Gripped By Drought Read online

  To the troughs Mace walked swiftly. The sheep gave way, but were strangely unafraid, although they had not been handfed with maize since the last shearing. Now enveloped in the red dust, Mace began pulling from the press those fallen sheep, assisting them to their feet, again picking them up when again they fell with very weakness, after staggering back into the mêlée.

  The leaders now had reached the edge of the scrub and there stopped, looking behind them at those who followed and who halted in their places, every belly distended with water. About the troughs the press began to lighten, and now the leaders walked into the scrub-belt followed by long lines of sheep. There was less struggling near the troughs, but Mace was kept busy, pulling from beneath stamping hoofs the weaker sheep that had sunk to the ground.

  Coming in through the long lines of outward-moving, water-filled sheep, isolated parties staggered haltingly towards the troughs. They comprised the “tail end” of the flock. Many of them lurched forward rather than walked, heavy-woolled skeletons, eyes dead and glassy, mouths partly open, tips of pink tongues protruding. Again and again some of these, the weakest of the flock, fell on their foreknees, their rear legs quickly giving out, their rumps collapsing.

  Several seconds’ rest, and once again they were up and staggering toward the water. At the troughs sheep were drinking, drinking, their bellies distended as the bellies of gluttonous calves. The weight of water within them was beyond their strength to carry. One after the other they lay down, or rather collapsed, piteously bleating for the departing flock to wait for them a little while. Some there were whose heads rested on the ground whilst they lay upright on their knees, no strength left after that awful ordeal to reach the water.

  Between the scrub and the troughs sheep stood still, gazing back after the departing flock, the instinct of follow-my-leader drawing them that way, thirst still urging them to the water. Many of these obeyed the instinct of follow-my-leader, and, after staggering towards the water for many miles, turned and staggered back without having had a drink–doomed, doomed to lie down for ever among the mulga and the pine-trees.

  Half a hundred sheep lay about the troughs. Some presently would rise and lurch back into the scrub-lands, bleating, always bleating for the flock to wait for them. Some would never rise again. Even whilst the car party watched several struggled in their final agony.

  And the wonderful, world-famed Australian sun shone on that scene of stark torture and death.

  “More work for you, Tom,” Mayne said lightly.

  “Yes. There’s no end to work. I’m skinning and carting away about forty every evening,” Mace replied, smiling grimly.

  Ethel Mayne could have struck him. Eva wanted to cry out. The lightness of Mayne’s tone seemed to wife and maid stupendously callous. They did not know, and therefore did not remember, that these two men had seen so many precisely similar sights that as returned soldiers they cloaked their feelings with assumed cheerfulness that had become a habit, not a mood. Even the most terrible carnage will come to be commonplace. Month after month Mayne and his men had daily seen sheep lie down, struggle a little, then become very still.

  3

  Said Mayne to Mace:

  “Tell Fred to take a ride through the Basin and muster the sheep back to the scrub-faller. I saw five small mobs coming across. Fred must keep his eye on Dead Man’s Hole as well. That’s a bad paddock corner even in a good year. I’ll give you the mail and stores now. We must get on.” Whilst Mayne was thus engaged Mace edged back to Eva.

  “Having a nice trip, Eva?” he asked, smiling through the dust smears of oil and grease.

  “Yes,” she replied without an answering smile and in hardened tones. Mace noted both and was hurt. He so badly wanted to talk to this pretty English girl, tell her how sorry he was she saw him as he then was, and explain how he had to labour from dawn till dark, oiling the engine and pumps, nursing the living sheep, and dragging away and skinning the dead sheep. He wanted to tell her about the bi-weekly dust-storms, and how the roughly cooked food was nearly always full of grit. With his soul behind his eyes he looked at her appealingly, failed to soften her, turned away, and accepted from his employer the box containing stores and mail. He raised his old felt hat to them when the car was being turned.

  Only Mayne nodded a cheerful farewell. Holding the box in his blood-and-grease-stained hands, he watched the car until it disappeared, a tiny dot among the sand-hills at the northern edge of the Basin.

  Once again on the main track, the squatter headed the car westward, to reach presently Mulga Flat, where they left mail and stores for the two riders stationed there, who then were out among the sheep. He drove mechanically and silently, his mind dwelling on the movements of those sheep being “edged” towards the river in readiness for the near shearing.

  About Mulga Flat the country for miles was bare of grass and of herbage, the ground windswept, hummocked with sand, stretches of sand ribbed by the last wind-storm as sand left by the receding tide.

  Blue sky, turquoise sky, hard, brilliant blue. Red land, barren land, windswept land. Dead land, lifeless. Trees that stood as dead trees, yet still bearing withered leaves; dying trees, gnarled, withered, tormented; trees with tapered, needle-pointed leaves, trees with greyish leaves, curled, brittle. sapless. And here and there heavy, slow-rising eagles and small flocks of fat, audacious crows, flap-flapping upward from the body of a sheep, mercifully dead, mercifully freed from the hell on this fair planet..

  With unfading clarity would Ethel Mayne remember the panoramic scenes presented endlessly throughout this preshearing tour with her husband. There was the remnant of the station bullock team at one well, the well and troughing, as seemed usual, in the centre of a mighty dust-heap. Of the eighteen, seven only were alive–seven great gaunt beasts that stared at them with dreadful, expressionless eyes, and lowed plaintively after them whilst they sped away.

  There were the ten or twelve horses they had passed in a wide pine and sand belt, horses that stood still, every rib-bone plainly marked falling from the skeleton backbone, hip-bones great knobs, skulls agrin above poor shrunken mouths. Mayne explained that they were the unbroken fillies. They never would be broken now.

  They saw three, sometimes four men, each party accompanied by several dogs, moving flocks of several thousands of sheep: the men hot, weary, almost voiceless; dogs unable to bark any more and sore-footed. Ethel noted how sleek and well-conditioned were the chaff-fed horses of these stockmen, and with horror thought of those young fillies. She beheld Ten Pot Dick, arrayed in disgracefully patched trousers, scattering maize that later foolish sheep spurned with their hoofs because they were not accustomed to being thus rationed.

  But it was the outcasts, the units that had been left behind the travelling flocks to take their poor chance of survival, which most moved her to horror or pity. There was the wether sheep lying close beside the track. Two eagles rose from it. They had torn the flank wool and skin away, and before they flew had been dragging out its entrails. Just when the car was passing the sheep lifted its head. And Mayne stopped, walked back, and cut its throat.

  At a gate before which they stopped, a lamb, but a few weeks old, came staggering with infantile weakness across the barren, rippled land, attracted by the sound of human voices. Behind it hopped three crows like horrible black gnomes. One, more hungry or more daring than the others, flew up, alighted on the lamb’s back, and dug its foul beak into the creature’s shoulder. The lamb fell, the crow dropped behind. The lamb struggled once more to its feet and continued to advance, now guided by the purring engine. Blood oozed from its dirty-white, shrunken little body, dripped down both its cheeks.

  “Oh, ma’am! Oh, God! Its eyes are pecked out,” Eva wailed, and fumbled with the car door to rush to its aid. She felt Mayne’s hand on her arm, and, through springing tears, saw his stern eyes looking down on her.

  “You can do nothing, Eva. Stay in the car. I’ll put the little thing to sleep.”

  The girl hi
d her face in her handkerchief. Ethel cuddled the wide-eyed Little Frankie, whilst Mayne picked up the lamb and walked behind the car.

  “Frank, we can stand no more. Take us home at once!”

  Ethel implored, even her iron self-command now broken.

  4

  The small morning-room was the warmest in Government House, and this had been converted into a sitting-room since the domestic staff of Atlas had been reduced. It was the evening of the day of the tour of the run which had been so ghastly a revelation to Ethel Mayne.

  Now dressed with her usual scrupulous care in her favourite unrelieved black, she invited her husband to sit beside her on the becushioned settee drawn before the leaping log fire, prepared to fight one of her biggest battles. When she turned a little to face her husband her eyes were big, compelling. She said:

  “Frank, do you still love me?”

  The question astonished him, so unexpected was it.

  “Of course,” he replied quietly. “Why do you ask?”

  Ignoring his question, she asked him another:

  “Do you know what I am feeling to-night?” “No.”

  “I have felt as though I’ve lived in an enormous chamber, so big that the roof and the walls are beyond distance, in which were millions of weak things which were the subjects of an army of vivisecting devils. The horror of it all still presses on my brain. I shall never forget the sights I have seen. I feel befouled by evil.”

  “The workings of drought are, I know, fearful,” he said gently. “You should not have gone. I am very sorry now that I took you. Even so, you must not take to heart what you have seen. All that is humanly possible is being done to save the flocks.”

  “I know that, Frank,” she told him quietly. “But the fact persists in my mind that your money, all this elegance surrounding us, even the food we eat, is gained through the terrible torture of those poor sheep, horses, and bullocks.”

  He was about to speak, but she silenced him with her hands, whilst rushing onward:

  “It is no use. You cannot convince me otherwise. My illusion of romance in the ‘abroad’ countries, my illusion of romance attached to every individual Australian travelling Europe, has vanished, wiped out by the terrible reality. How I would hate you to-night were you fat and paunchy–excuse the expression! When I remember those politicians and wealthy retired squatters we met in England and Europe, all of them well-fed, like sleek cattle, my blood boils in my brain, for I now know that their fat has been gained by the starvation of those countless sheep. This wonderful Australia, those romance-clad sleek squatters, have become a hell and the devils who have amassed money through the unspeakable agony of helpless animals.”

  With growing dismay Mayne saw how big were her eyes, big blazing black orbs with ghostly flickers of crimson in their depths, like black opals from Lightning Ridge. Again he would have protested; again she stopped him with her hands. Her voice hinted at hysteria.

  “Pain! pain! pain! All this vile Australia is one awful world of pain. It has become unendurable to me, something wickedly evil. You have no right, nor has any man the right, to rear sheep by tens of thousands to be tortured by Nature as never man was tortured by the Inquisition. Don’t you understand the foulness of it? Cannot you see that the torture of hundreds of thousands of sheep is epitomized by that partly eaten yet alive sheep, and that sightless bleeding little thing of a lamb? The crows are not responsible, nor the eagles. You are responsible for breeding animals and being impotent to save them from a torturing death. You cannot blame the drought. You have had droughts before. You know fully what suffering the droughts bring, that you are impotent to combat this suffering, and you have no right, no kind of right, to have allowed that tiny lamb and those thousands of other dying animals ever to have lived to die as they are dying.

  “No, no! Do not speak! Hear me! You have injured my soul by taking me with you. When I urged you to, you should have refused me. Since we came home I have been haunted by thoughts of those sheep dying at the water-troughs, those poor weary things which turned back to follow the flock after having crept so far to get a drink; of the lamb on which those foul crows were feeding; of those poor skeleton horses, and those nightmare bullocks. I keep seeing them, and hearing their pitiful cries for mercy. And you and I, and those other fat and wealthy people, stuffed our bodies with food this very evening. Oh, Frank! I’ll never forget it.”

  And then came the tears–tears of horror, of sorrow, aye, of self-pity; because beneath her genuine outcry against the facts of drought Ethel Mayne knew that her accusations were overdrawn, that she was deliberately simulating hysteria to break down her husband’s resistance to her wishes before she expressed them. She felt his arm encircle her waist, and permitted herself to be drawn close to him, feeling the surging triumph of success flooding her heart. She had not lost her power over him. She could feel him trembling. The moments fled. He made no attempt to speak, reckoning his physical closeness sufficient to calm her tempestuous mood. When finally she spoke again, her face was averted, and through real tears she gazed at the crackling logs.

  “I–I’m foolish, perhaps, dear. I should not let such sights worry me. But I am no pioneer’s wife. I haven’t the grit and the endurance they must have had. I have been imagining, Frank, thinking of Little Frankie in the place of that tiny lamb. I cannot help it. I see him staggering over that awful sand country, screaming for me, followed by hopping crows, his wonderful blue eyes gone, plucked out, his––”

  “For heaven’s sake, stop!” Mayne commanded, his voice thin with horror. “Ethel, your imagination is running riot this evening. Pull yourself together.”

  “I am trying to, dear,” she said, leaning against him. “I have tried, and you must be patient. I have been thinking of your offer to send the boy and me to England. But I can’t go without you. We–I’d be lost without you. Besides, it would look so peculiar. Oh, Frank, let us go together! Let us go to England where the rain falls, and the grass is emerald green and as high as the knee, and the cattle and sheep are fat and sleek. Take me to England, dear, where we were happy before we came here. Let us get right away from this. Sell Atlas, Frank! Please, please, sell Atlas, and let us all go.”

  How carefully she had laid her big guns, how deliberately she had fired them! She waited a little breathlessly to hear the shells bursting on the objective. “Sell Atlas!”

  Her husband’s words were the replica of those used by Feng Ching-wei. His expression was identical with that of his friend. To Ethel the two words sounded as though her bursting shells had stunned him. “Sell Atlas!”

  No, the shells had not really stunned him: surprised him rather. Again he said: “Sell Atlas!”

  “Yes, sell Atlas and let us go back to England,” she said with astounding calmness after the heat of the battle. And now, looking straight into his wide eyes, she knew she was defeated, knew that her ammunition had been wasted.

  “My dear Ethel, what you ask is impossible. Atlas is my life. Atlas is me and I am Atlas. You don’t understand, after all my efforts to make you understand.”

  The bitterness of defeat ate into her heart.

  “No, I shall never understand. Nor could any sane woman understand,” she told him, her voice vibrant with rising anger. “You are ego personified. You are the King of Atlas, king of a barren dust-heap on which lie rotting carcasses. You care nothing for me. I can rot like your poor sheep in this lonely house, till I become a bed-ridden hag and perish. Oh yes! You are a feudal lord, a monarch, a great power in the land, but you can’t stop your own animals from dying of starvation and thirst.”

  “Ethel!” he cried. “You are upset. Go to bed. To-morrow you will see things in a different light. Come, off you go! I have work to do.”

  This speech was meant to be solicitous, kindly sympathetic. To her it sounded more like bullying. Her face was like granite. Her voice was contemptuously weary.

  “Go to your office! Leave me in peace, for heaven’s sake, or you’ll make me scr
eam.”

  She heard from him a sigh of pain. With her stony face turned to the fire she heard him leave the room, heard the door closed behind him. For a full minute she sat without movement, then rose abruptly and passed to a writing-desk beneath the window. With paper before her and ink-filled pen in her fingers, she hesitated before beginning feverishly to write

  Alldyce,

  I give in. Come for me as soon as you possibly can. Take me away–take me back to England. I don’t care what happens to me, but take me away. I cannot stop here another day, not for another day can I hold out. Oh, Alldyce, come to me quickly and make me forget all…

  The door opened to admit Eva. “Please, ma’am, Little Frankie wants you. He simply won’t go to sleep till you come for him to say goodnight to you.” Ethel Mayne drew in a long breath, slowly expelled it. Her voice sounded as though she were utterly exhausted.

  “Very well, Eva. I’ll come in a minute.”

  For a little while Ethel Mayne sat very still, looking down on what she had written. When she rose to her feet and crossed to the fire she was sobbing quietly. Her appeal to Alldyce Cameron she dropped into the flames.

  After all, Little Frankie had fired the heavier guns.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE THIRD SHEARING

  I

  AT mid-afternoon of the day the shearers arrived at Atlas, Alldyce Cameron was riding a powerful bay mare northward along the Thuringah side of the river. As always, he was dressed to perfection: now in English riding kit.