Gripped By Drought Read online

  They knew each other to be mentally strong and subtle, and between them existed respect for those qualities they themselves possessed”

  “Will you be frank with me?” she asked him, knowing the folly of exerting her femininity on this man.

  “Have I not always been frank?”

  “Not always, Feng, but I want you to be candid with me now,” she said seriously. “You see, my husband says that he is badly pushed financially. He says that we have ahead of us a most difficult corner to round. But he gives me no details, and I want the details. I want something definite, something more than bare generalities.”

  Feng pondered this request whilst again their eyes were in clashing gaze. Then:

  “Possibly it will not be outraging Frank’s confidence in me if I do tell you a little of our difficulties. If you know them you will probably be able to forgive me my seeming antagonism to you in the past.” She made a deprecatory gesture with one slim hand. “But yes!

  I have felt that you think my influence with your husband is, or has been, exerted unjustifiably, but it is not and never has been so; because, Mrs. Mayne, whilst he denied you nothing for love’s sake, I could deny you many things for Atlas’s sake, for your good, his good, and my good. Thank you!”

  Accepting a cigarette, he held a match to hers, then lit his own, and, since she offered no remark, proceeded in his soft, well-bred drawl.

  “Atlas, as doubtless you have come to understand, is something more than a mere tract of land. Originally, of course, it was a mere slice of wilderness, a tiny part of a vast area of undeveloped country, before the coming of the white man. When white men did penetrate these far-western lands they took up huge grazing areas from the Government on lease. Old Man Mayne was not among the first settlers along the Darling River, but when he became established on one leasehold it was not long before he obtained others, and welded them all into the giant holding he called Atlas.

  “Unassisted by Government loan money–nowadays every industry save wool is bolstered up with loan money–Old Man Mayne laboured, suffered privations and hardships, to unite his holdings with fences, roads, dams, and wells. He built up his flocks from one hundred ewes, and at one time Atlas ran as many as two hundred thousand sheep. That number was overstocking, even though Atlas then was larger than it is to-day. Its size has been reduced by the Government resuming land for closer settlement.

  “Old Man Mayne married a woman of the bush, who never complained of the roughness of her life. I want now to emphasize a very significant point. Both Old Man Mayne and his wife possessed a highly developed land sense. Those early days in Australia were very similar to the feudal days of old England, with the slight difference that the feudal lords of England won their properties by military prowess and royal favour; whereas the Australian feudal lords gained their land and power by indomitable courage that rose above continuous set-backs and the opposing forces of Nature. The Maynes came west with many. The many returned to the coast settlements or went gold-hunting. The Maynes held their ground and won out, because of the deep-rooted land-love in both their hearts.

  “The land-love or land-sense in them was transmitted to their son, your husband. Like them, he looks down on Atlas from his seat in the tree as any feudal lord looked down on his domain from the battlements of his castle. To Frank, Atlas is a real entity. It has a personality of its own. It claims his mind, his soul, as no woman and no child could do. You see, I know this, because I was reared by Mrs. Mayne and governed by Old Man Mayne, who imbued me with just a little of the same spirit of pride in the place, the crowning achievement of a dauntless man and a courageous woman. Shall I go on? Perhaps I bore you?”

  He saw that he had captured her interest.

  “Yes, go on, please,” she said.

  “There is nothing discreditable in anyone not having that land-sense I have tried to describe,” he explained. “To be blunt, you have so far given no evidence of possessing it. It is not because you are an Englishwoman. In the Australian cities you will find hundreds of women, the wives and daughters of Australian squatters, leading idle, useless lives on money which the Australian bush annually pours into their laps. You will read of their unedifying capers in the society columns, if you are sufficiently shallow-minded. But I do believe that one can acquire land-love, and pride in the possession of land, if one tries hard. If you want to try, get Frank to take you out on the run as often as possible.”

  “I will think about that, but I am afraid I never shall have that land-sense.”

  “Well, try, anyway. Now for figures. In normal years the profit from the Atlas wool averages about twenty thousand pounds. The unsophisticated will regard that amount as very large. Actually it is a low percentage on the money invested in the property, otherwise the value of the property.”

  “What is that value?”

  “In good seasons a buyer could be found to pay anything up to two hundred thousand pounds for the leaseholds and every improvement and hoof on them. In a year like this it is doubtful if one could be found to offer more than half that amount.”

  “Well? Go on, please,” Ethel persisted, now with one elbow on the table, her chin resting on a cupped hand. Unhurriedly, coldly, Feng gave figures that shocked even cynical Ethel.

  “The year you came to Atlas it made a profit of four thousand pounds,” he said. “Last year we had a deficit of eight thousand pounds. When I urged your husband to cut every expense to the bone, including household expenses, Atlas was beginning to slide down a steep hill. At the end of last month Atlas was in debt to the amount of thirty-two thousand pounds.”

  Watching her dark eyes widen with astonishment, Feng realized what a mistake Frank Mayne had made in not discussing finance with his wife long before. If she had not land-sense she had money-sense.

  “Thirty-two thousand pounds behind!” she gasped, her controlled boredom for the moment vanquished. He nodded.

  “Even so,” he went on. “While the situation is grave, it is by no means disastrous, because the value of the property is big enough to carry double, in fact treble, that amount. Where we are most concerned is our standing at the break-up of the drought. When the drought is followed by the first of the succeeding good years, we shall pull up Atlas the more quickly the lower our debts are and the higher the number of sheep we have pulled through. It takes years to build up a flock of sheep, whereas a few months of drought will destroy it.”

  “Oh! Then Atlas is by no means bankrupt? “

  “No,” he told her, smiling quickly.

  “Then was it really necessary to banish my guests, deprive me of my servants, stop petrol supplies for my car?” The question was calmly put, but the gleam in her eyes forewarned him. The smile vanished.

  “Absolutely,” he replied with grave finality. “I’ll explain why very simply. Because no man can tell when this drought will end. A general rain guaranteeing future good seasons may come to-morrow, or may not come until six months hence or for another year, or even might be delayed for two years.”

  “Supposing the drought does last a further two years?”

  “I would rather not think about it.”

  “But tell me. I insist, Feng.”

  “If it doesn’t rain for another two years Atlas will be bankrupt, and Frank’s heart will be broken.”

  A silence united them, she slowly drawing at her second cigarette, he leaning back in his chair, his gaze resting on the silver teapot. To them in the severe quietness of the room came Little Frankie’s excited shouting in the garden. Feng became aware that she was regarding him intently. Lifting his face, his eyes encountered hers, dark, brilliant, forceful, and mysterious.

  “Thank you, Feng, for being so good as to explain these things,” she said thoughtfully. “You interested me with what you said about people having land-sense. I haven’t got it, and I know I shall never have it, no matter how I might try. I hate Atlas! Sometimes I could scream for the cool feel of rain on my skin, or the tiny drops of moisture on my
eyelashes when walking in a Scotch mist on glistening pavements. There are times when I simply cannot go out into the awful, eternal sunshine. I see a cloud with the wonder of a child, and at night I lie with aching heart and soul because I cannot hear wind and rain beating on securely fastened windows.

  “Feng!” she was leaning toward him, and he marvelled at her tortured face, “You don’t know, you can’t know, you have no idea how I pine and pine for England. There are moments when, like Faust, I’d sell my soul to the devil for twenty-four hours in England. Land-sense! No, it is not in me. But England is, dear, dull, rain-washed England! Yes, lovely, green-painted England is. England is in my blood, a living, calling mother–dear God!–calling me day and night. And when I look ahead to the years I am doomed to live here, an alien in a strange country, I feel just as one must feel in prison, counting the dreary years before release. Feng, will you help me? Whilst not warm friends, we have always treated each other with the respect of good swordsmen. Will you help me?”

  Surprised by her outburst, moved as never before had she moved him, Feng Ching-wei answered her warmly:

  “Of course I will, Mrs. Mayne. Of course I will.”

  “Then help me to persuade Frank to sell Atlas, and take me back to England.”

  The iron discipline of his features was shaken by this astounding request. His lips parted. For seconds he was unable to speak. Then;

  “Sell Atlas! Frank sell Atlas! Why, he would sooner take Little Frankie to a river-hole and drown him. Sell Atlas! Good God!”

  CHAPTER XVII

  BATTLE SCENES

  I

  BEHOLD a vast empty space!” Frank Mayne exclaimed cynically to his wife, sitting beside him in the station car. “We hear a lot about our vast empty spaces from our world-touring politicians who have never yet seen one save from the window of a railway carriage. We always shall have those vast empty spaces until God or a human genius makes it rain oftener.”

  They had left the main homestead–Forest Hill track five miles behind them and were running northward to Karl’s Dam, where Tom Mace was pumping water for the flocks. Before them the road dipped into a shallow basin some four miles across. They were now in a world showing three colours only: the brilliant turquoise of the cloudless sky, the light, reddish-brown of the earth, and the green, almost black, of the scrub trees.

  The colour of the sky was uninteresting. It was eternally the same every moment of the daylight hours. To Ethel Mayne the colour of the earth was refreshing to her sight after the slate-grey of the river flats, as was the dull tint of the sparsely set trees after habitually viewing the vividly hued, stately river gums.

  The floor of the basin was a bewildering maze of hummocks carved into a thousand fantastic shapes by the wind: here a round knob, there a huge mass of hardened sand supported by a thin, wind-worn column, over there a twisting series of sand-ridges rising from a near scrub belt as waves leaping on dark rocks. About the edge of this natural basin sand-hills jagged and bumped into the blue: red, smooth, clear-cut in the motionless air. There were places near which they passed which reminded Ethel of a sand beach where a small army of industrious children had been playing with spades and buckets; places similar to scenes of the Rocky Mountains in miniature; and other scenes reproduced from those rocky, sand-blown hill-cliffs east of Cairo. Every desert, every wilderness in the world was represented here, yet this one was unique because of the scattered, wind-tortured trees.

  They leaned at every angle, those trees. The scarcity of their blackened leaves revealed the gnarled nakedness of their poor, racked limbs, twisted and bent, some broken, with masses of red splinters at the break-trees that appeared as if stiffened in death after hours of atrocious suffering.

  “A land of milk and honey! A Land of Opportunity!” Ethel sneered, unable to resist shuddering at the dark prospect.

  “It is not always like this,” Mayne told her, ever loyal to the land of his birth.

  As a drunken man staggering across a street, a miniature whirlwind, sucking up a writhing column of red dust, moved across the flats in front of them. Of birds there were none, save three eagles sweeping in giant curves with never the flap of a wing.

  Presently they passed a flock of some hundred sheep. Normally those sheep would have fled from the humming car. Now they stood with lowered heads, the heavy wool causing them to appear to the uninitiated in good condition. Ethel considered that there was something strange about their appearance, but could not define it. Their eyes were heavy and glassy. Their gaunt weakness gave them the appearance of great age.

  “What on earth do they live on?” she inquired.

  “Oh! Bits of sticks and roots, and odd stalks of dead herbage,” Mayne replied absently. There was a man cutting scrub beyond the southern edge of the basin, and he made a mental note to send a rider to drive the sheep to the fallen scrub. Were they left there on those barrens, of a surety they would perish. The losses of stock this year would be enormous.

  2

  In the rear seat of the car, barricaded on one side by stretcher-beds, blankets, tucker-boxes, and half a dozen necessaries, Eva sat with Little Frankie asleep beside her. She had overheard Mayne tell his wife that Tom Mace was pumping water farther along this road, and her thoughts now of Tom Mace were uneasy, made chaotic by persistent mental pictures of Alldyce Cameron. Cameron had but kissed her that once in the garden grass-house, and she had met him but once in that small clearing in the centre of the Poison Belt, yet she knew if Cameron called her she would answer, leaving all.

  A long sand-ridge loomed before them, threatening to bar their passage; but the track, now faint on iron-hard clay-pan, turned east, skirted the ridge, rounded its flank, and by devious ways turned and twisted between hills of sand twenty feet high–hills of sand on which nothing ever grew. And then abruptly they were speeding across level country on which grew neither tree, shrub, nor grass. Against the edge of scrub timber a mile further, they could see the steel-grey blotch of an iron hut, revolving fans of two tall windmills, and lesser blotches of grey-blue iron, all of which danced in the air even on that cold, clear day.

  To them it seemed long before they reached Karl’s Dam, because, when first seen, the hut and mills looked only a hundred yards distant. Slowly on the screen of distance emerged two windmills separated by fifty yards of land, a dilapidated set of horseyards, a newer and more efficient maze of sheep-yards beyond the hut, and what constituted an engine-house near the fenced-in dam.

  In passing, both women examined the hut with interest. Its almost flat iron roof was kept firmly on the structure by the weight of several logs. A hessian bag, doing duty for a window, flapped gently in the breeze. The ill-fitting wooden door was open, and between the door-frame and the hut walls one could in places have put one’s arm. Passing slowly, they were given a glimpse of the interior, saw a broken-down pine table, a camp-oven beneath it, several bag-mats on the earthen floor, petrol-cases in lieu of chairs, petrol-tin buckets, and a half-bag of flour hanging from a cross-beam away from the mice.

  A barking kelpie dog rushed to meet them and scamper round the car, which finally was stopped at the engine-house. They could now see that two windmills, as well as the petrol-engine, pumped water from the dam into several great iron receiving tanks, from which lines of piping carried water to three long lines of troughing. For Karl’s Dam provided water for stock in four paddocks, whose fences made a cross there. They did not know, however, that the mills were erected over wells that would supply water when that in the twenty-thousand-yard dam was all used.

  About the nearest trough several sheep lay as though asleep. On the ground beyond the engine-house about a hundred sheep-skins lay with the wool undermost, drying in the weakly sun. The atmosphere smelt of wool and rotting flesh.

  A man gained the side of the car next to Mayne. He was arrayed in tom dungaree trousers stained with grease and blood, an armless flannel vest, old elastic-sided boots, and a decrepit felt hat. His hands and forearms were foul with b
lood and grease. He had not shaved for several days. He was quite a contrast to the gallant, oiled cow-punchers of the cinema screen, whom at one time Ethel had expected to meet. He was Tom Mace.

  “Well” Tom, how’s things?” Mayne asked.

  “So-so, Mr. Mayne,” this caricature of a nattily dressed lover replied.

  “Mills and pumps working all right?” “Y-yes.”

  “You are not giving them too much well-water?”

  “I don’t think so. About one salt in three of fresh.” “That’s right.”

  Mayne’s gaze wandered over the wind-swept scene. The water in the dam was, of course, fresh water, but the water in the twin wells was as salt as the sea. Their water was added to the fresh water in the reservoir tanks for two reasons: first because the fresh dam-water was limited in quantity, and secondly because stock thrive better on brackish than on pure fresh water.

  “Sheep coming in all right?” was Mayne’s next question.

  “Y-yes, they’re coming in all right, but a lot of them are staying in, Mr. Mayne.”

  Mace discovered Eva in the back seat and smiled. He saw her hesitate before she smiled back at him in a wintry manner. It was rough luck, her seeing him in his old skinning clothes. But she was thinking of the immaculate Cameron, whose face always was so wonderfully clean and shaven, and whose strong white hands were always so well kept. There were never any stains of blood and grease on his hands.

  “Stopping in, eh!” growled Mayne. “You skinning them all?”

  “Not all but most. I’ve had trouble with the engine. She keeps on konking out. I can’t get the carburettor properly adjusted. And there’s been no wind to drive the mills, so some nights I have to sit up with the engine to keep up the water-level in the tanks. The sheep seem to live only on water. Look at this mob coming in.”

  A flock of perhaps two thousand animals was approaching the nearest troughing. The leaders were barely fifty yards away, and through the slowly rising dust behind them the travellers saw that the sheep were marching in single file in several parallel lines, the rear not yet in sight, hidden by the distant line of scrub. The vanguard presently reached the water. With sheep after sheep reaching the trough, the body of wool grew dense, became ever greater, a swaying, bleating, dun-coloured patch beneath the dust rising in ever greater volume. The first to reach the water were the first to push back through the packed sheep behind. The watchers saw a sheep sink to the ground, and many others trample on it in their eagerness to drink. Another sheep fell, and yet others.