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He'd written once a few months ago to Margery offering to go to Kalangadoo at any time if she and Colin needed help. He remembered now the very words of her answer, “Don't come, Bret. He's so touchy, so easily hurt and made suspicious, and then he gets defiant. He'd think his father had sent you to watch him or something like that. He's getting better – he really is—”

So he answered now with equal carelessness:

“No. Why, haven't you?”

Drew muttered hurriedly:

“Oh, yes, yes – we – Margery writes regularly, you know. Colin never was much good at letters—”

His florid handsome face clouded. He stared away across the paddocks, sipping his ginger-beer, and Bret, leaning over to get a sandwich, saw Millicent's hand go out swiftly and cover her husband's—

He got up feeling suddenly restless, depressed – lonely. He walked down to the creek and stood there with his hands in his pockets pretending to be interested in the slowly flowing water.

There wasn't any getting away from it. A few years ago when he read, or when people talked of love he'd shrugged and thought of it cynically as the giraffe among emotions – impossible, incredible! Then, almost like the old tales of mythology when the gods heard your boastings or your doubtings or whatever they might be, and resolved to punish you, he'd had this impossible, this incredible thing flung at him from all sides! Jim, Susan, driven by it; Margery and
Colin using it like a lifebelt in a stormy sea; Drew and Millicent after God knew how many years, still—

He remembered talking to Margery about it just after she and Colin had married and settled down at Kalangadoo. He'd gone down to stay for a week-end and give Colin a few tips – a Colin marvellously well, just then, marvellously buoyant and eager and determined – Margery had said in her downright way.

“Why don't you get married, Bret?”

He laughed.

“Why should I?”

“Why shouldn't you?”

“Because I don't feel like it.”

“Haven't you ever been in love?”

He parried that, thinking grimly of Lilian.

“What is love?”

She'd said, “Good God, will you listen to that! What's love, Colin?”

Colin had grinned and suggested “a bio-chemical reaction between two persons of opposite sex,” and then he and Margery had gone off into peals of laughter—

Well, Bret thought, that description seemed to him as – as comprehensible as any other— He began to feel for his cigarettes. A bio-chemical reaction. Whatever that might mean. But it opened up again a train of thought which never failed to disturb him, because its logic, its essential reasonableness was always upset before very long by unspecified emotions whose vagueness he most bitterly resented—

Ken, blast him, had no doubts about it at all. They'd come nearer to quarrelling in these last few months than ever before. Ken, descending on Coolami from time to time was always blandly and infuriatingly amused.

“Susan not home yet?”

Or,

“Where's your wife?”

Or,

“Lord, Bret, why didn't you wire me to come back and marry her for you? My name's Maclean too.”

That idiotic sentence had stuck in his memory. It had a sting in it. It had the true Ken-like flavour, malicious, satirical. It said very plainly, “If I had a wife I'd
have
a wife!”

And, Bret admitted, his every coherent thought, his every logical bit of reasoning told him that Ken was right. Artificial, all this. Nothing in the world needed but the opening of that closed door between their rooms – a baby – a wholesome adjustment of
natural, bodily needs! Easy enough!

And yet impossible.

There, by your smooth road of logic and common sense, you came to it again. Nothing you could see, nothing you could get hold of – just something that made you as helpless as if you were struggling and writhing in the invisible grip of an electric current. Some kind of mental, moral or spiritual recoil—

Damn! No cigarettes left! He put his empty case back in his pocket and turned to rejoin the others. Susan was coming down the bank towards him with a packet of Capstans in her hand.

“You haven't any left, have you?”

“No. I'd forgotten. Thanks.”

Holding a match for her he found himself asking.

“What
was
it just now, Susan? I – it – oh, hell!”

She said
coolly, blowing an eddy of smoke away from her eyes:

“Jim and I picnicked here one day. I – woke up to it too suddenly. That's all.”

He said, “Oh,” rather flatly. Something froze up inside him. He had nothing to say, and silence became like something heavy and almost tangible, so that he felt he couldn't stand there any longer beside her where Jim had probably stood once, watching the same willows trailing eastward in the water, the same reeds, the same fallen log across the creek—

He turned away. She said in the low, malicious tone of the mood which always infuriated him, “Bret?”

“Well?”

“Are you jealous?”

He dropped his hardly-smoked cigarette in the water; his words and his short laugh sounded like some stranger's heard from a distance.

“Jealous? Of you? Good God!”

He went back up the bank and began to collect the unopened bottles. He didn't know how plainly his face betrayed him; didn't realise the contraction of his brows, the suddenly expressionless opaqueness of his eyes, the ugly jutting of his underlip. He said briefly:

“Shall I take these back to the car? Would you like any more, Mrs. Drew?”

She shook her head, wondering miserably what had happened now. Drew with his back against one of the tree-trunks was pleasantly comatose. She jumped up on an impulse and ran after Bret. But when at the fence she caught up with him, her old dread of interference overwhelmed her again, and she was glad of the excuse which stooping under the wire gave her not to look at him while she said:

“There's a devil in Susan sometimes, Bret.”

He said dryly:

“I've met it.”

She stood erect again and looked at him.

“It's nothing on earth but unhappiness.”

He answered that with an inflection of conventional politeness which made his words sound, she thought, rather grotesque.

“I'm sorry she's unhappy.”

She answered:

“Well, naturally so am I. But I'm also concerned for you. Don't think my maternal prejudices are blinding me to the fact that you're finding it unpleasant as well.”

He opened the car door, and began stowing the bottles away methodically. He said something indistinctly and she asked:

“What did you say?”

He straightened up and repeated:

“She suggested a
divorce.”

Millicent's heart gave a little lurch.

“And you?”

“I don't want it.”

She felt a gleam of comfort, instantly destroyed by his belated addition of, “At least I don't think I do.”

She asked:

“Are you sorry you did it, Bret?”

He shrugged.

“We couldn't know the child wasn't going to live.”

She turned away, chilled, despondent, and yet at the
same time, faintly amused. Dear Bret, how tenaciously he stuck to his point! Even now in the thick of the obscure difficulties of his marriage, he wouldn't forget the unblemished logic of his original reason for it! She said sadly:

“I'm afraid I'm rather to blame. I knew in my heart that logic and rectitude and a handful of good intentions don't make a marriage!

He looked at her with a queer intentness. She thought that his expression was that of a man amused by his own earnestness. He asked:

“Well, what does? You of all people should be able to tell me that.”

But suddenly she knew she couldn't. The inhibitions of her temperament, her training, her age, descended on her. Stand there in cold blood, aged fifty-seven, and expound to a politely uncomprehending young man the ultimate mystery of the human race? Absurd! Impossible! She shook her head.

They stood without speaking after that, watching the others come up the hill. Drew walked ponderously, his breath coming rather short by the time he reached the fence. Susan, until she saw her father waiting for her with one foot on the lower wire, her mother and her husband watching her from beside the car, had her eyes on the ground and a little drag in her walk. Something in Bret's attitude annoyed her; he looked appraising, speculative, standing there beside her mother with his hands in his pockets and his hat pulled down over eyes which she knew held nothing for her but an intent, detached curiosity, an impersonal and equally detached regret—

She began suddenly to glitter. The blue flare of her skirt swung out as she ran; her whole body, from a slack despondency, became alert and vital; she laughed and flung her head back so that her hair flamed back from her face like fire in a changing wind. She was through
the fence, across the road with a movement rather, Millicent thought, like the dart of a blue dragon-fly across a pool, and as she passed Bret she fairly hurled at him the contemptuous, arrogant gaiety of her defiant youth.

Bret, without moving a muscle, said casually to Drew:

“Perhaps I'd better sit in front to show you the way. We turn off the main road pretty soon.”

W
HEN
they did turn
off at last they faced a range of hills, a narrow road that twisted and turned, following a creek fringed with she-oaks and flanked by tall rung timber. The grassy bank near the water seemed, as the car passed, alive with sudden movement; a flicker in the shade of a darker shadow, and a whisk of white that vanished swiftly; as though the earth, after drawing into itself some secret life, lay there still and passive, with nothing to tell of the vanished movement but its surface, pitted and scarred with holes—

Susan said from behind, ruefully:

“I'll never be a proper country woman till I've learnt to hate rabbits, will I?”

Bret wondered, getting out to open the second gate, whether that remark had been addressed to him. And whether there had been intended the suggestion of an olive branch which he imagined he detected in it. He thought, wrestling irritably with the ramshackle fastenings of the gate, that he was possibly too anxious to read into Susan's more casual remarks meanings which she never meant them to have. All the same he maintained, climbing back into his seat, the words had had a pleasant ring. They'd suggested that she wanted – that she hoped – that she thought it possible—

Oh, well – why try to analyse these things? Why not simply be thankful that into the disheartened apathy of your mood a sentence had come refreshingly, with
an indefinable promise of an unspecified happiness! And he said to her over his shoulder as he banged the door shut:

“They're disarming little devils if you let yourself look at them.”

Drew, driving slowly, asked:

“Pretty bad, aren't they?”

They were. Up the hill-slope to their left among an outcrop of grey-green granite boulders they moved like an army. Every now and then with a flash of its white bobbing tail one scampered across the road in front of the car. Bret, looking worried, grunted something non-committal, opening the car door as another gate came into view. He was wondering now how sharp the older man's eyes were; whether he noticed the dilapidation of the gates and the disrepair of the fences.

He looked at the hills as the car drove through the gate he held open. He'd always rather envied Colin that granite mountain of his, barren land as it was. There was something about its shape that made it look, for all the massive solidity of its naked rock, airy and aspiring; in this light with purple shadow round its base and its distant peak in sunlight it had an almost insubstantial look as though it were something you were dreaming about rather than seeing. No wonder, he thought, the natives had called it Jungaburra – “a spirit place”—

All the same, Colin would come to grief on it some day, scrambling round alone as he so often did—

Drew asked him as he got back into the car:

“That's the mountain Colin's so keen on?”

“That's it.”

“You
been up it? To the top?”

“Yes, once, with Colin.”

“Pretty stiff climb, eh?”

“In patches. One in particular. Colin has a sort of cave about half-way up. You can”—

His hand was half raised to point. Up there, looking like a tiny black spot on the cliff face, his far-sighted eyes could see the cave, and faintly, almost indiscernible in the sunlight, something that looked like a wisp of blue smoke. Bret didn't know what made him stop. He only felt abruptly some deep-rooted instinct to camouflage his barely begun sentence, to mark time, to wait and see—

So he finished quickly: “—see it from the other side of the mountain.” And then asked, though he knew quite well, “Is this the third gate or the fourth?”

“Third,” Drew said, stopping the car again. “How many more?”

“Only three. You can see the house when we get over that next rise.”

Bret, holding the gate, stole another glance at the cliff face as the car went through. It was smoke, sure enough, which meant—

Well, not necessarily. It was conceivable though not likely, that some one else might be there. But Colin didn't encourage visitors to his mountain. Even before he owned it, so the local people said, only one or two parties had ever reached the top. Bret didn't wonder. His memory of the one ascent he'd made with Colin was still very vividly with him, and his eyes, as they came over the crest of the hill, went towards the distant homestead with an anxiety he couldn't quite explain or subdue.

By the time they reached the last gate he had seen
that the car shed was empty, and that there were no fresh wheel marks on the road they themselves were travelling. He heard Millicent say eagerly: