Capricornia. Xavier Herbert
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Название: Capricornia
Автор: Xavier Herbert
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007321087
isbn:
When the party waxed lively the lubras came in and took seats, and the others took the doorway. When it became boisterous the lubras took liberties with their men, and the others sometimes slipped inside and snatched. Frank McLash came later, then Sam Snigger and Karl Fliegeltaub, who both lived across the bridge. The party was uproarious when Cockerell crept up to Mick O’Pick, who was laying down the law about politics, and poured a glass of beer over his head. All but old Mick and Ballest laughed loudly. Ballest shouted angrily about wilful waste. Mick gasped and groped till he regained his sight, when he leapt up bellowing, snatched up a large kerosene-lamp that stood on the table beside him, and dashed it at the iron wall. Flames shot up to the roof.
Everyone rushed out but Ballest and Mick. Ballest was sitting on his lounge when the lamp was smashed. He had risen and was shouting. Mick rushed at him and hit him on the jaw, sent him flying. Funnigan and two blackfellows rushed in with sodden sacks and tackled the flames. Cockerell and Frank tackled Mick.
Mick bellowed, “Strike an old man—strike an old man—hooligans—cowards!” and fled.
Thus the party ended, as usual.
An hour passed. The camp was silent save for clicking of music-sticks in the distant native camp and the drone of voices of Frank and Smelly and Cockerell in the house of the last-named and the incessant muttering of Ballest in his house—“Drink a man’s beer and murder him—ungrateful unsociable ill-bred ’ounds!” Old Mick was sitting on a chopping-block by his back veranda with a young lubra smoking at his feet, watching the moon rise over the bush and crooning an Irish folk-song.
Suddenly a wailing-cry rang out. Mick’s lubra turned her half-naked body quickly to the right. Mick turned too, listened for a while, then said, “An’ what was that m’ dear?”
The girl, with cigarette hanging from her lips and chin advanced, clicked her tongue for silence. A pause. Then the cry again, long and mournful. And again, this time in a different key.
“Dingo,” said Mick.
“No-more,” said the lubra. “Two-fella. One-fella dog no-more dingo, one-fella piccanin.” She rose, adding, “Go look see.”
She went off towards the railway with Mick at her heels.
Again the cry, this time accompanied by faint thumping sounds. “Him dere,” said the lubra, pointing to a rake of cars and trucks. She cooee’d, was answered at once by a burst of joyful barking.
They found that the sound came from one of the trucks. The lubra climbed in and found Nawnim and the dog he had travelled with. Nawnim rushed into her arms, thinking she was Anna. The dog whined and rubbed against her legs. She kicked it away. She lifted Nawnim and called to Mick and lowered the child to him, then picked up the dog and tossed it into the night. Back on the ground she took Nawnim from Mick and examined him, then said contemptuously, “Yeller-feller,” and gave him back.
Mick took Nawnim to Ballest, bawling as he entered the house, “Hey Joe—look’t I got!”
Ballest sat up on his bed and stared for a while, then said in a surly tone, “Where’d you get that?”
Smiling broadly Mick replied, “I found the little divil in a thruck.”
Ballest snorted, said, “Tell that to the marines!”
“Look at him!” cried Mick, excited. “Lil yeller-feller. Look at his pants like blue chicken-pox. I found him in a thruck with a dawg——”
“Bah—found it in the bulrushes!”
“In a thruck I said.”
“In the bulrushes! Take it away man, take it away. You can’t unload your brats on me.”
OSCAR held dominion over six hundred square miles of country, which extended east and west from the railway to the summit of the Lonely Ranges, and north and south from the horizons, it might be said, since there was nothing to show where the boundaries lay in those directions.
Jasmine had said that he worshipped property. It was true. But he did not value Red Ochre simply as a grazing-lease. At times it was to him six hundred square miles where grazing grew and brolgas danced in the painted sunset and emus ran to the silver dawn—square miles of jungle where cool deep billabongs made watering for stock and nests for shouting nuttagul geese—of grassy valleys and stony hills, useless for grazing, but good to think about as haunts of great goannas and rockpythons—of swamps where cattle bogged and died, but wild hog and buffalo wallowed in happiness—of virgin forests where poison weed lay in wait for stock, but where possums and kangaroos and multitudes of gorgeous birds dwelt as from time immemorial. At times he loved Red Ochre.
At times he loved it best in Wet Season—when the creeks were running and the swamps were full—when the multi-coloured schisty rocks split golden waterfalls—when the scarlet plains were under water, green with wild rice, swarming with Siberian snipe—when the billabongs were brimming and the water-lilies blooming and the nuttaguls shouting loudest—when bull-grass towered ten feet high, clothing hills and choking gullies—when every tree was flowering and most were draped with crimson mistletoe and droning with hummingbirds and native bees—when cattle wandered a land of plenty, fat and sleek, till the buffalo-flies and marsh-flies came and drove them mad, so that they ran and ran to leanness, often to their death—when mosquitoes and a hundred other breeds of maddening insects were there to test a man’s endurance—when from hour to hour luke-warm showers drenched the steaming earth, till one was sodden to the bone and mildewed to the marrow and moved to pray, as Oscar always was when he had had enough of it, for that which formerly he had cursed—the Dry! the good old Dry—when the grasses yellowed, browned, dried to tinder, burst into spontaneous flame—when harsh winds rioted with choking dust and the billabongs became mere muddy holes where cattle pawed for water—when gaunt drought loafed about a desert and exhausted cattle staggered searching dust for food and drink, till they fell down and died and became neat piles of bones for the wind to whistle through and the gaunt-ribbed dingo to mourn—then one prayed for the Wet again, or if one’s heart was small, packed up and left this Capricornia that fools down South called the Land of Opportunity, and went back and said that nothing was done by halves up there except the works of puny man.
Red Ochre was so named because an abundance of red ochre was to be found in the locality. Not far from the homestead was a cleft hillock of which the face was composed entirely of red ochre that was scored by the implements of men of the Mullanmullak Tribe who had gathered the pigment there for ages. From the hillock a score of red paths diverged as black ones do from a colliery, one of them leading to the homestead itself, trodden, so it was said, by Tobias Batty, founder of the Station, who went mad and took to painting his body after the fashion of the blacks.
Red Ochre was founded twenty years or more before Oscar settled there. His predecessor, who succeeded the mad Batty, was a man named Wellington Boots, formerly a Cockney grocer, who had a young wife whom he worked like a horse and five young children whom he kept perpetually in a state of virtual imprisonment. It was said that he used to weigh out the rations of his native riders in niggardly quantities on loaded scales. He was killed by a bull on the plain to the south and eaten by ants and crows and kites till buried in a sack by his wife.
The homestead stood in these days just as Batty had СКАЧАТЬ