Best Australian Short Stories (22 page)

Half-way down a raspberry row Mr Sims signalled a rest, by standing up and looking about him, while rubbing his loins with the back of his hand. It was then that I put the question that had been troubling my mind.

“Mr Sims, why did you leave Kent?”

My question fetched from Harry a deep belly-chuckle which ended in a ringing laugh and, although it had been asked in all innocence, drew upon me a shrewd look from both men. Mr Sims seemed to feel that I had challenged him, so, while Harry listened, grinning, he explained.

“Well, boy, seeing that you’ve asked me, I’ll tell you! And then followed an explanation from which I learnt that while Kent was a very beautiful and wonderful place—”the finest county in all England, I’ve heard say”—it was a place in which everything was owned by someone, pretty well down to the last minnow in the brook, and the people who owned it, and had owned it for hundreds and hundreds of yuurs”, were very jealous of their rights. If the farm steward saw me eating as much as one raspberry unbidden by him he might lay his whip about my legs; and if my father took some faggots from the woods for firing and the steward came to know of it he might be brought before the “magistete” and be turned off the place—the “magistete” being a friend of his master and a neighbouring squire.

Tere slowly faded from Mr Sims’s face the somewhat dramatic expression with which he made me this explanation, and he looked long into the distance, while Harry lit a pipe and looked at me with an ironic smile about his mouth. Mr Sims said, “Yuurce, yuurce”, and we bent again to our digging; and to our several trains of thought.

I was deeply shocked by this talk of whipping, entrenched proprietorship, and dear old country gentlemen who were also stern magistrates. I assumed, as an article of faith, that my own country was free from comparable harshness, and I went over to Harry’s equivocal view of the fabled land of Kent. I saw that Kent, as Mr Sims most kindly remembered it, was mainly an ideal of thorough farming which he kept in mind to help him, and, for the rest, something which had its lovable side and which he was trying to reconstruct with its worst parts left out. The more I thought about it all the more I liked him for what he was trying to do.

From then on he spoke to me of Kent in the tone of one speaking to another who is in the know; but I think he was anxious lest I should think too badly of his home country, because a few days later, when we were hilling-up the potatoes in the top orchard, he interrupted work to tell a few yarns of the great larks they used to get up to in the Old Dart. When we reached the headland he put his hoe on his shoulder and to Harry’s amusement and my vast delight did a few steps of a village break-down.

My mirth seemed to gratify him. “Yuurce, yuurce,” he said. “The living was hard, I suppose; but we were cheery lads!” Presently he lowered his hoe. “Well,” he said, “I s’pose we’d better be getting on with looking after these ‘taters.” And then our backs were bent to it again, our bright blades stabbing the earth and drawing it up around the growing plants.

It was about this time that I began to understand something of the chances governing Mr Sims’s hopes of success in his enterprise. I came from the house one raw winter evening to get some wood for the stove just as he—last home from the field of toil—was stumping up from the barn. I heard his footsteps cease at the gate, and glanced up. He stood there for a while looking back through the murk at the lower cultivation, and then he spoke, half to himself and half as if he had become aware of a listener. “Yuurce, yuurce,” he said, “we’ll have the living comin’ in in a couple more yuurs.” Then he turned and stumped on towards the lighted kitchen.

It was the first time I really became aware that the living was not yet coming in. The way he spoke, as if reassuring himself, made me wonder whether—despite the fact that it would be impossible for him, of his nature, to slum any kind of work—there was not a measure of desperation behind the fine state of cultivation in which his orchard was kept.

People round about were not doing very well. The cold dayey soil just didn’t sean sufficiently responsive to cultivation; crops seemed, as a rule, rather uncertain, and orchard-trees seemed to run more to wood than to fruit. I had come to understand, from the tenor of Mr Sims’s observations, that the indifferent success of his neighbours was due in some part to slack methods, and that good methods would prevail over disadvantages of soil and climate. That was the farmer’s justification!

But then there was the afternoon when I was returning by a short-cut through the bush from meeting the storekeeper’s wagon on the road, and saw Mr Sims standing on the headland below the barn, facing the crop of red clover. I climbed through the fence and joined him.

That clover’s not doing very well,” he said

The clover looked well enough from a distance, but when you came to look at it closely it was very sparse, with a lot of bare ground between the plants.

He left me and walked into the middle of it and looked about him, and stood a long while in thought. I saw that he had forgotten me and was deep in a problem. When he came back he looked at me with a slight widening of the eyes that showed he had just recalled my presence. We stood together for a moment or two, looking at the clover, then he said quietly, “We’ll start to plough that in in the morning. I’ll try something else—swedes, probably.” And you could tell from his tone that in the minutes when I had watched him standing alone in the middle of his unsuccessful crop of clover one hope had been courageously abandoned and another, with equal courage, taken up in its place.

It was about this time that I began to understand that in the affairs of the selection too much depended on too little for comfort of mind. The failure or success of this or that small cropping venture made a difference in immediate living prospects. Hard work had anxiety for its invisible team-mate. No jollity accompanied the ploughing-in of the clover and sowing of the swedes.

Nor was there any margin to cover loss by disaster. There was the time when we were driving down the range in the wagon to the railway and Billy, the creaky old horse-of-all-work, slipped and fell and knocked the wind out of himself and couldn’t get up. Mr Sims was the first to scramble from the wagon and rush to kneel at his head. It seemed for a minute that the horse had broken his leg and would have to be destroyed. Mr Sims had great difficulty in controlling his feelings. He made a funny noise. He seemed for a moment to shrink in bodily size, and the hand that rested on Billy’s head was shaking. When we had got Billy up and were driving on again I sat very quiet, not saying anything to Mr Sims for fear talk might be unwelcome at the moment. I just sat there watching the trees move past, rather frightened at discovering that accident could rip away the surface of things and show the works underneath. It seemed to be my first glimpse of the works.

It was all right on the drive home from the railway. Mr Sims had enjoyed the glass of beer he always drank on his rare visits to the township, and he had had some pleasant conversation with people he met in the store—as well as a day sitting in the wagon instead of working himself to death. While we were jogging back over the level road between the rail and the foot of the range he talked about things on the selection, what good growth the young apple-trees had made since the day they were planted, how healthy the raspberry-canes looked and about the fowls coming on to lay very soon. He sang a bit of “I’ll Be a Jolly Peddlar and Around The World I’ll Roam”; and when we came to the place on the mountain road where Billy had fallen down he didn’t seem to notice; he just slapped Billy’s back with the reins in a friendly way.

Things went up and down like that, and it was not always a matter of whether they were up or down in themselves, but to some extent a matter of how you were feeling in yourself. There was the day Mr Sims came along just when I had finished cleaning out Billy’s stable and stacking the manure neatly on the heap outside the stable door. He stopped very kindly to give me a word of praise for the thorough way I did the job; which really wasn’t deserved because to me old Billy was all the grand horses in the world and I just enjoyed fixing things up comfortably for him. I was even pleased with what he left on the stable floor for me to clean up, and I said to Mr Sims, “That’s a fine lot of manure we’ve got now!”

Mr Sims said, “Boy, that’s only a spoonful! That’ll go nowhere!” And then followed a tale of the manuring of Kentish fields. How, in addition to the manure of byre and stable, cartloads of fish would be brought from the nearby markets in time of glut and ploughed in and how, after a storm at sea, the wagons would go down to the beaches and come back loaded with seaweed to be spread on the fields.

Mr Sims stood looking out over his own acres, and I saw that hope was at a low ebb. Perhaps he was tired and perhaps he was thinking of the clover that had failed. “That land ’ad been tilled and manured for hundreds and hundreds of yuurs,” he said And that’s just the difference!” He kicked a nearby clod and watched it burst into dust.

It occurred to me to wonder if Kentish fields had not been better soil to begin with to wonder, in fact, if he had not selected unwisely. The same thought must have been running through his own head—and possibly was no newcomer—for he said, as if in answer to my speculation, “Perhaps I did wrong in coming to this part of the country.” He asked me then why I didn’t work in the city and grow up to sit at a desk and wear a coat and be a gentleman; and I had difficulty in making my preference for cleaning out stables and splitting fence-posts sound very sensible.

The good sense of my preference was linked in a certain way with his moods, and I was reassured to notice that the moments when he seemed to wonder if his hopes were hollow didn’t last. He went on working just the same, and presently the beginning of some new job would indicate that he had forgotten his doubts. It was only a couple of days after our talk that we started digging the well he had been planning for some time I noticed later that the successful completion of one job seemed always to set his mind busy with plans for the future. When we were finishing off the well—shovelling away the spoil from around the top—he fell to talking of the nice pastures, in place of the rough grazing of the bush paddocks, he hoped to have for his livestock “by and by”.

The swedes came up nicely, but a few months later the weather dealt Mr Sims a heavy blow. It was the only occasion on which I heard him driven by excess of feeling to lay his troubles at the door of malignant fate.

The part of the range where the selection lay jutted to the south and was sometimes swept by unseasonable hail. One of these storms came over in early spring, just when the raspberry-blossoms were setting to fruit. I was bringing the two milking cows home from the bush one afternoon when the sky darkened, and by the time we were in the lane leading from the bush paddock to the barn the hail was dancing off the cows’ backs and was getting heavier. I made a bolt for the house with face screwed up against the stinging pellets, and arrived at the gate just in time to run into Annie and Jessie, who had been across the road to visit a neighbour. We raced pell-mell for the shelter of the veranda and reached there breathless, laughing and shouting.

It was a wonderful hailstorm; the iron roof roared under it. You couldn’t see fifty yards from the veranda. The ground whitened with hail while you watched. We stood admiring the transformation, pointing out the big fellows—like pigeons’ eggs—and exclaiming over the way the hail danced back from the veranda ledge. We hadn’t thought of it knocking every blossom from the raspberry-canes.

Just then we saw Mr Sims coming towards the house from the lower cultivation. He wasn’t running. Indifferent to the pelting hail, he was walking more heavily than usual, and his shoulders were more drooped. We remembered the raspberry-canes then. Our voices were hushed and our eyes fixed on him.

Within a few yards of the veranda he stopped and lifted a haggard face and a clenched fist to the sky, and shouted, “Send it down! Send it down, Hughie!”

His wife gasped in the doorway. “Oh, Arthur,” she cried, “you shouldn’t speak like that!” And she drew back into the shadows of the kitchen.

Mr Sims shouldered past us to the end of the veranda, and stood looking out, his hands clutching the rail. His face was no longer tan, but grey. He turned and spoke as if his outburst demanded justification. “That’s a yuur’s work gone in less than two minutes!” he said, and turned grimly to watch the hail again.

We were silent. His arms, from shoulder to the hands gripping the veranda rail, were shaking. He spoke again. “And half the next yuur’s livin’ gone with it!” he added. Soon afterwards he slumped down on the slab wash-bench and was lost to us in hopeful reckonings and bleak meditation.

The storm passed shortly after. The air cleared and all the earth was white. The trunks of the trees in the bush paddock lookedlike charcoal marks on paper. Then the sun shone forth, and all the world sparkled like fairyland. But we could take no delight in it. The farmer’s loss was heavy on us. It seemed as if all his hope lay under a shroud of bright ice.

You’d have thought that a blow like that would have sunk Mr Sims for ever, but he came right side up again. Perhaps despondency was a luxury beyond his means. At any rate, within a few days we had begun work—”to take advantage of the cool weather”—on a new bit of clearing. It was in the following weeks that I learnt what it meant to uproot and destroy the forest. It was during the later part of these weeks, too, that I heard Mr Sims, as if misfortune and disaster were unheard of things, recalling with satisfaction the epic days when he and Ernie began in the virgin bush.

The tide was on the turn while we grubbed and burnt the trees, and there came a Sunday morning in middle spring when it seemed as if soil and season were conspiring to encourage the farmer in his best hopes. Sunday morning on the selection was a time when you had the world in repose and therefore in condition for stock-taking. You couldn’t work on Sunday, but you could walk about at ease and see how things were getting on. You could look back over the work you had been doing, and plan what you were going to do next week. You might end up raking the fowlyard, but that wasn’t really work; that was just making the fowls comfortable and putting in a half-hour while waiting for dinner.