Gripped By Drought Read online

  Yes, the change in his wife, if change there was, had occurred when the boy was born. The change had been so imperceptible that until quite recently he had failed to notice it. Her new attitude towards him was a kind of drift, as though she floated on a raft slowly pulled seaward by the current, leaving him behind her on the land, helplessly watching her go ever further from him. And she, looking back across the widening water, seemed to regard him curiously, puzzled why she ever had given herself to him.

  An hour passed whilst he occupied the commanding Seat of Atlas, brooding, thinking how best he might break down her reserve and the barriers her reserve surely was building between them. That he loved her he was certain. There was never a doubt about that. But her excuses to put him off! It was her new frock; or fear of her hair being disarranged; or a headache; or just plain mopes. Too sensitive to battle against these excuses, too civilized to trample them under foot in the approved sheik or “he-man” style, he mentally strove to discover a path along which he might reach her and claim her.

  Tentatively he considered the idea of making full confession to Feng Ching-wei, seeking guidance from this inexhaustible fount of wisdom. Had Feng been married, Mayne would not have hesitated, for Feng was–indeed, always had been–the depository of his troubles. And, thinking thus, it was almost as though Old Man Mayne stood there beside him, uttering one of the many truisms his grim nature approved:

  “You must lie on the bed you’ve made, son. If you gamble and lose, don’t whine. Gamble again.”

  But had he lost? He stood up and threw back his shoulders. Had he really lost? Was it not possible for him to have been more attentive to his wife since their arrival home? Had he permitted Atlas to reabsorb him too much? In his heart he admitted how powerful in its influence over him was this land, this piece of the vast Australian bush, confined by boundary fences and named Atlas. It was a part of him and he of it. Its many vibrations, the rustling leaves, the whispering winds, the silences, the bird cries, the scents–all were in exact tune with the vibrations of his being. The bush had called, and from the other side of the world he had come.

  As his spirit entered the shadow of doubt, so did the material world enter into a cloud-cast shadow. His eyes sought for the cause of the dimming of the material world, and his mind temporarily forgot the cause of that spiritual dimness. Across the north-west arc of the sky stretched from horizon to horizon a knife-edged bank of even-coloured cloud.

  5

  Rain! The zephyr wind still blew gently and warm from the north. It was a wind favourable for rain. The cloud bank, coming as it did from the north-west, also favoured rain. Long did Mayne stand gazing at the cloud-belt steadily rising to the zenith, observing with satisfaction that along the far northwest horizon there was no light to indicate thinning clouds. Rain! Two inches, two hundred points of rain would fill all the surface dams and assure Atlas of sheep feed right through the summer. To him such a fall would be worth precisely fifty thousand pounds. And it might fall. August was a favourable month for rain.

  With joy in his heart he walked rapidly from the ancient tree to the shearing shed. He found there Noyes with two stockmen yarding a flock of wether sheep for the next day’s “run”. The shearers and the hands were occupying their leisure in a dozen ways: a party playing the national game of two-up outside the dining hut, in which a larger party was playing banker! The clink of money drifted to Mayne in passing. Arrived at the shed receiving yards, he beckoned Noyes to join him.

  “Get as many as you can into the shed pens, Mr. Noyes,” he ordered. “It looks like rain, and we must give the shearers as long a run as possible to-morrow.”

  Should rain fall during the night, only those sheep within the shed would be shorn, for wet sheep cannot be stripped of their fleeces. Noyes was a fair-headed, fresh-complexioned youth in whose brown eyes danced the mirage of the bush plains.

  “It will be a jolly good thing if it does rain, sir,” was his opinion. “All right! We’ll jam ’em in.” Noyes went back to his work. Mayne’s critical eyes examined the milling, dust-raising, bleating animals. They were some of the nine thousand surplus wether sheep. He would be better able to judge their condition after they had lost their wool.

  It was a little after four o’clock when he reached the office, there to find Feng writing letters. On entering the doorway one came parallel with a short counter on which business with the hands was done. Directly beyond the counter stood Barlow’s table, flanked by a set of cupboards in which the books were kept. On the further side of the large room stood another table used by both Mayne and his lifelong friend. A safe and a press and several windsor chairs completed the plain furnishing. The walls were adorned with large-scale maps of New South Wales and South Australia, showing the stock-routes in red, and photographic enlargements of rams and ewes, of several race-horses, and a large framed picture in oils of the Atlas homestead done by Feng from the Seat of Atlas.

  “It looks like rain, Feng,” Mayne ejaculated before sitting down at the table opposite his friend.

  “Rain! Does it, indeed?” Mayne nodded.

  “If it rains an inch before morning,” he said, “many of our troubles will be solved. If it rains two inches, all our troubles will be at an end.”

  “They will be,” agreed Feng, smiling blandly, yet with black eyes that twinkled with affection. “We want rain badly enough.”

  “Who are you writing to?” asked Frank, with the freedom of long friendship.

  The smile on Feng’s face broadened. Leaning back in his chair he regarded his questioner through eyes that were almost concealed by their lids.

  “I am writing to a lady, a lovely lady, the most beautiful lady in Australia,” he said.

  “Not to my wife, surely?”

  “The letter will be addressed presently to Miss Ann Shelley.”

  Mayne sighed with exaggerated relief.

  “I am glad to hear you say that,” he said, laughing. “I was so sure it was Ethel whom you so accurately described. Ann Shelley! I wonder, Feng, whom she will marry.”

  “Sometimes I wonder too.” Feng’s smile now was less broad.

  “Howevcr, it is none of our business till she chooses to tell us. I am writing to suggest that I go along to Tin Tin once every week to paint her portrait.”

  “Good idea, old man! But I remember you saying in one of your letters to me that you were then painting her picture. What happened to that?”

  “I destroyed it. I was not satisfied.”

  “Indeed! But then, Feng, you were always your severest critic.”

  Mayne got to his feet. “It’s tea-time. Before we go, I’ll ring up MacDougall, who happens to be home to-day.”

  A few minutes later he turned back to Feng, saying:

  “MacDougall says it is raining at Forest Hill. That’s good news, isn’t it?”

  “The very best,” Feng cordially agreed. After drinking afternoon tea with Ethel, they spent an hour with her in miscellaneous gossip in the drawing-room. Eva, coming in to draw the curtains, shut out the fast-falling night and attend to the fires, announced that it was raining. Impulsively Mayne opened one pair of french windows and, followed by Feng, stepped out on the veranda. They could just see the gleaming drops that fell to patter on the cinder path and on the leaves of the shrubs beyond it. The perfume of the thirsty earth met their nostrils, carried to them by the west wind.

  “Great!” Mayne sighed, inhaling deeply. “Dear God, give us a hundred points at least!”

  “Amen!” murmured Feng, so solemnly that Ethel, standing between them, wondered.

  At eight o’clock it was raining lightly but steadily. At eleven, when Mayne went to bed, it was still raining. Ethel was asleep, and he refrained from waking her to tell her the good news. For an hour he fidgeted, unable to sleep, and at midnight he went out quietly to the veranda to hear the rain falling.

  But the rain had stopped. The wind was blowing coldly from the south, from which quarter rain seldom came. The sky was a
blaze with stars.

  Going out to the rain-gauge, he removed the measuring glass, struck a match, and saw that eleven points only had fallen.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE SECOND PHASE

  I

  THERE were shorn that year on Atlas the highest number of sheep since the year 1911. Sixty-six thousand sheep passed under the shearers’ hands, and the wool clipped from them filled eighteen hundred and sixty bales. By the end of September every bale had been carted to the railway and dispatched to the wool brokers’ warehouse, there to await the first series of wool sales.

  The eleven points of rain which fell in August freshened the growing grass and herbage, and the twenty-one points that fell during September helped it at the most needed time. The two falls, however, were not heavy enough to ease the market; and, believing now that a dry season was inevitable, Mayne instructed his agents to find buyers for his surplus stock.

  Eventually the agents quoted seven shillings a head for his wether sheep, but were unable to quote any price at all for his culled ewes. All one night Frank Mayne sat in the office weighing the pros and cons of this offer. Ethel never knew that he spent that night out of his bed, and failed to remark his heavy eyes at breakfast the next morning. The Governor-General with his suite were touring the Western Division, being scheduled to spend two days at Atlas–a prospect that possessed Ethel’s mind to the exclusion of all else.

  Despite Feng’s counsel to sell, Mayne did not close with the agents’ offer of seven shillings. He considered, and justifiably so, that if he lost fifty per cent. of the wethers the remainder would compensate him when the rain did come to send prices soaring again. As for the culled ewes, they must take their chance.

  Neighbouring stations were in worse plight, whilst the position of the selectors was becoming desperate. Although under modern conditions Atlas was now overstocked, had outrun that margin of safety dictated by bitter experience in the past, it was by no means singular in this respect. Where Atlas was in a slightly better position was in the inclusion within its boundaries of much plain country covered with the low grey salt-bush, better able than grass to defy the long dry period. Nevertheless, the many square miles of this hardy shrub did not give sufficient margin of reserve, even had the sources of water supply been more numerous and unlimited in volume.

  The Vice-Regal visit cost Atlas three hundred pounds. The expenditure was due almost solely to the ambitious Ethel, who insisted on the engagement of a chef from Adelaide, and an experienced butler from Sydney. Both these men she wished to keep, but they were unable to find happiness so far from the cities. The single-seater car she set her heart on–secretly to vie with Ann Shelley, but openly to permit her to take Little Frankie on short excursions–cost eight hundred pounds; whilst the general upkeep of Government House was now two hundred per cent. higher than ever it had been.

  These extra expenses caused Mayne no uneasiness. Atlas was free of mortgage, whilst his personal fortune, sadly reduced by his three-year overseas trip, was nearly twenty-two thousand pounds.

  Until his wife had thoroughly settled into her new life, he was determined to grant her every desire in order to lighten, if not keep at bay, that terrible malaise suffered by the new-chum after the first novelty of the life has worn off. Nevertheless, the season and the prospect of a dry summer meant very close attention to his business.

  No rain fell during October, but early in November there fell thirty-six points, which started green shoots in the tussock-grass and germinated grass and herbage seeds the earlier and lighter rains had failed to do, but fell too late to benefit the scanty grass and herbage, stunted in growth and already ripe. The wished-for following rain did not come; instead, there arrived the first heat-wave of summer. A hot north wind and a scorching sun in six hours whitened the green shoots and killed them, sucked up the little moisture in the ground, and blew away tons of edible sheep feed.

  The heat-wave lasted two days, being broken by widespaced thunderstorms, from which little rain fell and that in narrow strips, the heat of the ground evaporating the moisture by the next sunrise.

  There came one afternoon to Atlas Harry Westmacott, owner of the resumed land that took a bite out of Atlas, spoiling its shape, making a bottle-neck which to Mayne always was as an open wound. For this he did not blame Westmacott. It was due entirely to the State Lands Department, which could have cut off the area from Atlas on one of its western corners, thereby not so disfiguring its shape. Mayne talked with his visitor in the seclusion offered by a cane-grass summerhouse at the foot of the garden.

  “What I’m wanting, Mr. Mayne, is agistment for about three thousand sheep,” Westmacott said without needless preamble. “My son, young Harry, off-sided by a nigger, started off last week with two thousand wethers for the public roads of northern Victoria. By keeping ’em down there, picking up what they can, he’ll be able to pull them two thousand through this blasted summer and bring ’em back when the feed is good after the first autumn rain. Still I’m left with five thousand, and to-day my place won’t carry five thousand. I got to get rid of three thousand of them.”

  “I am sorry, Harry, but I haven’t the paddocks to spare. Like yourself, I’m overstocked too. Why don’t you sell two thousand of your sheep for what they will fetch?”

  “For the simple reason that no one will buy ’em.”

  And therein lay Westmacott’s tragedy, and the tragedy of the majority of the small sheepmen.

  “If you were to cull heavily, how many culls would you get out of the five thousand you’ve now got on your place?” Mayne questioned.

  “Not so many. I’ve culled heavy in the past, and, as you know, I started with good Bungaree stock from Atlas. Will you take two thousand off me for three shillings a head?”

  “Short of money?” asked Mayne.

  “No! Short of feed,” come the fiercely spoken reply.

  Mayne knew his visitor for a careful man. For years before Westmacott got his selection he had worked for Atlas. Mayne knew Mrs. Westmacott, a frugal Scotswoman. No, it was not money of which the man was actually short, as he had said. He desired to get rid of the sheep so that the remainder could be pulled through the summer.

  “Well, I can’t take ’em, Harry, not if you were to present them to me as a gift,’“ Mayne said, to add more deliberately: “But I will give you seven thousand pounds for your place as it is. You know how it bottlenecks Atlas, spoils Atlas. If you sell to me for seven thousand, you could take a job till the dry spell breaks, and then buy another place.”

  But Westmacott shook his head vigorously.

  “I couldn’t sell,” he said. “Why, me and the wife have made Nardoo. She helped me to build the flamin’ house, and you remember how young Harry rode here with me when he was only five years old and helped me drove the first mob of sheep home. No, no, I’ll never sell!”

  Mayne sighed. He understood Westmacott.

  2

  The second heat-wave came in the first week in December, at the time Mayne was compelled to order the removal of his breeding ewes from several of the western salt-bush paddocks in which the half-filled surface dams had gone dry. Those sheep were brought in to the river paddocks to be partly hand-fed with a ration of one ounce of maize per head, with a little pressed lucerne. Since the two Atlas trucks were required for the actual working of the station, the maize and lucerne were brought from the railway by contractors at the price of one shilling per mile per ton..

  Four extra hands were put on lopping the mulga, cabbage tree and sandalwood branches in the paddocks between White Well and Mulga Flat for the wether sheep to feed over; the culled ewes, the weaner lambs and the hoggets remaining in those salt-bush paddocks where there still was water in the dams.

  Against his forthcoming wool cheque, which promised to be for a large amount, since the first portion of the Atlas wool had realized twenty pounds per bale, Frank Mayne had obtained an advance of ten thousand pounds.

  During these trying spring months he had
spent much time out on the run, being absent from the homestead repeatedly for several days. He came to believe a little in that old saying, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”; for, on his return from those trips, he discovered Ethel to be more attentive and affectionate. But the following morning, invariably was she again barred from him by her chilly reserve. It seemed that the flame his absence created in her burned out at his touch.

  Her silence one meal-time maddened him to protest. They were alone, Feng being again served by Mary O’Doyle in his bungalow cottage, and all through the meal Ethel had refused to answer his questions, or to speak one word, sitting opposite him and stonily looking down at her plate. Pushing back his chair, Mayne regarded his wife with drawn brows, rage smouldering to fire in his heart, the cave-man desire growing ever more strong to spring on her and beat her into warmth and submission.

  There never had been a wish he had not gratified. There never had been an instance when he had spoken sharply, upbraided her, or consciously given her offence. He had deferred to her, studied her wants, figuratively laid himself down for her to tread on, loved her slavishly, even worshipped her. And why she was silent, why she refused to speak one word, he had absolutely no remotest idea.

  Keeping yet a grip on the reins of impulse, he said calmly:

  “Won’t you tell me what is wrong, dear? If I knew, I could help, possibly.”

  She made no reply to his entreaty. Her eyes gazed steadily at her plate. The seconds passed with ominous deliberation. Quite still, the knuckles of Mayne’s hands gripping the arms of his chair were white. Added to the worry caused by the dry spell, the domestic situation was intolerable. Ethel gave him one swift look, when he saw the sneer disfiguring her mouth. It was that which ended his self-control.

  His face white beneath its new-won tan, his eyes now blazing with a strange green light, he rose abruptly and, crossing to the door, locked it and slipped the key into his pocket. When he recrossed the room and locked the first pair of french windows Ethel rose to her feet, watching him with a faint smile of contempt and mockery. When he closed and locked the second pair she said: