Mollie laughed when she heard Hugh telling the gins what to do about the house next morning. At first she had not been sure enough of herself to ask for anything, much less give orders. But she was beginning to feel at home.
“This is my home,” she told herself. “These are my servants.”
Looking round the edge of her door she saw Hugh, spurs and hat on, a sturdy figure, not very tall, of average height, standing there on the veranda, the gins before him as he gave instructions for the day’s work. She thought he looked “the master”, every inch of him, and very nice in his white moleskin trousers, faded blue shirt, big-brimmed felt hat, stock-whip looped over one shoulder, a brass match-box and clasp-knife on his broad leather belt, his pipe tucked through it. She was very proud of being his wife; still a little excited about it and the adventure she had embarked on.
Not that Hugh’s courtship had been at all what she imagined a courtship should be. There had been no love-making about it. In the most matter-of-fact way he had asked her whether she thought she would like to marry him and live outback on a rather rough and lonely cattle station. Maid of all work in a boarding-house in Geraldton, where Hugh stayed for a few days after he left the hospital, she had thought he was joking. He declared he was quite serious, and she supposed he must like her, more than he said, to be wanting to marry her.
If Hugh had not been much of a lover before they were married, he was the most lover-like of husbands. Mollie found herself thoroughly enjoying being Mrs Hugh Watt, during the long journey from the coast to Wytaliba. Hugh was good to look at, gentle and courteous; and being waited on, considered, looked after — the experience was so new to Mollie, who had run about, waiting on and looking after other people as long as she could remember, that she lapped it up greedily. And Hugh, she felt sure, was liking her much better than he did when they started out on the journey. He smiled gratefully to her for “cracking hardy”, pretending she was not tired when her back ached and her head swayed giddily on the long days driving, and gazing through dust and blinding sunshine, over the ever-widening, ever-distancing plains.
“It’s quite romantic, after all, isn’t it?” Hugh asked happily when they camped by the roadside. He made a fire and spread their mattress under the open sky. “You and I to be driving away like this!”
“It is, isn’t it?” Mollie replied.
Hugh did not pretend to be “gone on her”: “wild about her”. “I want a wife,” he had said, “a good sensible girl like you, Mollie, to come and be mates with me out there. We’d get on well together, I think. You’ve had a hard life … and I’ll try to make up. Be good to you.”
“Don’t be a fool,” her aunt who kept the boarding-house advised. “He’s the best chance you’ll ever get. Even if you’re not in love with him, you can easily be.”
Aunt Emily was right, sure enough, Mollie reflected. And Mrs Fairweather, the doctor’s wife, said Hugh had chosen her from among several of the prettiest girls in Geraldton, who would have been quite willing to go and live with him on Wytaliba.
Mollie had heard Eustace Fairweather congratulating Hugh, on the day Hugh and she were married.
“I think you’re right, my boy,” he said. “You’ve chosen well. She looks sound in wind and limb — a good, commonsense little creature, who will be grateful for all you do on her behalf.”
Hugh hoped that Mollie was as pleased with their companionship as he. There was nothing he desired so much as to make his wife happy and satisfied.
Looking through the doorway, she thought it was funny to see him standing there, ordering the gins about.
“Here,” she called, “that’s my job.”
“Right.” Hugh turned to laugh back at her. “You can have it.”
He went over to the door of her room; Mollie was standing half dressed, twisting up her hair, before a small square mirror.
“I’ve got to get out and do some branding, or we’ll be short of calves this year,” Hugh said.
“I’ll be all right.”
Mollie’s smile and her cheery assurance brought Hugh across the threshold. He kissed her bare shoulder and went out of the room again.
She heard him whistling as he swung along the veranda to the kitchen. There he made a great noise about tucker bags which had not been washed or could not be found; rationed the blacks, carved hunks of meat from a huge joint and put tea, sugar and flour in their tins.
“Can you make bread?” he asked when Mollie trotted into the kitchen, fresh and eager-looking in a lavender-checked print dress.
Prowling round shelves against the wall, she lifted pie dishes, milk tins, saucepans. Every second one had a hole in, and some were plugged with scraps of dirty rag. She sniffed and explored.
“You see,” Hugh apologized, “mother was a bit mean about these sort of things. She didn’t know quite what I would do. We’ll make a list and send down for all the new things you want.”
Mollie’s face lighted.
“I’ll make it while you’re away,” she replied promptly. “You’ll see how different the kitchen will look presently. You won’t know the place.”
“The gins will do all the hard work, scrubbing and washing,” Hugh said. “Meenie knows what mother did, or Coonardoo. But they’ll do just what you tell them. Be firm, and then carry on as if you were having rather a good joke together.”
Hugh went off a few minutes later. Mollie saw him riding with the boys towards hills which looked as if they had been dipped in a blue-bag.
She set to work to put her kitchen to rights. She had spent so much time working in other people’s kitchens, washing their dishes, scrubbing their floors. And this great barn of a place was her kitchen, filthy and ramshackle as it was, no curtain on the window, glass cracked and quite out of one square, no newspaper on the shelves. “No nothing,” as Mollie put it to herself.
Whatever else Hugh’s mother was, she wasn’t much of a housekeeper, Mollie decided. She might have been able to run a station; but Mollie bet herself, any money she liked, she would run rings round Mrs Bessie, housekeeping.
And fancy having so many servants! Elated at the thought of her dignity, Mollie bustled the gins about as Mrs Armstrong had bustled her about so often. On the whole she was rather glad Mrs Armstrong had bustled her; insisted on her doing things properly. She would show Hugh how a house should be run, and the gins too, Mollie promised herself. This slow, lazy, go-as-you-please way of doing things would not suit her.
For the first time in her life Mollie had a sense of ownership. Her proprietorship in this kitchen, these pots and pans, was a new sensation. It was her kitchen, these were her pots and pans. Mollie was very proud of herself, disdaining them, sending them to the rubbish heap, ordering the gins about, getting their wide eyes of awe and amazement, hearing their exclamations.
All day she spring-cleaned the kitchen enthusiastically, giving herself and the girls only time for a cup of tea and some bread and butter at midday.
Hugh left her keys for the hut of mud bricks with a thatched roof, at a little distance from the homestead, and Mollie had jingled the keys importantly and gone down to the store, taking Coonardoo with her, to show where things were.
The store had been a revelation.
“Why, it’s a shop, isn’t it?” she exclaimed delightedly when the big key Coonardoo fitted into a huge lock grated and groaned; the barred door swung back.
“Wiah!” Coonardoo breathed anxiously, as Mollie stepped into the store.
“Why, what is it?” Mollie hesitated on the threshold, realizing the warning and fear in the girl’s exclamation.
“Koodgeeda.” Coonardoo gasped. “Koodgeeda lie down here.”
“Oh!” Mollie understood. It was better to wait in the doorway until her eyes were accustomed to the dark of the windowless hut after the brilliant sunshine out of doors.
Taking a long stick from the outside wall, Coonardoo beat the floor. Mollie heard the thatch rustle as a snake slipped away through the roof.
She remembered Hugh had warned her, “Be careful when you go down to the store. It hasn’t been opened for a long time, and sometimes a stray snake or two goes to sleep down there.”
Mollie was terrified of snakes. She did not know whether she would go into the store after all. But Coonardoo walked into the hut on her bare feet, and glanced back, smiling, as if to say, “It’s all right. You may come in now.”
Once in, Mollie was thrilled by the store. It was a shop really, a little shop in the dark, very dirty and badly arranged — shirts and men’s blue trousers hanging up all together; rows and rows of tins in gaudy wrappers, jam, cocoa, coffee, tomato sauce, fish, along the wall; bags and bins of flour, sugar and tea piled at one end.
Mollie was thoroughly pleased to think that a shop went with a station. She understood the shop better than the station, and looking about, promised herself a good time arranging and putting it in order when the house had been disposed of. Meanwhile, she was a little chary of putting her hands among the bales and packages, not knowing when a swift, gleaming body might not slip from among them.
“Salt and whitewash,” she told Coonardoo. “And what’s that? Green paint? Let’s have some of that too.”
Coonardoo foraged for and found the salt. She took a tin of green paint from a high shelf. But “whitewash”, she shook her head, smiling, and trying to tell Mollie that came from a creek bed some distance away. You pounded the soft limestone to dust, and mixed it with water. She would send the children for some.
Mollie did not quite understand; but nodded her head, realizing Coonardoo knew what she wanted and would get it for her.
Thrusting her hand into a tin which held nuts and raisins, Coonardoo brought out a handful and held them to Mollie with eyes which gleamed and laughed, as much as to say, “See this is where the treasure is hidden!”
Mollie took a raisin, and shook her head.
“No, you eat the rest.” she said.
Coonardoo’s slim fingers curled over the nuts and raisins. She did not eat them herself, but clutched them carefully. Later, Mollie heard her calling children from the uloo, and saw her giving the nuts and raisins to Charmi and Beilaba.
Two old women had come over from the uloo and asked for tobacco and gina-ginas. Mollie did not know what to do about them. Coonardoo scolded angrily and sent them away again.
She helped Mollie to carry the salt, green paint, coffee, cocoa, jam and tinned fish they had raided from the store.
Very pleased with herself and her possessions, Mollie walked over the rough stony earth to the house again, thinking how homey it looked, crouched there among dark shrubs on the red earth, against the background of tumbled blue hills, trees, thick and curled, in dense scrub upon them. The kurrajongs in a row beside the fence had fluttering crests of light-green leaves. No other homestead she had seen beyond Karrara looked as comfortable and homely.
But she was not so pleased when she found Meenie and Bandogera had taken advantage of her absence to have a smoke and yarn together at the wood-heap; and scrubbing of the kitchen floor was not much farther on than it had been an hour before.
When Hugh came in towards sunset the gins were hosing the veranda and Mollie putting the last of a few pieces of crockery and enamel-ware, considered worthy, back on the shelves. From the heavy sullen faces of Meenie and Bandogera Hugh guessed what had happened. He stood, head flung back, laughing at them, as he stepped on to the veranda.
“Nabi, silly cowa-cowa! Look at the sun!” he exclaimed, pretending that they had forgotten it was time to stop work. “Finish ’em quick feller, and come along for tucker.”
As the gins scuttled away, taking the hose and brooms, Mollie came from the kitchen, conscious somehow of having done the wrong thing.
“Oh, Lord, womanie,” Hugh explained, “we never work them as late as this. After midday, as a rule, they never do a tap.”
“But, Hugh,” Mollie protested. He saw the kitchen behind her newly whitewashed, the shelves with their newspaper runners cut and fringed, Coonardoo still arranging dishes and plates on the dresser.
“My word, you have been going the pace!” he exclaimed.
Mollie was not sure he was altogether pleased, but she was too satisfied with her effort to have room for wondering how Hugh felt about it. Naturally, she thought, he would not like things altered, upset. But she intended to be boss in her own kitchen. She had made up her mind about that.
“Everything was in an awful mess. I’ll get the place to rights gradually,” she apologized.
Hugh’s sympathy and compassion welled as he kissed her.
“You’re a brick,” he said.
But he laughed as he had on the veranda when, turning to Coonardoo, Mollie said, with a lofty air, “That will do, you may go now.”
Coonardoo said, “Yes, ma’am.” And with a dignity and grace, inimitable, turned away and went out of the kitchen.
Hugh laughed as though that were the best joke he had ever heard.
“What’s the matter?” Mollie inquired.
“You can’t have her calling you that,” Hugh explained.
“What?”
“Why, ‘ma’am’. The whole countryside will have a fit.”
A shade of that obduracy which was the bedrock of Mollie’s character set on her face.
“I didn’t think there was anyone in the countryside to have a fit. Besides —”
“They’d soon know at Nuniewarra, and you may be sure Sam Geary’d let everybody hear of it for hundreds of miles around,” Hugh said.
Mollie jerked herself away from the arm he had thrown across her shoulder.
“Two old women came down to the store when I was there and said, ‘Gib it gina-gina, Mullie,’” she explained. “And I said, ‘Here, you mustn’t call me Mullie.’ I didn’t know what to tell them to call me, so I said, ‘You say ma’am.’ When Coonardoo and the others started to Mullie me, I told them to say, ‘Yes, ma’am! No, ma’am!’ when they spoke to me, like I had to say to my mistress.”
“I see.” Hugh understood, and very tenderly went about soothing the wounded pride which had gone into this explanation.
“But we don’t feel like that out here,” he said. “The blacks always called my mother Mumae, because they used to hear me calling her mummy, I suppose, when I was a kid. But Mumae means father in their dialect, too, and mother was proud of their name for her. It meant mother and father really. And they’ve always called me You, or Youie. I’ve grown up with most of them … besides, I don’t know any man in the Nor’-West who works his own place doesn’t like to be called his Christian name by the blacks. We sling off at the man who makes his abos ‘sir’ or ‘boss’ him. He’s a new-chum, or a sleeping partner.”
“What are they to call me then?” Mollie inquired. “I never heard of a woman’s servants calling her by her Christian name.”
“But these people are not servants,” Hugh told her, “not in the ordinary way. We don’t pay them, except in food, tobacco, clothing. Treat them generously, feed them well, give them a bit of pain-killer or a dose of castor oil when they’ve got a bingee ache, and they’ll do anything in the world for you. But you must never work them too hard — specially gins. They’re not made for hard work, can’t stand it. Look at their little hands. Coonardoo’s — I’ve never seen any woman with as pretty little hands as Coonardoo’s.”
Mollie stared at him curiously, her brows lowering. She could see her idea of a nice orderly home threatened; but she was not beaten. She intended to be mistress in her own house. She did not mean Mrs Bessie’s way of doing things to rule Wytaliba for ever. But she would go warily.
“Anybody been through while I was away?” Hugh asked Warieda, who had come to the kitchen for the blacks’ ration of meat and flour.
“Sam Geary and Cock-Eyed Bob come with Saul one time,” Warieda replied. “Sam got motor-car. Sheba drive ’m.”
“He has, has he? A car?” Hugh cut chunks of the dark wooden-looking meat. “What did he want here, anyhow?”
Hugh had heard about Geary’s car, and that he had taught Sheba to drive, so that when he was drunk she could take the wheel and deposit him wherever he wanted to go.
“Oh, just walk about. See everything all right.”
The black was grinning. He knew as well as Hugh how Geary hankered after Wytaliba; how he had been scheming for years to get possession of the place.
“Want you to go over and do some horse-breaking for him?”
Warieda nodded.
“And you wouldn’t go, Warri?”
The black shook his head.
“Wiah!” he said. “Tell ’m Wytaliba boy. You comin’ close-up now.”