look down his throat, and then he found some stuff coming out of his ear. And then he said, ‘It is not concussion, and the bleeding, that is nothing.’ He said, ‘He has ear disease, and he has a temperature. He should go at once to hospital in Banbury.’ My dear, of all the things to have, and that man finding it out so quick! Well, I felt his forehead myself, and it was awful hot, and so I asked the truck driver to go on to Balaclava and tell his mother, and I drove this doctor and Peter into town to the hospital. And Dr. Jennings was there, and he said it was a sort of mastoid—otitis something, he said.”

“Pretty good, that,” said Jack Dorman.

George Pearson said, “Dr. Jennings knew all about this chap. He’s a Czech, not a German. He works up at the camp there, doing his two years.”

“What’s his name?”

“He did tell me, but I forgot. One of these foreign names, it was—Cylinder, or something. Not that, but something like it. Ann drove him back to Lamirra.”

His wife said, “He was quite a quiet, well-behaved one for a New Australian. I do think it was quick of him to find out what was wrong.”

“Lucky he came along just then,” said Jack.

“My word,” said Ann with feeling. “If he hadn’t come I think I’d probably have put Peter into the utility and brought him straight back here, because it’s so much closer here than Balaclava. I wouldn’t have known what to do with mastoid.”

The Dormans left soon after that, and drove back to Leonora. Life went on as usual on the station, and on Saturday evening Tim Archer drove into Banbury with Mario Ritti for the Red Cross dance. He hit it off all right with Mario in spite of their very different backgrounds, but there was always a little difficulty with Mario at a dance. There was a barrier of language and experience between the Italian and the local Australian girls; he was inclined to be too bold with them, and they would not willingly have been
seen with him except at a dance, where social barriers were somewhat broken down. There had been an Italian girl at one of the hotels till recently, and Mario had done most of his dancing with her, but now she had left to go to Melbourne to earn eight pounds a week in a café, and Tim was a little anxious about Mario in consequence.

There were about eighty thousand pounds’ worth of new motorcars parked outside the Shire Hall that night, for wool had been good for a couple of years. They parked the old Chevrolet and went into the hall, neat in their blue suits, with oiled hair carefully brushed. For a time they stood with a little crowd of young men round the door while the girls sat on chairs in long lines on each side of the floor waiting to be asked to dance; only two or three couples were yet dancing, and the place was still stone cold. Tim studied the girls; Elsie Peters was there talking to Joan McFarlane. If he had been alone he would have gone and asked one or other of them to dance, but that meant leaving Mario high and dry. He felt an obligation to the Italian to get him started with at least one partner before going off to his own friends, and he did not think that either Elsie or Joan would appreciate it if he landed her with an Eyetie who spoke poor English and was full of rather obvious sex appeal.