The Thorn Birds (55 page)

“I don’t know, Vittorio. I wish I did! At the time it just seemed the only thing to do. I’m not gifted with Promethean foresight, and emotional involvement makes one a poor judge. Besides, it simply… happened! But I think perhaps she needed most what I gave her, the recognition of her identity as a woman. I don’t mean that
she
didn’t know she was a woman. I mean
I
didn’t know. If I had first met her as a woman it might have been different, but I knew her as a child for many years.”

“You sound rather priggish, Ralph, and not yet ready for forgiveness. It hurts, does it not? That you could have been human enough to yield to human weakness. Was it really done in such a spirit of noble self-sacrifice?”

Startled, he looked into the liquid dark eyes, saw himself reflected in them as two tiny manikins of insignificant proportion. “No,” he said. “I’m a man, and as a man I found a pleasure in her I didn’t dream existed. I didn’t know a woman felt like that, or could be the source of such profound joy. I wanted never to leave her, not only because of her body, but because I just loved to be with her—talk to her, not talk to her, eat the meals she cooked, smile at her, share her thoughts. I shall miss her as long as I live.”

There was something in the sallow ascetic visage which unaccountably reminded him of Meggie’s face in that moment of parting; the sight of a spiritual burden being taken up, the resoluteness of a character well able to go forward in spite of its loads, its griefs, its pain. What had he known, the red silk cardinal whose only human addiction seemed to be his languid Abyssinian cat?

“I can’t repent of what I had with her in that way,” Ralph went on when His Eminence didn’t speak. “I repent the breaking of vows as solemn and binding as my life. I can never again approach my priestly duties in the same light, with the same zeal. I repent that bitterly. But Meggie?” The look on his face when he uttered her name made Cardinal Vittorio turn away to do battle with his own thoughts.

“To repent of Meggie would be to murder her.” He passed his hand tiredly across his eyes. “I don’t know if that’s very clear, or even if it gets close to saying what I mean. I can’t for the life of me ever seem to express what I feel for Meggie adequately.” He leaned forward in his chair as the Cardinal turned back, and watched his twin images grow a little larger. Vittorio’s eyes were like mirrors; they threw back what they saw and didn’t permit one a glimpse of what went on behind them. Meggie’s eyes were exactly the opposite; they went down and down and down, all the way to her soul. “Meggie is a benediction,” he said. “She’s a holy thing to me, a different kind of sacrament.”

“Yes, I understand,” sighed the Cardinal. “It is well you feel so. In Our Lord’s eyes I think it will mitigate the great sin. For your own sake you had better confess to Father Giorgio, not to Father Guillermo. Father Giorgio will not misinterpret your feelings and your reasoning. He will see the truth. Father Guillermo is less perceptive, and might deem your true repentance debatable.” A faint smile crossed his thin mouth like a wispy shadow. “They, too, are men, my Ralph, those who hear the confessions of the great. Never forget it as long as you live. Only in their priesthood do they act as vessels containing God. In all else they are men. And the forgiveness they mete out comes from God, but the ears which listen and judge belong to men.”

There was a discreet knock on the door; Cardinal Vittorio sat silently and watched the tea tray being carried to a buhl table.

“You see, Ralph? Since my days in Australia I have become addicted to the afternoon tea habit. They make it quite well in my kitchen, though they used not to at first.” He held up his hand as Archbishop Ralph started to move toward the teapot. “Ah, no! I shall pour it myself. It amuses me to be ‘mother.’”

“I saw a great many black shirts in the streets of Genoa and Rome,” said Archbishop Ralph, watching Cardinal Vittorio pour.

“The special cohorts of Il Duce. We have a very difficult time ahead of us, my Ralph. The Holy Father is adamant that there be no fracture between the Church and the secular government of Italy, and he is right in this as in all things. No matter what happens, we must remain free to minister to all our children, even should a war mean our children will be divided, fighting each other in the name of a Catholic God. Wherever our hearts and our emotions might lie, we must endeavor always to keep the Church removed from political ideologies and international squabbles. I wanted you to come to me because I can trust your face not to give away what your brain is thinking no matter what your eyes might be seeing, and because you have the best diplomatic turn of mind I have ever encountered.”

Archbishop Ralph smiled ruefully. “You’ll further my career in spite of me, won’t you! I wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met you?”

“Oh, you would have become Archbishop of Sydney, a nice post and an important one,” said His Eminence with a golden smile. “But the ways of our lives lie not in our hands. We met because it was meant to be, just as it is meant that we work together now for the Holy Father.”

“I can’t see success at the end of the road,” said Archbishop Ralph. “I think the result will be what the result of impartiality always is. No one will like us, and everyone will condemn us.”

“I know that, so does His Holiness. But we can do nothing else. And there is nothing to prevent our praying in private for the speedy downfall of Il Duce and Der Führer, is there?”

“Do you really think there will be war?”

“I cannot see any possibility of avoiding it.”

His Eminence’s cat stalked out of the sunny corner where it had been sleeping, and jumped upon the scarlet shimmering lap a little awkwardly, for it was old.

“Ah, Sheba! Say hello to your old friend Ralph, whom you used to prefer to me.”

The satanic yellow eyes regarded Archbishop Ralph haughtily, and closed. Both men laughed.

Drogheda had a wireless set. Progress had finally come to Gillanbone in the shape of an Australian Broadcasting Commission radio station, and at long last there was something to rival the party line for mass entertainment. The wireless itself was a rather ugly object in a walnut case which sat on a small exquisite cabinet in the drawing room, its car-battery power source hidden in the cupboard underneath.

Every morning Mrs. Smith, Fee and Meggie turned it on to listen to the Gillanbone district news and weather, and every evening Fee and Meggie turned it on to listen to the ABC national news. How strange it was to be instantaneously connected with Outside; to hear of floods, fires, rainfall in every part of the nation, an uneasy Europe, Australian politics, without benefit of Bluey Williams and his aged newspapers.

When the national news on Friday, September 1st, announced that Hitler had invaded Poland, only Fee and Meggie were home to hear it, and neither of them paid any attention. There had been speculation for months; besides, Europe was half a world away. Nothing to do with Drogheda, which was the center of the universe. But on Sunday, September 3rd all the men were in from the paddocks to hear Father Watty Thomas say Mass, and the men were interested in Europe. Neither Fee nor Meggie thought to tell them of Friday’s news, and Father Watty, who might have, left in a hurry for Narrengang.

As usual, the wireless set was switched on that evening for the national news. But instead of the crisp, absolutely Oxford tones of the announcer, there came the genteel, unmistakably Australian voice of the Prime Minister, Robert Gordon Menzies.

“Fellow Australians. It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of the persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war….

“It may be taken that Hitler’s ambition is not to unite all the German people under one rule, but to bring under that rule as many countries as can be subdued by force. If this is to go on, there can be no security in Europe and no peace in the world…. There can be no doubt that where Great Britain stands, there stand the people of the entire British world….

“Our staying power, and that of the Mother Country, will be best assisted by keeping our production going, continuing our avocations and business, maintaining employment, and with it, our strength. I know that in spite of the emotions we are feeling, Australia is ready to see it through.

“May God, in His mercy and compassion, grant that the world may soon be delivered from this agony.”

There was a long silence in the drawing room, broken by the megaphonal tones of a short-wave Neville Chamberlain speaking to the British people; Fee and Meggie looked at their men.

“If we count Frank, there are six of us,” said Bob into the silence. “All of us except Frank are on the land, which means they won’t want to let us serve. Of our present stockmen, I reckon six will want to go and two will want to stay.”

“I want to go!” said Jack, eyes shining.

“And me,” said Hughie eagerly.

“And us,” said Jims on behalf of himself and the inarticulate Patsy.

But they all looked at Bob, who was the boss.

“We’ve got to be sensible,’ he said. “Wool is a staple of war, and not only for clothes. It’s used as packing in ammunition and explosives, for all sorts of funny things we don’t hear of, I’m sure. Plus we have beef cattle for food, and the old wethers and ewes go for hides, glue, tallow, lanolin—all war staples.

“So we can’t go off and leave Drogheda to run itself, no matter what we might want to do. With a war on it’s going to be mighty hard to replace the stockmen we’re bound to lose. The drought’s in its third year, we’re scrub-cutting, and the bunnies are driving us silly. For the moment our job’s here on Drogheda; not very exciting compared to getting into action, but just as necessary. We’ll be doing our best bit here.”

The male faces had fallen, the female ones lightened.

“What if it goes on longer than old Pig Iron Bob thinks it will?” asked Hughie, giving the Prime Minister his national nickname.

Bob thought hard, his weatherbeaten visage full of frowning lines. “If things get worse and it goes on for a long time, then I reckon as long as we’ve got two stockmen we can spare two Clearys, but only if Meggie’s willing to get back into proper harness and work the inside paddocks. It would be awfully hard and in good times we wouldn’t stand a chance, but in this drought I reckon five men and Meggie working seven days a week could run Drogheda. Yet that’s asking a lot of Meggie, with two little babies.”

“If it has to be done, Bob, it has to be done,” said Meggie. “Mrs. Smith won’t mind doing her bit by taking charge of Justine and Dane. When you give the word that I’m needed to keep Drogheda up to full production, I’ll start riding the inside paddocks.”

“Then that’s us, the two who can be spared,” said Jims, smiling.

“No, it’s Hughie and I,” said Jack quickly.

“By rights it ought to be Jims and Patsy,” Bob said slowly. “You’re the youngest and least experienced as stockmen, where as soldiers we’d all be equally inexperienced. But you’re only sixteen now, chaps.”

“By the time things get worse we’ll be seventeen,” offered Jims. “We’ll look older than we are, so we won’t have any trouble enlisting if we’ve got a letter from you witnessed by Harry Gough.”

“Well, right at the moment no one is going. Let’s see if we can’t bring Drogheda up to higher production, even with the drought and the bunnies.”

Meggie left the room quietly, went upstairs to the nursery. Dane and Justine were asleep, each in a white-painted cot. She passed her daughter by, and stood over her son, looking down at him for a long time.

“Thank God you’re only a baby,” she said.

It was almost a year before the war intruded upon the little Drogheda universe, a year during which one by one the stockmen left, the rabbits continued to multiply, and Bob battled valiantly to keep the station books looking worthy of a wartime effort. But at the beginning of June 1940 came the news that the British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated from the European mainland at Dunkirk; volunteers for the second Australian Imperial Force poured in thousands into the recruiting centers, Jims and Patsy among them.

Four years of riding the paddocks in all weathers had passed the twins’ faces and bodies beyond youth, to that ageless calm of creases at the outer corners of the eyes, lines down the nose to the mouth. They presented their letters and were accepted without comment. Bushmen were popular. They could usually shoot well, knew the value of obeying an order, and they were tough.

Jims and Patsy had enlisted in Dubbo, but camp was to be Ingleburn, outside Sydney, so everyone saw them off on the night mail. Cormac Carmichael, Eden’s youngest son, was on the same train for the same reason, going to the same camp as it turned out. So the two families packed their boys comfortably into a first-class compartment and stood around awkwardly, aching to weep and kiss and have something warming to remember, but stifled by their peculiar British mistrust of demonstrativeness. The big C-36 steam locomotive howled mournfully, the stationmaster began blowing his whistle.

Meggie leaned over to peck her brothers on their cheeks self-consciously, then did the same to Cormac, who looked just like his oldest brother, Connor; Bob, Jack and Hughie wrung three different young hands; Mrs. Smith, weeping, was the only one who did the kissing and cuddling everyone was dying to do. Eden Carmichael, his wife and aging but still handsome daughter with him, went through the same formalities. Then everyone was outside on the Gilly platform, the train was jerking against its buffers and creeping forward.

“Goodbye, goodbye!” everyone called, and waved big white handkerchiefs until the train was a smoky streak in the shimmering sunset distance.

Together as they had requested, Jims and Patsy were gazetted to the raw, half-trained Ninth Australian Division and shipped to Egypt at the beginning of 1941, just in time to become a part of the rout at Benghazi. The newly arrived General Erwin Rommel had put his formidable weight on the Axis end of the seesaw and begun the first reversal of direction in the great cycling rushes back and forth across North Africa. And, while the rest of the British forces retreated ignominiously ahead of the new Afrika Korps back to Egypt, the Ninth Australian Division was detailed to occupy and hold Tobruk, an outpost in Axis-held territory. The only thing which made the plan feasible was that it was still accessible by sea and could be supplied as long as British ships could move in the Mediterranean. The Rats of Tobruk holed up for eight months, and saw action after action as Rommel threw everything he had at them from time to time, without managing to dislodge them.