Geary and Bob camped on the veranda for the night: Saul went to his own room. Mrs Bessie’s door remained locked. Hugh did not have it opened, though neither Bob nor Geary would have cared to sleep in Mrs Bessie’s room.
In the morning Coonardoo grilled steaks and made porridge, tea and toast. It was difficult to believe Mrs Bessie had not superintended getting of the breakfast as usual.
Expecting the buggy from Nuniewarra, Warieda had gone out after a killer, cut up the beast and given everybody in the uloo his or her share.
“Oh well, Youie, have it your own way,” Geary said, smoking over his meal. “I only come thinkin’ I could do something for you — take you down, maybe.”
“Thanks, Sam,” Hugh replied. “My own boys’ll take me down in a day or two.”
“And who’ll look after the place while you’re away?”
“Saul, of course! Cripes, he would be sore if I left anyone else in charge — though Warieda and Chitali know as much about running things as I do. Besides, I won’t be so long gone.”
“The blacks say Mrs Bessie’s still keepin’ an eye on the place.”
A faint wispish smile moved Hugh’s lips.
“She seems to have thought of everything.”
“Coonardoo says Mumae told her what to do if ever you were sick,” Bob said.
“She would,” Hugh agreed.
“Well, we’d better get a move on, if you won’t come along with us,” Geary remarked. “We’re mustering just now, Youie, and I left the boys holding a mob on the Gidgee well.”
“It’s damn good of you, Sam,” Hugh replied, “but I’ll get the boys to rig up a stretcher in the buckboard and go down in a day or two.”
Coonardoo had washed and ironed clothes, packed them in a suitcase as Hugh told her, and fixed the tucker bags. She would have liked to go to the coast with the boys. But Hugh said no to that. He knew the life of the coastal towns too well to wish her to go near them.
She had lain on the floor near him, wakeful, watching, or sleeping lightly, all the time he was ill, and had done every service for him. As she helped him to wash that night before he was going away, Hugh said, “What pretty hands you’ve got, Coonardoo!” So elegant and delicate the slim brown fingers were. “I’d no idea you had such pretty hands — and feet.”
He glanced down at the small brown feet which were as straight and well-shaped as her hands.
Coonardoo looked shy at the words of praise. Her eyes covered Hugh with unfathomable tenderness.
And next day she watched him go, lying on a mattress on the floor of the buckboard. She had filled his waterbag and put Mumae’s umbrella beside him to keep off the sun, warning the boys to travel slowly and rest during the heat of the day.
With Meenie, Bandogera and Saul Hardy, Coonardoo stood looking on, while the fresh horses Warieda had brought in, swirled and plunged, then turned, carrying the four-wheeler away over the plains. She watched till her eyes could not see clouding red dust and creek trees through which the buggy disappeared.
As a child she had suffered to see Hugh go away. And something of the old desperate anguish returned to her now. It was as if her entrails were being dragged as the distance grew between her and Hugh. When she could not bear the tension any more, a fibre snapped in her. The intensity of her following sense failed; it was as if life had receded from her.
Coonardoo felt that Hugh would not die. She had guessed the fighting instincts Geary roused. If she had not done the right thing in sending for Saul Hardy, she had done well in bringing Geary to Wytaliba. Coonardoo guessed Hugh was determined to get well if only to defeat Geary.
Hugh would come back to Wytaliba. He would come back, well and strong; not so much a stranger as before; but part of it; of the country and of her. He belonged to them.
Instinctively Coonardoo knew these things as she sat gazing out to the sky that was blue-grey, iridescent, with fuchsia-coloured mists against the hills like the bright feathers in a crested pigeon’s wing.
He would bring a woman with him, as he had done before — not the same one. She would be different. But he would bring a woman. The spirit of Mumae would rest more easily under the white-barked gum-tree near the creek. Coonardoo would be there also. Always she would be there, where Youie was, to watch over and care for him as Mumae had said she must.
The white woman would come and would go, Hugh’s woman; but Coonardoo would be there. Always she would be there where Hugh was. The happiness of the thought comforted her. Hugh would return, Coonardoo told herself. She must sweep the verandas, brush down the spider-webs and chase fowls from the veranda; keep the house as Mumae would have liked it kept for Hugh’s woman, the white girl he would bring back with him for a wife.
Hugh never remembered that journey to the coast, except as a nightmare, in which he had swayed and jolted endlessly across the plains, up the steep walls of tablelands, red and bare where the surrounding country had subsided from them, through the grey seas of mulga, stretching away and away under dim, pale-blue sky.
Bare red earth and ironstone gravel, black under the sky film, thin, blue-grey and green, clear as water, he had seen through half-open eyes. Brush of mulga, with narrow leaves, withering, grey-green and brown, upstanding, scratching the sky, and quandongs; thick stunted shapes of dwarf firs. He closed his eyes on those drought-stricken stretches of country where the mulga, bare and beaten by sun and sand through years of dryness, shone like silver through hard white light. Every germ seemed to be sterilized in the still air. Only a hill in the distance, lumped like a giant blue whale along the horizon, promised life and hope.
Snippets and scraps of the country he passed through wove a patchwork over Hugh’s brain. He saw wind-grass growing among the rocks, tufts as fine and yellow as mulga blossom, beaten away and driven to dust against the shingle. Coming to ruckled earth of a river flat, the wind-grass flowed, luxuriant and wheel-high, under bloodwoods and light scrub. Wild flowers, magenta and mauve, swirled to the foot of rugged hillsides, as if a brightly patterned old-fashioned shawl had been thrown down there.
Creek gums whose trunks looked newly white-washed sidled and swayed nymphishly beside the dry sand of their water-courses. The green, soft and young, of their crests, telling of water beneath the creek bed, coolness and shadow there: flash of birds, the blue wing of a butterfly.
Through the dust and heat of the long journey Chitali and Warieda drove by turns. While one had the reins the other sat beside Hugh, put wet rags on his forehead, moved Mumae’s black umbrella so that it shaded him from the sun, and sang or told him aboriginal legends of stones and hills they passed.
There was the story about that crag at the end of Nungarra range, a mass of granite which could be seen against the sky, miles away.
“Before my mother grow,” Warieda said, “before her mother, weary bugger years” — he waved his hand, vaguely for a long time ago — “big blackfellow kill people and eat ’em. Wallabee come. Old fellow tell ’m hide in trees, kill all blackfellow and eat ’em. Young blackfellow make smoke, tell other blackfellow. Old blackfellow see smoke, very sulky. Chase young fellow, want kill ’m and eat ’m too. Young fellow movingar, make cloud, send lightning, tear up old fellow, send him into earth. He make stone … big stone over there in hills, Nungarra.”
Warieda first saw a steam-engine galloping along rails one time when he had gone to Karrara with cattle for Mumae. He made a song about it and sang the song to Hugh, often as they bumped on over the long track to the coast:
“Me-ra-rar ngar-rar ngular-gar gartha-gara!
Calling with steaming head!
Mooranger! Nar-ra-ga! Mille-gidgee!
Coming! Passing! Gone!”
Each day Hugh became weaker, more exhausted. He could only drink the water he bad told the boys to boil and cool off for him; and, although the fever abated, his heart seemed to swim all over his body, his breath came in such faint windy gusts, that he lay without speaking more than he had to. At Illigoogee and Karrara the boys got fresh horses and drove on again, more anxious than Hugh, and set on getting him to the coast without loss of a moment.
A dream it had all been; but the horror and oppression lifted always by the presence of those two dark protecting figures. Towering as trees, they had loomed before Hugh sometimes, and merged with the darkness shrouding his brain. But how they had cared for and attended him — with such gentleness and sympathy, patient and alert, singing and talking to while away the time!
Lala station, a hundred miles from the coast, was reached at last. The Burnhams of Lala owned a truck, and insisted on lifting Hugh on his mattress into the house, and feeding him with beaten eggs and milk, before taking him on into Onslow.
Hugh sent Warieda and Chitali back to Wytaliba from Lala, and told them to obey and work for Saul Hardy as they had when he owned the place. They would get on very well with Saul he knew: there was nothing to worry about on that score.
John Burnham and a couple of his boys carried Hugh on to the boat; and those days on the freshening blue seas to Geraldton were like lying in a cradle and being rocked to sleep after the long journey from Wytaliba.
There was no milk on the boat; but oranges, plenty of oranges. Hugh ate oranges. He sucked at the golden rind, lying gazing over the blue dancing expanse of southern ocean, sleeping, dreaming, not thinking.
Wytaliba was a mirage on the horizon of his consciousness. All the distraught passion, loneliness and suffering, beyond the flowing miles of plain and tableland.
He could hear the blacks singing beside their camp-fires in the dark, the frail eerie melodies winging over the dark plains, under a wide sky on which the stars were dim as rock crystals. That throbbing on one note, flight, fall and reiterated rhythm and melody quivering, infiltrating had always stirred and excited him. He told himself he liked to hear the blacks on Wytaliba singing, because it showed they were happy; life was good to them.
But there was more in it than that. The blacks’ singing was a communication, a language of the senses, remote and aboriginal. Infinitely, irresistibly Hugh felt it. Always he could hear Coonardoo singing above the rest of the women.
The Centurion made her way to Geraldton with leisurely lurch and stride. The land looked dark and menacing, after the peace of the sea. White lines of surf and beaches flashed from the lightning bluffs and headlands. Hills, trees and green swardy slopes, grew out from them. Sea birds, swooped, screaming, about the steamer as she bumped piles of the jetty.
There was nobody he had seen before in the gaily coloured little crowd which assembled to meet the boat; but Hugh felt as if he knew everybody; everybody was glad to see him. Geraldton was a place you dreamt of, and talked about a great deal, on Wytaliba. Coming to the township again was like dipping into his childhood. Hugh had been there before when he was going down to school. Eustace Fairweather, the doctor in Geraldton, an old friend of his mother’s, had come to the boat and taken him away for the day.
Hugh asked the steward who had been looking after him to send for a car as soon as the boat arrived, and told the driver to take him to Nurse McGillvaray’s cottage hospital which he remembered having heard his mother speak of.
In a bed of the neat small house, tucked away behind plumbago hedges and pink oleander bushes, with a stout middle-aged woman, and a girl who was learning to be a nurse, fussing about him, Hugh began to feel really well — to laugh at himself for all the fuss he had made, about “a go of fever and a headache”, he said.
But Dr Eustace Fairweather, who overhauled him, was not amused. He realized the experiences of his patient, and that he had come nearly five hundred miles for treatment.
“Oh yes,” he said, “you’ve had ty. all right, my boy. You ought to have died.”
“That’s what Sam Geary said,” Hugh told him smiling. “But I wouldn’t — to spite him.”