2

Early next morning Warieda and Chitali brought in two fresh horses for Sam Geary’s buggy, and it was there in front of the veranda again.

Meenie carried out the little black tin box which contained all the clothes Mrs Bessie had been making Hugh for months, and put it in the buggy. Mrs Bessie came out, and Hughie in a suit of navy blue serge, a round felt hat and boots with tabs which stuck out behind, strutted after her. Very grand he looked in his boots and new clothes, saying good-bye to everybody.

Wanna, Mick, Bardi and Coonardoo were there to see him drive away; Joey Koonarra, as well as Bandogera, Bardi’s Polly, Pinja and old Gnardadu, grandmother of the tribe.

Sam Geary swaggered out from the dining-room where he had been having breakfast, Cock-Eyed Bob beside him, a slight boyish figure in dust-stained moleskins, white shirt and the Ashburton felt and spurs, he slept in, some folks said. Sam carried himself jauntily, with an air of being master of the situation. A tall man of thirty or thereabouts, bullock shouldered, buff-coloured shirt open half down its length and moleskins the same colour tight on his thighs, tin match-box, clasp-knife and pipe on his belt, he slouched as he walked, bow-kneed, in the way of a horseman.

Sun-scorched, almost raw his face looked under the felt hat he had slammed down over his thin gingery hair; his eyes, bulbous, pale blue, stared from under pink slatted lids with straight fair eyelashes. A brush of coarse gingery hair hid his mouth, except the thick upper thrust of the lower lip and tufts of hair sprouted from the nostrils of his big sunburnt nose.

“Well, Mr Geary, I’m very much obliged to you,” Mrs Bessie said.

“Don’t mention it, missus,” Geary replied. “Got to go south meself, and might as well take the young shaver. Bob’ll look after you until our horses are spelled a bit. Then he’s going out prospectin’ in the To-Morrow. Reckons he can smell gold out there, and’ll be making our fortunes one of these days.”

“That’s right,” Bob murmured abstractedly, one shoulder swung over, his head askew, as if already he were following a gleam under the surface of those tumbled hills north and east along Wytaliba boundaries.

Sam lit his pipe, Warieda and Chitali stood at the horses’ heads. Sam undid the reins knotted about the dash-board, gripped them in his hard sun-flayed hands and stepped carefully into the buggy. Mrs Bessie kissed Hugh and hoisted him over the wheel to his seat beside Sam. Sam’s boy climbed in over the other wheel.

“Let ’m go!” Sam shouted.

The horses swayed and tussled with the traces; the big chestnut reared and plunged, threw himself about; but Sam Geary knew how to handle horses. He let them play; then they sprang forward and out, and in a few moments, buggy, horses, Hugh, Sam Geary and Arra were no more than a feather of red dust on the plains, against a sky, mother-of-pearling, in the early light.

Coonardoo, who ran down to shut the gate in the fence below the garden and windmill, after the buggy had passed through, stood to watch the last swirl of dust through the trees, at the creek crossing. The sun, rising, burnished their green and golden tips. White cockatoos flew out screeching and floated to feed on the plains, as the buggy scuttled over stones in the bed of the creek.

What was there in saying good-bye to a small boy that should drive the light and living out of a woman’s eyes, Cock-Eyed Bob wondered. Mrs Bessie’s eyes were hard and blue as the winter skies when she stood staring over the plains at that gap in the trees where the buggy had been.

“Oh, well,” she gasped sturdily, “they’ll get the mail at Karrara all right, I suppose, Bob. And I’ve warned Paddy Hanson to look after Hughie if Sam does get on a bender. Paddy’ll keep an eye on Hughie and hand him over to Captain Frenssen, who is an old friend of mine. The school people will meet the boat.”

“That’s right,” Bob murmured awkwardly.

Coonardoo had come to stand beside Meenie and the rest of the gins. The blankness of the world about her Mrs Bessie saw in Coonardoo’s eyes.

“We’ll miss Hughie, won’t we, Coonardoo?” she said.

“Eeh-mm.”

If ever mute devouring love lay in mortal eyes it lay in Coonardoo’s. Mrs Bessie realized a suffering and endurance as great as her own. The child’s shadowy eyes, her air of a faithful deserted animal, sprang a train of thought which had been haunting Mrs Bessie, hovering in the background of her mind for a long time.

She could see into the years before her, years and years, stretching mistily, filling her with fear and illimitable anguish; years which she could not touch or control, so beyond her they stretched, her son in them, man-grown, herself unable to help, reach, or care for him, so distant she had become. But the child beside her, she would be there: she could be with Hugh.

A year older, Coonardoo had looked after and played with Hugh when he was little; soon dominated by and obedient to him. Glad of a playmate for her boy, Mrs Bessie taught Coonardoo to read, write and count, as she taught Hugh.

A shy, graceful little creature of more than usual intelligence, Mrs Bessie had thought Coonardoo. But now she looked at the child as if she found something of greater value in her. Mrs Bessie prided herself on treating her blacks kindly, and having a good working understanding with them. She would stand no nonsense, and refused to be sentimental, although it was well known she had taken the affair of Maria to heart. Ted Watt was as good-natured a man as stepped, until he got drunk, everybody agreed. But he could not stand liquor, went mad, ran amuck like an Afghan, or a black, when he had got a few drinks in.

Few people knew what had happened about Maria, except Mrs Bessie, and she held her tongue. The blacks said Ted had shot Maria’s dog and she was badgee with him about it, back-answered and refused to do something he told her when he was drunk. He had kicked her off the veranda. Maria died a few days afterwards; no more was heard of her. And as Ted walked over the balcony of a hotel in Karrara and was killed, a month or so later, the blacks believed justice had been done.

After Ted’s death, Mrs Bessie continued to run Wytaliba. As a matter of fact, everybody knew she had been responsible for management and working of the station, ever since she and Ted bought out Saul Hardy.

Sam Geary liked to think and boasted that Mrs Bessie consulted him upon occasions. But he knew she was shrewd enough to manage her own affairs. He never doubted that it was she, and not Ted, who had snavelled Wytaliba under his nose, and Geary was willing to admit he would swap the million and a half acres of Nuniewarra for Wytaliba, any day in the week.

Mrs Bessie had her head screwed on the right way, there was no denying it, although why she married Ted Watt no one could imagine. A schoolteacher in Roebourne, she had taken up with Ted and gone off droving with him. They knocked about the Nor’-West a long time together, droving and carting from the coast to stations and scattered mining settlements along the Ashburton, the Fortescue and the De Grey.

“Ted was as rough as bags,” Geary said; “a good-looking, good-natured bloke who could neither read nor write. Mrs Bessie taught him to make pot-hooks.”

She had an idea if they got a place of their own she could keep him away from the pubs, and used her eyes as they wandered up and down the country. When she made Ted give up droving she planked down all the money they had saved for years to take over Saul Hardy’s lease of a million acres between the Nungarra hills on the west, To-Morrow ranges on the east and tributaries of the coastal rivers north and south.

Saul Hardy had lost three thousand head of cattle, and was short of whisky when Mrs Bessie made her bargain, wrote a cheque for a couple of hundred pounds, took over his liabilities and promised another couple of hundred when that was done. She brought out her papers and made Saul sign the contract before he had time to change his mind.

Ted could never have worked out, and brought off, a deal like that. The country was dead and dry for hundreds of miles, even the mulga dying; the drought had broken Saul Hardy, to be sure. But Mrs Bessie knew what she was doing. She had seen those plains, a flowing sea of grass and herbage; and believed the good seasons would come again. And they did, bringing Saul with them. He could never live anywhere else, he said. His roots were in Wytaliba and he wanted to die there. Mrs Bessie and Ted told him to make himself at home, come and go as he pleased. He took them at their word, and spent most of his time camped on the veranda, or in a room Mrs Bessie earmarked for him.

Over eighty and deaf, Saul prowled about the garden and yards doing little odd jobs as he pleased. He had brought cattle west from the Queensland border in the early days, and tramped up and down the Nor’-West, droving, and loading stores. As a young man he spent all the money he made on sprees in the coastal towns, and went off into the back-country again when his cheque gave out. Later he had taken up that stretch of Wytaliba country, and started running cattle; but he was not cut out for a squatter, Saul himself said. He had been a rolling stone too long to sit down in one place, breed cattle and wait for them to grow.

“A rolling stone gathers no moss,” he said, “but a sitting hen loses feathers.” Now he was old and could roll no more, his only desire was to sit down on Wytaliba and moult peacefully.

A stiff, creaking figure, he mooched about as if the place belonged to him still; and everybody, Mrs Bessie most of all, humoured him and sought his advice. She was glad enough to have him there after Ted’s death; liked to tap old Saul’s knowledge and experience of the country, and to get him yarning, in the evening, as he did, sometimes, smoking, and legs stretched along the veranda.

But Coonardoo — Mrs Bessie came back from her far thinking to the child standing holding Meenie’s hand before her.

Meenie loved Coonardoo as Mrs Bessie loved Hugh, although Coonardoo was not her child; but the little girl whom Warieda, her husband, would one day take to be his woman, as Meenie herself was. In the meantime Meenie had taken the place of her mother to Coonardoo.

Coonardoo’s mother — they no longer spoke her name in the uloo, which indicated that she was dead. There was a mound, with bark and a small close fence of sticks round it, on the other side of the creek, where her people had laid Maria.

“We’ll take Coonardoo into the house, Meenie, and teach her to be a good house-girl,” Mrs Bessie said.

Meenie’s dark eyes lighted with pleasure. There was no better, more faithful woman on Wytaliba than Meenie, and Mrs Bessie knew that Meenie would think it an honour for Coonardoo to be taught to sweep and wash dishes beside her, so soon. Both were fair-haired, full-blooded aborigines of the Gnarler tribe. Bandogera, Mrs Bessie’s other house-girl, whose people came from the other side of the To-Morrow ranges, had thick dark brown hair; but Meenie’s hair was tow-coloured and dark only at the roots. Coonardoo’s hair, soft, and wavy when it had just been washed, grew dull golden, like wind-grass out on the plains.

Mrs Bessie had wondered at these fair-headed aboriginal women when she first came across them, thinking they were half-castes or had some white blood. She was satisfied after a while that, as far as anybody knew, they were native; among tribes which had no contact with white people there were fair-haired women. She had seen black babies with mops of golden curls, though to be sure, as a rule, the hair darkened as the children grew older. Coonardoo had been a baby like that — and all aboriginal babies are honey-coloured when they are born. Their skins darken with exposure to the air and sunshine, so that by the time they are toddling, the cooboos are as bronzed and gleaming as pebbles lying on the red earth: but their hair darkens more slowly. Mrs Bessie thought that when the women washed their heads every day, as her house-girls did, their hair remained fair longer.

Every morning, after that, Coonardoo came up from the uloo at dawn with Meenie and Bandogera; scrubbed her head with the crude soap of fat and wood-ashes Mrs Bessie made; showered in the shed beside the big windmill, put on a fresh blue gina-gina, and went into the kitchen. Mrs Bessie herself taught her how to wash dishes with boiling water, making the soap froth and foam; sweep the veranda and bedrooms, dining-room and sitting-room. At first Coonardoo laughed and gurgled, as if it were great fun, this new game she was playing. Then she missed the other children, ran off to play with them when they came near the house, or chased Mrs Bessie’s white hens, forgetting to finish washing the dishes, or that there was a room she should have swept out and dusted.

Mrs Bessie spoke sharply: and when Coonardoo soiled one of her new gina-ginas turning somersaults in the garden with Bardi and Wanna, she was really displeased.

Coonardoo was slow and lazy, there was no doubt about it. She did not scrub the tables quite clean, or sew as neatly as she might have done.

“You’re a bad, wicked, naughty little girl, Coonardoo,” Mrs Bessie scolded. “If you won’t do things properly, you had better not do them at all.”

Coonardoo hung her head, scowling and sulky, eyes averted.

“What’s the good of trying to teach you, if you don’t want to learn?” Mrs Bessie asked irritably. “And goodness knows who’s to look after Hugh when I’m gone!”

Coonardoo’s eyes slanted in her direction, and away, at that.

“Of course,” Mrs Bessie said, “that’s why I want to train and teach you, all I can. Meenie and I can’t live for ever. And who’s to look after Hugh then? He’ll marry some day, I suppose; but even so, I’d like to think he had some good faithful soul to look after him. Meenie’s been that to me. If you’re only half as good to Hugh …”

As if they had made a new compact, Coonardoo went steadily about her jobs after that, no longer chasing the hens, sitting to sing under the white blossom-tree, or running off to play with Bardi and Wanna, in the morning, when she should have been busy in the house.

All day she worked beside Mrs Bessie, down at the store, in the garden, or up at the sheds mending harness and saddles, tanning skins, making soap; and at sunset she went off to the uloo with Meenie and Bandogera. Mrs Bessie in the big empty house worked at accounts, wrote letters, read for a while, yarned with Saul Hardy, or lay back to plan out her manoeuvres for the station that year and years ahead. Coonardoo saw the yellow eye of Mumae’s light winking out into the night as she sat singing with her people beside their fires in the uloo.

Coonardoo would not have cared to sleep like that by herself, and every night she looked up at the white house under the starry night sky, fearful for Mumae that a narlu, or unknown evil, might swoop on her when no one was near. She was always glad to find Mrs Bessie safely in bed in the morning; pleased to stand beside her with a cup of tea before she wakened.

And Mrs Bessie was really fond of the little girl. She confessed it to herself. Imperceptibly, on quiet naked feet, with her shadowy, steadfast eyes, Coonardoo had come into a blank place in Mrs Bessie’s life, a place of hunger and desolation. She set her teeth and determined to go on with the plan she had made; but for the first time in her life the yearning and ache of loneliness threatened her. She had been glad to interest herself in the child; was grateful for the eager, alert way Coonardoo tried to follow her will and interpret her wishes.

After a while it was recognized that wherever Mumae went Coonardoo went. The first time she rode out on a muster, after Hughie had gone to school, Mrs Bessie told Chitali to bring in Hera for Coonardoo to ride, and Coonardoo went with her.

By and by Mumae read Coonardoo bits from letters the schoolmaster at Stratford wrote to her about Hugh. He was quite smart at his lessons, but a bit homesick it seemed. When Hugh’s letters came, a year or so later, she read from these priceless epistles also. Once every three months Mrs Bessie sent Chitali or Warieda into Nuniewarra with letters and they brought back any mail there was for Wytaliba.

When the boys were expected in, Coonardoo watched the track over the plains, her eyes restless as birds’.

“Boys comin’,” she loved to cry and race out to bring in the bag with letters. The postmaster in Karrara plastered the bags with red seals which Coonardoo regarded as movins to protect Hugh’s letters from floods, winning-arras, or evil spirits, on their long journey over the hills and plains.

While Mumae was reading her letter from Hughie, Coonardoo would sit down on the floor at a little distance and watch her face. She read Mumae’s face as Mumae read Hugh’s letter, and knew from it whether Hugh was well and what he was doing.

Mumae would laugh and smile to herself, say, “Hughie kicked two goals in a match against High School,” or “Hugh’s training for the under-fourteen championship — whatever that might be!” Something to do with running, Mumae supposed. Coonardoo agreed. Youie could run, and a long way! Later Mrs Bessie looked more concerned over reports which came from the headmaster at Stratford. Hugh was not doing as well at school as he might have. He was not studious, Mr Potter explained, although strangely enough the subjects he paid most attention to were Greek history and Latin.

How Mrs Bessie laughed when Mr Potter wrote to say he had asked Hugh why he liked Greek history and Latin, and Hugh said, “Hector’s one of the horses up on our place and there’s Hera, Pluto, and old Diana —”

Coonardoo echoed Mrs Bessie’s laughter, although she did not know why it was funny Hughie should like the names of horses on Wytaliba. Mrs Bessie tried to explain that she had named Wytaliba horses after the gods, nymphs and heroes of Greek myth and history. Coonardoo did not understand. There was a good deal Mrs Bessie talked of that Coonardoo did not understand; but she liked to pretend she understood very well; and Mrs Bessie liked to pretend that Coonardoo understood. But happy as she was in the child’s companionship, never in any way would she attempt to interfere with, or alter, her native faiths: turn her from the customs of her people.

Mrs Bessie would not allow any Christianizing of the aborigines on Wytaliba. She had never seen a native who was better for breaking with his tribal laws and beliefs, she said. And as long as she lived, aborigines on Wytaliba should remain aborigines. For that reason, although all day Coonardoo was Mrs Bessie’s shadow, and learned to wait on and do everything for her, bring her tools, make her baths and her camp-fires, always at sunset she went off with her people and slept with the dogs by her father’s camp-fire.

The seasons were good, and Mrs Bessie was very busy all those years Hugh was away at school. She planned wells and stockyards with Charley Leigh.

The Leighs lived in a hut of corrugated iron Mrs Bessie had put up for them, at a little distance from the homestead; but most of the time Charley was well-sinking his wife camped out with him on the run.

Once a month Charley Leigh and his wife drove into the homestead for stores and Mrs Bessie kept them there, a day or two, wore her white dresses and made cakes for them, brought out her china cups and saucers and spread a white cloth on the table. She gossiped very happily with Mrs Leigh and sent her back to camp loaded up with magazines, newspapers, jam and dried fruits.

Before her first baby was born, Mrs Bessie brought Fanny Leigh into the homestead and looked after her until the youngster, a fine sturdy boy, was several weeks old. She talked wells and well-sinking with Charley half the night, costing and depths, and worked with him on a map she had made of Wytaliba, where wells ought to be sunk; where they could best be sunk. Mrs Bessie had a bee in her bonnet about wells, Charley said. It was the dream of her life to have Wytaliba honeycombed with wells.

Her dream had to keep pace with her purse. That was the worst of it; and she would not borrow money for developments. She was determined to pay off the mortgage and hand the station over to Hugh without “a monkey on it”. Meanwhile she worked with an energy and obstinacy which never flagged.

A wiry, restless figure in a pair of trousers, white shirt, and old hat of Ted’s, she rode everywhere, inspecting the wells and windmills Charley had made, mustering, droving, working her blacks with skill and wisdom. White stockmen she refused to have on the place, because she said they would only make trouble about their gins with Warieda and Chitali, who were the best stockmen in the country. Indefatigable, her resistless energy drove everything, everybody.

Coonardoo rode and worked with her. Wherever Mumae went Coonardoo went, and Coonardoo was a good horse-girl in no time. Coonardoo loved the cattle camps. The joy of her life was to ride out over the plains like that with the men and horses.

Mumae always took two or three gins with her when she went on a muster. Meenie looked after the packs and cooked in the camp while Wanna or one of the younger boys tailed the night horses. But Coonardoo would not stay in the camp, she liked to ride off through the wild ragged hills and pick up stray cattle. Warieda had plaited a whip and given it to her, because Coonardoo was to be his woman as soon as she was old enough. As a child she had been promised to him and sent to sleep at his fireside. In a year or so she would lie there always with him and Meenie.

Meenie had told Coonardoo, and talked to her so that Coonardoo was filled with pride and pleasant anticipation at the thought of being the wife of Warieda. Was he not a strong man, young fellow, good-looking and powerful, the best horse-breaker in the Nor’-West, everybody said. Only Mumae did not like the idea.

Coonardoo heard her talking to Meenie about it.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Mumae had said, “that child’s to be Warieda’s wife soon?”

“Eeh-mm,” Meenie murmured in her slow, tranquil fashion.

“And you don’t mind?”

Meenie did not understand.

“You’re not angry about it?”

“Wiah.” Meenie smiled, and talked away in her own language.

“She’s a pretty young girl and you’ve taught her to be a good wife to Warieda?”

Meenie nodded.

“Well, it’s a new idea and not a bad one, perhaps, Meenie,” Mrs Bessie declared crisply. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know, and you’ll always rule the roost, I suppose.”

Meenie smiled, pleased to have made herself clear to Mumae.

“Eeh-mm,” she agreed placidly.

But Mumae was not pleased. She would not accept Meenie’s point of view altogether. She had been careful not to interfere with her natives in any of their own ways and customs. She tried, rather, to leave them entirely to themselves in all that did not concern her. But Coonardoo — she could not accustom herself to the idea of the little girl marrying “a great brute like Warieda”, as she put it to herself.

“Well,” she said decisively, “I won’t have it. You tell Warieda I won’t have it. Not until she’s sixteen, at least —”

Meenie gasped; her eyes widened. She looked disturbed, foreseeing trouble.

“Very well,” Mrs Bessie said, “I’ll have a word with him.”

And a word she had, several words, standing up there by the stock-yards — a small sturdy woman in her white dress and a wide straw sun-hat — having looked at a mob of young horses Chitali, Warieda, and the boys had just turned into the yards.

“Warieda!” she called. The tall, handsome aboriginal with his dark and curling lashes swung over to her and stood looking down on her shyly. “They tell me you want Coonardoo. She’s straight for you?”

“Eeh-mm.” Warieda’s brown eyes looked Mumae in the face. Mrs Bessie realized a depth and strength in his wanting of Coonardoo. Realized, too, that Coonardoo was a more suitable wife for the young man than Meenie, who was so much older than he, old enough to be his mother.

“You know, Warieda” — Mrs Bessie found it more difficult than she had expected to say what she wished — “I am fond of Coonardoo. She is my own girl. You are fond of her too, I can see … I will give her to you. But the white people say it is not good to give a girl to her husband before she is fully grown.”

The dark face before her gloomed and hung, sullen and heavy.

“You are mulba, strong fellow, Warieda,” Mrs Bessie said. “Good man. I will give you a horse and new blankets … if you wait until Coonardoo’s sixteen.”

Warieda’s eyes lighted, he grinned good-humouredly. He was almost amused to see Mumae, the woman who was like a man, as he thought of her, so concerned and making terms with him.

“And I will give Coonardoo a horse,” Mumae said, “come three musters.” She held up her fingers. “Tarcoodee, bullock muster.”

Warieda understood he was to wait until after three bullock musters — for three years that was — for Coonardoo. Then Mumae would give him the horse and blankets with Coonardoo. He grinned obligingly.

Mrs Bessie was well pleased to have got her own way. She trotted back to the house where the gins were waiting and watching, having seen her talking to Warieda up there by the stockyards. She was not quite sure herself why she was so opposed to Warieda taking the girl. She did not object to the idea of Coonardoo being Warieda’s woman, but to his interfering with a plan she had made — a plan attaching Coonardoo to herself and Wytaliba. To take her away, give her children just yet, would have disturbed that. But Mrs Bessie had won the day; she was satisfied for the time being. Her shrewd busy brain went on with its scheming.