The Refuge (20 page)
‘Hey—easy, Fitz, easy,’ he mumbled, trying to get another look at Irma, as, acting mechanically and from instinct, she walked quickly out to the car with her face averted, and opened the door of the rear seat, Miss Werther at her elbow all the time. Without difficulty—for he had taken hold of my wrist in a strong, drunken grasp—I kept myself between McMahon and the very ordinary street scene of two women dressed in businesslike black getting into the back seat of a car, and, when the door was closed, settling themselves in the interior darkness to wait for the driver. When I heard that door slam shut, I stood away from McMahon, whose breath and clothes smelled strongly of a mixture of beer and rum. He stared past me into the shadowless light of the street, a mixture of daylight and lamplight, and frowned in hazy puzzlement.
‘Funny thing,’ he said conversationally, ‘I could have sworn I saw a young dame here I know quite a bit about . . . A very choice piece, Fitz, old man, honestly, no, honestly. You see her? or am I a bit—you know—seeing things?’
‘Why don’t you head for home?’ I said, my annoyance going as his bewilderment persisted. ‘You know quite well you will only make trouble for yourself with the subs if you go up now. Blake has his eye on you, you know.’
He would not listen to me, but muttered something unrepeatable about Blake and made for the lifts. While his back was turned, and his attention focused uncertainly on the choice of buttons to be pressed, I almost ran from the building and round the back of the car into the crowded roadway beyond. A passing driver, important with the moment’s crazy haste, called out irritably, ‘Look out, whiskers,’ as I got into the driver’s seat, slid home and turned the ignition key, and took the chance of pulling out at once behind a careering tram into the homeward-bound, savage flood of competing traffic. In the rear-vision mirror I caught a glimpse of the two women’s faces pale in the gloom when the shop-window lights flickered on them as we went forward.
Irma’s head was resting against the back of the seat, and her delicate eyelids were closed as though in the extreme of an absolute exhaustion. She looked frightened. With an air of lively concern, Miss Werther was caressing her dark hair, from which her hat, like McMahon’s, had fallen or been flung.
Beyond Richmond the branch road turns north-west. We had driven aslant the sunset glow above the blue blackness of the mountains where the light flowed up into the cloudless sky with a pure radiance almost white at the level of the aerial horizon, and faded through pale gold to the imperceptibly deepening blue of the zenith. After eight miles we began the slow series of climbs towards Hill Farm, leaving a last village to sink with the land behind us as the road swept in arbitrary curves and zigzags between taller and taller trees.
Hill Farm is on a curious, roughly defined plateau which drops suddenly on the eastward side. The road became a firm bush track, and the towering trees that seemed to but actually did not meet overhead so darkened the way that I had to switch on the headlights. In their penetrating downward glare the most recent wheelmarks of old Jack’s light cart could clearly be seen, and I knew by this, and by the sweet, nippy smell of the thin mountain air, that rain had fallen here more recently than it had in town. As I drove up the familiar way I thought again how wise and leisurely the original maker of Hill Farm had been, to cut his track so that the place was approached from the rear in a gradual ascent and a final level stretch northwards along the mountain side, rather than to attempt to breast the swelling bosom of the plateau’s eastern limit with deep cuttings into that dead clay subsoil which becomes like a cold reddish glue during the winter rains.
After Miss Werther had helped Irma into her coat, nobody spoke at all during that unpleasantly fast progress which only the foothills beyond Richmond slowed down. I was glad to be able to concentrate on handling the car, a business at which I am no expert but which does not interfere, as speech does at such times, with thinking. Once we had left the outskirts of the city, the grime and slickness of the factory district south of the University, and the hugely depressing sprawl of residential wildernesses beyond, my mood changed. It always does, here. When the unsullied plain is visible at last on either hand, and the mountains in the distance slowly cease to be a flat navy-blue dado at the foot of the wall of sky and begin to show themselves in all their depth and complicated splendour, a surge of joy and content gathers force in my breast like the urge to sing on a fine morning; and I think, always, that I should leave the city and live a country life, farming the plateau with old Jack to guide me, keeping myself for ever away from the deadly contact with the people of the city, from the greedy fears and the frightened greeds which seem to be the two aspects of their whole being.
I think this, many times each year, whatever the season, whatever my city preoccupations; but—like most other escaping travellers in the same scene, who must think similar thoughts—I shall never do it. Because I am not a nervous man I shall never have the impulse, pure and strong, to break with habits of living and working, and above all with the more subtle and implacable habits of memory.
We passed occasionally by tree-trunks and open spaces that I recognized, signs of the home-comings of years. Remotely below on the right the blur and sparkle of the lights of civilization’s fringes could be seen sometimes in passing vertical panels opening and closing between the crowded trunks of huge turpentines and aspiring red and white gums; and over the plain thus briefly revealed hung the pale, forgiving haze of the last blue daylight. The thought came into my mind that, as it was Friday, as likely as not Jack had shut Donna in her wire cage, milked early, and gone off on his grey horse to the nearest pub, at North Richmond, south-east of us and miles away. If so, he would not be back until midnight, asleep on his homing animal as comfortably as an Oriental prince in a howdah. As the trees thinned and the boundary fence halted us, I looked for his light, and as I was closing the sliprails behind the car I saw it, bobbing through the orchard between the cottage and the shed where, years before, he had built a big brick fireplace and set himself up, solitary but not lonely, silent but always ready with an answer and a sharp jest (especially about marriage and the horribleness of women), and casually skilful at everything he had need to do.
He saw my lights at the same time, and raised in salute the storm-lantern he was carrying through the dusk. Underfoot the earth was still clearly visible, and above the mutter of the engine I heard the sudden minatory barking of Donna, and the graver bull-roaring of Jack’s dog Ike. It was a moment of such comfort that I did not get into the car at once, but for a full minute stood waiting until Donna’s approaching clamour became, abruptly, a series of exclamations of wonder, incredulity and delight as she allowed herself to recognize who had come.
‘We are here,’ I said into the darkness of the rear seat; and again for a moment the thought of those two women, distracted, over-civilized and alien, in these still and empty solitudes made me frown. No imagination could force them to fit, here; but I realized this now without undue dismay, for my sense of my own ease, like that of a man closing his front door after him as he comes home, gave me strength and confidence in what I had undertaken.
The small bitch flashed like living copper across the steady beam of the headlights, and welcomed me with small whines and groans of pleasure until I felt god-like for that moment. When I let her in upon the seat beside me, however, she went rigid and the hair of her thick winter coat rose stiffly between her shoulders.
‘Speak,’ I said. ‘It is my spaniel—her name is Donna.’
Both the women said her name, but she was not reassured. In her two years of life she had never seen a female human being, nor smelled one. She growled unhappily on a high protesting note, and as we moved forward towards the barn, where I kept the car beside Jack’s cart among odd bits of farming machinery, she put one paw, with an air of mingled question and authority, upon my left knee and let me see the whites of her eyes. Not only was she quite unused to strangers, but she was pathetically jealous of my attention whenever I was about, though Jack assured me she grieved little once I was gone.
He was waiting with the lantern. He smelled pleasantly of rum, his evening refreshment after the day’s work. I took the usual half-bottle of it out of the glove-box and watched him slide it into his hip pocket without a word, before I explained about our visitors. He listened in silence, sucking at his cold pipe, and nodded when I added that there were peculiar circumstances and that the younger woman was unofficially under my protection for the present.
‘I remember,’ he murmured gravely into my ear, ‘I found one woman quite peculiar circumstances. I reckon two would be very peculiar.’
They would have to stay on for a while, I said, and he must not let them worry him, for it would not be for long. Then I helped the two of them out of the car on to the warm earth floor of the barn, where the air carried the sweet ancient odours of the cow and her milk and her feed from the byre next door. Jack held the lantern high so that he could see who was here. For the coldest part of the winter the cow lived under the same roof with him for a time each night, but for most of the year she came in only to be milked at night and in the morning. A wooden partition wall divided their quarters, and through a square opening cut in it he could commune with her when he felt like it. He was partial to cows.
The two women stood close together while I introduced Jack, who looked sharply at them, pulled some inches of pipe-stem out of his toothless mouth, and to my surprise shook the hand of each in turn. My mind was set finally at rest when of his own accord he led the way to the kitchen door of the cottage with the lantern held so that they could see their steps, and, once inside, began to light the lamps.
It is a comfortable cottage, made and lined with hardwood that has darkened with the passing of half a century or more to the colour of cedar where it is protected from the weather. Two rooms, used as bedrooms, open out of the living-room, which has the biggest floor-space in the house, with casement windows looking north and east across a wide veranda.
In winter, the north side is warmed by the northerly sun; in summer the eastern side, the front, is cool from midday onwards. Whoever built it must have found good timber cheap to obtain, for the floors are of that loveliest of building hardwoods, Western Australian jarrah, polished to a deep rosy brown and as indestructible as teak. It had been Jack’s habit, since first he saw the interior of the cottage several years ago, to polish these floors once a week with a paste of his own making—a concoction of bees’ wax and turpentine to which he added the dissolved crystallized gum of one of the mountain eucalypts—and this he did whether the cottage was in use or empty. Thus it invariably had a welcoming air of masculine fastidiousness, with the clean old furniture that matched nowhere except in its look of comfortable ease, the gentle brilliance of the bookshelves which the floor hazily reflected as it did the windows and the pale winter curtains we put up every April, and the fireplace of scrubbed brick, where in the colder months I always found a clean fire set ready for my match.
It was these details of care, which I could not myself have seen to, that made me prize Jack’s tenancy of part of my land—as much of it as he could manage alone—and consider well any act of mine that might send him wandering again; for he had an independence entirely his own, which was either the cause or the result of his sincere indifference as to where he lived or what became of him. He was by far the most solitary human being I have ever known, but he was not what is called, with weak slickness, ‘anti-social’. It was simply that, like the miller of Dee, but without his minor-keyed jollity, he cared for nobody.
So I had a disproportionate pleasure in the sight of him laying and lighting a fire in the kitchen range which, if Jean had not died, I had meant to replace with a kerosene stove. For men’s use, the range was far more pleasant, and I was glad I had never done what I once intended. Jack, I saw, was playing the host’s assistant, and if the grimace of a smile he wore in any company was, as I suspected, a little wider and thinner than usual, it was still untroubled. I left the women in the larger bedroom in front, where we carried in Irma’s luggage and Miss Werther’s travelling bag, and changed into more comfortable clothes in the other room, which was my own. Already beyond my open window the south was dark and starry above the high wall of the spur, and the sweet and nourishing air had the edged cold that follows rain in the mountains and threatens a wind from the west. Passing into the golden lamplight of the big room, where as I bent to light the fire I could hear the subdued voices of the two women through their closed door, I brought my wandering and lazy thoughts back to consider my immediate duty.
They would need warming drinks and hot food. The night was far colder than night in the city. I remembered the coffee among my parcels, the fish and the
batons
of white bread, with satisfaction. There were always eggs and cream and several sorts of tinned food in the tiny pantry which shared with the neat bathroom one end of the long kitchen itself. I had partitioned this off at Jean’s wise suggestion, when I was having the cottage and its outhouses repaired and extra tanks installed to ensure a sufficient household water supply in case of the unpredictable winter or summer droughts. There was little now that the human heart could wish for, here, I thought, as I came to a decision to turn the kitchen and the food supplies over to the women, so that as soon as possible they might feel that first faint authority which makes for comfort in a strange place.
Miss Werther joined me where I knelt in front of the fire watching it draw up sweetly while I felt over Donna’s skin for ticks. This human habit caused her much bliss and self-abandonment.
‘I have been telling Irma you would not mind if she went to bed,’ Miss Wether said, ‘but it is useless. She says it would be bad manners, also she wishes company.’
