Best Australian Short Stories (35 page)

“I don’t see why you should say that. I was just having my evening meal. You could take a little refreshment before you go on. You have a long walk in front of you.”

He was standing theatrically erect, hands straight by his sides,

head thrown backward. I knew then that the beard made him look older than he was.

Not because I stood in need of refreshment, but because he had aroused my curiosity, I thanked him, followed him into the hut, and sat in a rickety cane chair while he put another cup and saucer onto a small table already set for one.

“As regards getting back to the road, you have no reason to worry. My track will take you straight to it only a mile from the township. If you had turned left instead of right you would be there now. May I ask what brings you to this part of the country?”

His change of manner was welcome, but transparently deliberate. “Birds,” I said “I’m interested in natural history. I’ve heard that there is a place hereabouts which is a haunt of the hooded robin.”

He had moved to the stove and had his back to me. He said something that sounded like: “Ah, the hooded robin now, eh?”, but it was in such a low voice that I let it pass as not intended for me. The interior of the but showed that he was living alone. It was a roomy place, unlined, and with a steeply pitched roof supported by paperbark spars raw from the bush. Everything spoke of a man of simple tastes and exacting habits: a single bed made up with military efficiency, a skeleton wardrobe hung with a curtain of sugar-bags opened up and sewn together, a Coolgardie food-safe, shelves fitted here and there between the hardwood studs of the walls and holding crockery, odds and ends of tins and boxes, and a few books. There was no floor covering and no curtain at the window.

Something of the remote and primitive charm of the place had already seized me. Wisps of blue smoke drifted out from the open stove, bringing to me a nostalgic smell of burning tea-tree. Through the open doorway I had a view of one perfectly rounded shoulder of the hill. It resembled nothing I had ever seen in all my years of wandering in the Australian bush. The gloom under the blackened mealy-gums had deepened, while the setting sun touched the canopy of blue-grey leaves with a light that seemed curiously artificial. It was as though night had already fallen and a great lamp was beaming over the tops of the trees. Alongside my chair the window looked out over an unbroken field of scrub ending in a ridge topped conspicuously by a group of pine-trees.

A ragged pepper-tree grew close to the but on this side, and as I looked there appeared a honeyeater feeding on the blossoms of a branch that drooped toward me. Perhaps it was only imagination, but I thought I could hear the leaves tapping together as the bird moved among them. Everywhere else they were perfectly still, and lit up by the sinking sun like slivers of steel.

“So you like birds ?” The old man sat down opposite me and pushed toward me a plate of biscuits.

“Very much indeed,” I replied.

It had been evident from the first that I was dealing with a chronic eccentric. I felt now that he was secretly laughing at me, and began to wish I had declined his invitation to stay. When he urged me to eat I took the opportunity to remark on the fading light.

“This is very kind of you, but you mustn’t think me rude if I go soon. I must reach the road before dark.”

“You can’t get lost again, even if darkness does overtake you. Isn’t it pleasant sitting here? Listen to it!”

I had indeed been missing nothing of what was going on outside. Every sound of the bush was magnified under the iron roof. Walking up the track a few minutes ago had been like entering a dungeon; now the whole top of the hill had become alive with birds. There was a babel of song and chittering, and through the window we could see the leaves of all the near trees thrown into movement as if a breeze had sprung up.

“They must have followed me.” I smiled.

He pulled a face, as though the remark didn’t please him. But the next moment he pointed to where some pardalotes and sitellas were fluttering about the drooping branch of pepper-tree.

“It’s odd how they all move around together. Except for a golden whistler or a blue jay I never see one bird alone. Sometimes for hours on end there’s nothing on the whole hill. Then, suddenly, they are all here. They never stay long, though. They just pass through. Then it’s quiet, and I’m all alone again.”

I didn’t miss the note of self-pity here, and for a moment thought this was the final lead-in to what he really wanted to talk about. To my relief, however, he went on talking about birds, about the bush generally, about his own particular bit of territory. He spoke of it all with enthusiasm, with wide knowledge, with phrases vivid and well-turned though sometimes a trifle extravagant. He talked hurriedly and continuously, like a man in whom a limited number of thoughts have been fermenting for a long time.

I thought at first that I was listening to nothing more than the panegyrics of a cultured and poetic hatter. But after a while I observed that in all his apparent rapture there was an underlying bitterness, as though he were concerned not so much with a precious possession as with the memory of a hard-fought battle by which it had been won.

“And it is all mine. No one ever comes here. No one else to set foot in it.”

Suddenly the bitterness came right out, and he was star across the table with a twisted humourless smile. “Like a prison!”

“Like a prison ?”

“Well, what else is it? Does she imagine I don’t know wha going on?”

“She...Jean?”

His smile quickened, became cunning.

“You told me that name meant nothing to you!”

“It doesn’t, except that you spoke it the moment I arrived.”

“I’m speaking in enigmas, am I? You don’t understand what all this is about, do you?”

He thrust his face nearer, and for the first time a little chill of fear ran through me.

“Or do you?”

“I assure you I haven’t the least idea what you’re driving at.” “Perhaps you haven’t. But she has. Quaife...it’s no accident to me that your name begins with the seventeenth letter of the aphabet. In all these years I haven’t been able to trace one of you back to her. Does the name Goyai also mean nothing to you?”

“I saw it for the first time in my life a few minutes ago, at the bottom of the hill.”

“It’s an Aboriginal word. It means ‘Come back’. What more can do to tell her?”

The way in which this was said left me free to answer or not, so I kept silent. Through the window I could see the great ball of the sun now resting lightly on the pine-trees a mile or so away. Its flushed beams fell across the summit of Goyai, blazing avenues of long shadow and misty light, and picking out the tufts of seeded sundew like blossoms of tinsel. Everywhere else was receding into night Some magpies still sang at a distance, but in the vicinity of the but a deep silence had fallen. I followed the grey gliding flight of a kookaburra under the mealy-gums. On the edge of the scrub, perhaps a hundred yards below, there was a dark object which could have been either a feeding wallaby or the stump of a vanished tree. I became half-absorbed in waiting for it to move.

“When I first came here my neighbours used to call on me. Now they shun me. Why ?”

“I cannot guess,” I lied. “You must have been here a long time.” “Seventeen years.”

“Always alone?”

“Why should I come here if not to be alone...well, until she returns. It took me a long time to find a place like this. When I first came here there were only three other people between me and the road. Now they are all around me. And not one of them can give a satisfactory reason for taking up land in this area. The latest of them moved in only last week.”

“Perhaps it’s good country,” I ventured.

He smiled contemptuously.

“Heath country is never good.”

In the manner of a normal man driven to exasperation by stupid questions he raised his eyebrows, hunched his shoulders, and spread his big hands.

“Work it out for yourself, my friend!”

Moving in his chair as it became necessary, he then enumerated his neighbours, beginning in the north and going the full round of the compass:

“Devlin, Morton, Rice, Merrivale, Street, O’Neale, Robb, Kirkwood, Heffernan, the Shapes, Taylor, Rutherford, Davenport, Lanza, Smith, Cullen....”

His voice had gradually risen, so that the last name came with a shout:

“Perrin!”

I waited.

“How many?” he demanded fiercely.

“I didn’t count them.”

I knew the answer, though, before he yelled it at me:

“Seventeen!”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen! No matter which way I turn now—there they are.

Watching every movement I make—like those foul pines!” He pointed to the distant ridge, now barely discernible. “How many trees would you say there are in that stand?”

“Seventeen?”

“Seventeen exactly. You can count them easily from here in daylight. Why doesn’t she either come back to me or leave me alone?”

“She was your wife?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“My dear fellow...”

“All right, perhaps you are innocent, like the others. But all this talk of coincidence irritates me. You know the Podargus?”

“It’s a bird. The tawny-shouldered frogmouth.”

“How many times does it call out? I mean, how many separate notes are there in each call? You said you were a naturalist. Come now, don’t hesitate, or I’ll think you’re in it too.”

“Usually about twenty.”

“Not here, my friend. You’ll find that nothing is the same here. What have you to say when I tell you there is a Podargus on this hill which calls seventeen times? Always seventeen times. You’ll hear it for yourself in a few minutes.”

I stood up.

“I’m sorry, but I really can’t stay any longer. You’ve been most kind...”

Everything else apart, the falling night was indeed beginning to cause me some uneasiness. My directions were simple enough, but I knew from experience how easy it is to get off even a well-defined track in the darkness. All colour had gone from the surrounding bush. The western sky had cooled from a fiery red to a metallic grey. Inside the but it was quite dark away from door and window.

“Must you really go?” he asked in a voice full of disappointment.

“I must reach the road.”

“I would guide you that far. You might be able to help me. There is so much...so much...”

He shook his head as if a sudden rush of thoughts had bewildered him, and placed both hands to his face. Then, to my consternation, he rose, came round the table, and took hold of me by the arms. I got a whiff of perspiration-soiled clothing and strong tobacco, and found myself looking into eyes moist with tears and wild with despair.

“What made you come here?” he pleaded. “You must tell me. Who sent you?”

“Don’t you believe me? I was lost...”

“No, no, no! Of all the places you could have come to this day...”

“You’re ill,” I said. “Believe me, I know nothing about your affairs.”

“Of course I’m ill. But I’m not mad, as some of them say I am. Something tells me you understand. You must talk to me.” He was actually shaking me now, but not in anger.

“Think! Has a strange woman spoken to you? She’s tall and fair. She has a lisp...the kind of lisp you’d never forget. Perhaps you got a letter that puzzled you...”

“I’ve had no letter, I give you my word. And no strange woman has spoken to me. You’re upsetting yourself over nothing. Please sit down...”

I had nothing to fear from him. He made no resistance as I gently forced him backwards into a chair. All strength had gone from him, and he suddenly collapsed, folding his arms on the table and hiding his face in them.

“Jean...Jean...if only you would leave me alone! If only you would leave me alone!”

And there I left him.

I tiptoed out, and the cool air, laden with the scents of the sleeping bush, closed around me. In the heavy silence the crackle of dry twigs underfoot unnerved me, and I began to run, stumbling over exposed roots and colliding with trees that seemed to rush at me out of the darkness.

Not until I was at the foot of the hill, and the trees opened up to reveal the friendly stars, did I pause. And in that very moment a frogmouth began calling in the bush on my right. That strangest of all bird sounds, so like the urgent pumping of an old-fashioned car horn: Toot...toot...toot... Twenty-one

But I knew positively that in the hut on Goyai the man had lifted his head from the table and counted no more than seventeen, the fatal number by which his disordered mind identified everything with the tragedy of a lost love.

TWENTY years ago, in the first days of my school-teaching, I stepped from the coach at Melamo in the Alpine country of eastern Gippsland.

The night was so indelibly dark that the coach-driver’s facetious “Ain’t the scenery lovely?” fell nothing short of diabolically upon my ears. According to the school lists the place boasted a population of seven hundred; so, as the coach moved off, I began to look for signs of any of the dwellings that might have housed it. One faint light stuttered a welcome through the trees. It seemed miles away, but on approach it presented me suddenly enough with the swing- doors of a homestead-hotel, where I knocked and was answered by a man in a beard who spoke as abruptly as if knocks on swing- doors late at night were so common as to be a nuisance, especially when the company was merry and the beer good.