Mellow light lay on the plains; the red wall of the ridge had mists, azure and magenta, in its broken sides, the evening Coonardoo coming down from the little well, a smoke-blackened kerosene bucket of water on her head, stopped suddenly, and glanced behind her as though someone had called.
Tall and straight, in her blue gina-gina, dark as the hills, she stood listening.
“Car comin’!” she called.
Hugh rose from the chair on the veranda in which he had been stretching, and looked out across the plains. He heard the distant hum and bluster of a car; its rattle and burr, as it crossed the creek stones, two miles away, climbed the opposite bank and turned towards the homestead.
Children from the uloo were running out to open the lower gate. As the car swung in, Coonardoo knew it was not Sheba driving; nor was Geary in the car. Hugh himself exclaimed.
The car, heavy with dust and way-worn, rocked over the pebbles. A woman was driving. When it came to a standstill before the veranda, Hugh went down to meet her, and, to his surprise and consternation a girl looked out at him.
“Give you three,” she cried, as he stood before her, “and you won’t guess who I am.”
She jumped out of the car, hatless, a fawny-grey dust-coat over a dress the same colour. Hugh glimpsed naked-looking silken-clad legs and a short frock. There was a suitcase in the car. She had come to stay, no doubt. Her black hair was straight, and cut like a boy’s; she had greyish-green eyes; there was something vaguely familiar about her mouth and jaw.
“Phyllis!” It was Coonardoo who uttered the little cry; and the girl turned to her.
Standing at a little distance from Hugh, Coonardoo’s eyes were filled with joy.
“Coonardoo,” Phyllis cried, “of course you would know.”
She went up to Hugh, put her arms round his neck, and kissed him. “I’ve come to stay with you, Youie! Bolted? Yes … All by myself. How many thousand miles is it from Perth? Thought I’d never get here. Was bogged on the Gascoyne. But, Lord, I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. It’s been great fun, everybody’s been so kind telling me the tracks, and I smelt my way along from Nuniewarra. Every inch of the road was familiar. Felt I knew it all the time —”
“Phyllis, Phyllis,” Hugh murmured, unable to accustom himself to the idea that this was his daughter, this pretty young thing who had, if she was to be believed, motored over a thousand miles to see him.
“A cup of tea would save my life,” Phyllis told Coonardoo.
Coonardoo turned and went back to the house. Putting her arm through Hugh’s Phyllis steered him to the veranda, flopped into one of the big chairs there, felt in the pocket of her coat for a cigarette case, and took out a cigarette, while Hugh gazed at her, too bewildered and at a loss to offer a match. She lit up, crossed her legs and smiled at him.
“There, that’s how it’s done, You darling,” she said. “If you want to see a parent bird you haven’t seen for years and are rather devoted to, nick a car, and — make your own arrangements. Say you’re glad to see me. I don’t believe you are, but —”
“Of course, you know, my dear, you can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, well,” Hugh hesitated, “of course, they’ve told you the sort of old blackguard I am … Living here with a gin … all that sort of thing.”
“Do you?”
Phyllis looked him over, her young eyes reading more than anyone had done in Hugh’s, an obscure principle for which he was immolating himself. She found something heroic and absurd about him; his stoutish figure, round pink face and greying hair. Stupid and sentimental she thought he might be; but altogether lovable in his humility and stand-offishness.
“Wytaliba’s not a fit place for a young girl these days.” There was bitterness in the slow gentleness of Hugh’s voice.
“You think it’s fitter down there?” Phyllis asked. “I’m fed up with it all, daddy. You don’t know how fed up. I really can’t stand it any longer, being cooped among houses, your eyes full of walls, walls and walls. I’ve ached to be home again. I’m sick for Wytaliba really.”
What queer happy dream was it, Hugh wondered, to hear his girl talking like this? As she lay back in the chair, she looked as she said, as if she had been sick for the country. Her eyes, wandering over the plains, took in their vastness, the silence, with an expression he understood.
“I’ve always wanted to come back. You don’t know how I’ve wanted to come back. I love being here.”
“Yes.” Hugh remembered her spirit.
“Mum wouldn’t let me come. She likes living in town, of course. So do the girls. And you didn’t answer my letters, so I just saved all the money I could get hold of for petrol and repairs — and here I am.”
“By God …” Hugh gazed at her admiringly.
“Sent mum a wire to say I’d taken the loan of her car to come and see you,” Phyllis went on, smiling. “You see, dad, it was the only way. You don’t know how awful it is tracking round with her, these days …”
Hugh smiled his sympathy and amusement.
“Five of us, and mum always trying to marry us off — me particularly. And I won’t be married off. I loathe every young man she trots along and is nice to. If a man speaks to me she’s so nice to him I could kill him, I hate him so. The married men aren’t so bad … I can bear them because they don’t think you want to marry them. I get on with them, well enough — too well … that’s the worst of it …”
Phyllis knocked the ash from her cigarette, doubting whether to go farther in this confidence.
“Your mother’s rather a social success, I understand?” Hugh’s eyes had a quizzical gleam.
“She’s on every charity ball committee,” Phyllis told him. “We hang round Government House, cadge race tickets and theatre passes — dance, play bridge, tennis, golf. Cora makes her own frocks, and ours sometimes. She’s pretty … everybody likes her. But I can’t sew … am damned useless in the whole business, dad. It makes me mad to play bridge in the afternoon. I smoke myself sick, lose my money, and when Garry Macquarrie suggests a sail on the river, or out to the islands, I’m so grateful —”
“Garry Macquarrie?” Hugh tried to remember and associate the name.
“Ever hear of him?”
“Garath Macquarrie? I’ve heard of him, all right.”
The reputed millionaire, owner of a string of popular stores, a racing stable and considerable interests in mining properties, had recently been divorced by his wife on sensational evidence, to the tune of handsome alimony.
“Oh, yes,” Phyllis exclaimed lightly. “Garath Macquarrie! I’ve been getting myself talked about, as they say, with him. Garry’s such a damned fascinating man … Oh, well, the end was in sight, old dear, when a girl I know rather well …”
Hugh was looking so pained and uncomfortable, Phyllis faltered. It was funny to feel so sorry for him. She laughed; the flow of her confidence veered inconclusively.
“She told a few tales about Garry — and here I am.” She hesitated, then went on, “I’ve always thought of you as more like a decent sort of elder brother than a father. I ought to have been a boy really. I hate this female life so. Let me knock round with you?”
Hugh felt a host of new and tender sentiments stirring.
“You could —” he began.
“I couldn’t,” Phyllis interrupted, “stay in at the house and look after the cooking. I want to be out and away with you. Do you remember the times you took me out camping in the To-Morrow? I’m as strong as a bullock really. If I were a boy you’d let me. And I ought to have been your eldest son.”
“There’s Winni,” Hugh said.
“Oh, yes.” The thought did not disturb Phyllis. “Well, won’t you do as much for me as you do for him? He goes everywhere with you, they tell me. Let me knock round like that. Forget I’m a girl. How would you have liked it if grandmother had wanted you to stay in Perth, go to the uni, be a lawyer or doctor, or something?”
“I wouldn’t have stayed.”
“Well, I won’t.”
In the silence between them the windmills clanked, Phyllis could hear water gushing into troughs beside the outer fence where horses and cattle came to drink. A flock of white cockatoos rose from a patch of earth beyond the garden fence and wheeled, the flakes of their white wings sequined and glittering against the twilight sky, as they flew to roost in one of the creek gums.
“There she is!” Phyllis rose, looking after the white cockatoos. “If you knew how I love them! Do you know what mum says?”
Hugh waited for her to go on.
Phyllis played her trump card.
“I get all this hankering after Wytaliba … the life here, to be with you, from her.”
Hugh’s eyes had all the stirred tenderness of his new emotion. It was as if the gay and lovely companion he had dreamt of in his youth had been given to him when he was past hoping for her. And that she should be his own daughter!
“Your grandmother liked being here,” he said.
“And to think of her having made the place, worked it and given it to you, like it was.” Phyllis looked out over the plains, where the moon rising was like a fire on the mulga. Round and golden, dinged on one side, it came slowly over the dark of the trees.
“I’ve always felt I ought to be a son to you, for her sake, dad. I’ve wanted to be. And all I’ve done is drain all the money I could out of you … with mother and the girls. Think of it, all the years you’ve been up here, through the heat and the droughts — slaving for us! And all we’ve ever done is squeeze you for every penny we could get — to play the fool, drink, dance, chatter … Oh, it makes me mad!”
“The place is heavily mortgaged, my girl,” Hugh said, “and every day things seem to be getting worse instead of better. I had to write to your mother — explain to her that her allowance would have to be cut down.”
“I know, that’s why I came. Do you know what I’ve been dreaming?” Phyllis’s voice was very eager. “That I can do what grandmother did, help you to make the place again — throw off the mortgage.”
Hugh smiled into the young face which was so serious now.
“You’ve got her spirit, Phyll. There’s more of my father in me. I haven’t half the grit she had …”
Phyllis took possession of the big bare room which the little girls had regarded as theirs. It still held the chest of drawers made from fruit boxes, with a faded cretonne curtain sagging along a string in front of it. The pegs on which their small clothes had hung were still screwed beside the window, and some of Phyllis’s and Cora’s first alphabet scratchings in coloured chalks, and drawings of birds and pointed houses with smoke coming out of the chimneys, stalked gaily across the pale-green wash on the walls. The bullock-hide stretcher, on which any stray man who was passing through Wytaliba had slept since the children went away, stood ready with clean sheets and pillow-cases as Coonardoo always kept it.
“But you can’t stay here. You can’t stay here,” Hugh groaned as he looked round the bare, shabby room, bringing Phyllis’s suitcase in and putting it beside the box cupboard with a small square wooden-framed mirror on top.
Phyllis sat down on the seat under the wide-open windows at the end of the room.
“The trouble is, my dear,” she said, “you can’t get rid of me — unless you want me to make that trip to the Argentine Garry’s been suggesting.”
Hugh gazed, confounded and aghast, at the young, pretty thing before him — his daughter — who looked more like a good-looking, rather effeminate boy, with her short hair and long slender legs.
Phyllis took a comb-case from the pocket of her coat, pulled a little comb from its gold-monogrammed tortoiseshell case and raked back the wave of her black hair. Then she went up to Hugh, put her arms round his neck and kissed him.
“We’re going to be cobbers, old dear, aren’t we?” she begged. “I’m going to work with you, learn to run the place like gran did.”
Hugh stared at her abashed and wondering. He admired her so, was so touched by her way with him. A passion of tenderness gripped and shook him.
“It seems too good to be true,” he said. “Wytaliba’s your home. You’ll stay here as long as you want to — of course. I’ll try to make the place fit for you, Phyllis.”