WHEN SUNSET CAME, Mary Dillon stood on the veranda of the homestead, watching the shadows lengthen across the brown land, the ridges turn from ochre to deep purple, the sun lapse slowly behind them out of a dust-red sky. It was the hour when she came nearest to peace, nearest to comfort in this alien, primeval country.
The days were a blistering heat when the thermometer on the door-post read a hundred and fifteen of shade temperature and the willy-willies raced across the home paddocks – whirling pillars of wind and sandstone grit. The nights were a chill loneliness, with the dingoes howling from the timber and the myalls chanting down by the river, and Lance snoring happily, oblivious of her terror. But in this short hour, which was neither dusk nor twilight, but simply a pause between the day and first stride of the dark, the land became gentle, the sky softened, and the bleached, neighbourless buildings took on the illusory aspect of home.
It would never be truly home to her. After three years of marriage to Lance Dillon and two visits to her family in Sydney, she knew it for a certainty. She was a city girl, born and bred to tiled roofs and trim lawns and the propinquity of people like herself. She needed a husband home at seven, pulling out of the driveway at eight-thirty in the morning, and a comforting domestic presence in between – not this brown man with the leathery strength and the distant eyes, gone for days at a time, then ambling homeward, dusty and saddle-weary, to demand her interest and her comfort and her encouragement in this bleak ambition of his.
Other women, she knew, made a life and a happiness for themselves in the outback country. They lived a hundred miles from the nearest neighbour, their only company the homestead lubras and the piccaninnies, their only visitors the policeman, the pilot of the mail-plane and the flying doctor. Yet when she heard them talking in the daily gossip session over the pedal radio network, she read the contentment in their voices and wondered why she had never been able to attain it. ‘Give it time,’ Lance had told her, in his calm, positive fashion. ‘Give it time and patience and you’ll grow to love it. It’s an old land, sweetheart – not old and used up like Europe, but old because the centuries have passed it by and the seas have cut it off from change. We’ve got birds and animals and plants you’ll find nowhere else in the world. The myalls – even the homestead blacks-are our last link with pre-history. But it’s new too. The soil has never seen a plough, the waters have never been dammed, and nobody’s even guessed at what’s under the surface. All we need is oil and we could explode into growth, like America, overnight. Isn’t it worth a little waiting and a little courage?’
When he talked like that, so strangely out of character for a hard-driving cattleman, she had never been able to resist him. So she smiled ruefully and submitted. But now, after three years, the land was still a stranger, and Lance, it seemed, was becoming a stranger too. He was gentle as ever, considerate in his casual fashion; but he seemed not to need her any more, because she had failed him as she had failed herself.
Soon she must face the question: what to do about it? This land demanded a wholeness. One could not love it with a divided heart, nor fight it with a defective relationship. A rifted rock split swiftly under the day-long heat and the bitter cold of the inland nights. A rifted marriage had as little chance of survival. A man with a discontented wife was beaten before he began. Her choice, therefore, was simple and brutal: make good the marriage promise of submission and surrender, or make an honest admission of defeat and go away, leaving the man and the land to work out their own harsh harmony.
Yet, for all the apparent simplicity of the equation, there was a subtler corollary. Given the submission and the surrender, was there love enough in her and understanding enough in him, to guarantee a permanence and an ultimate contentment?
Three years ago, when Lance Dillon had come striding into her life, bronzed, smiling, confident, a country giant in suburbia, she had had no doubts at all. This was a land-tamer, a man to walk deserts and watch them blossom under his boot-soles; a woman-tamer too, strong as a tree for shelter and support. Now, in another time and in a far country, he looked disappointingly different. The immensity of the land dwarfed him. Its harshness honed the humour out of him, as the winds scored the sandstone rocks and twisted the trees, so that their roots must thrust deeper into the hungry soil for nourishment and anchorage. But if the soil were dry and the root-hold shallow the tree would die, as a man would die if there were not love or strength enough to support him against the storm.
She had loved him once. She still loved him. But enough…? That was a hard question and she could not wait too long to answer it.
She shivered as the first chill of evening stirred in the wind, and walked into the house where the soft-footed lubras were bustling about the kitchen and laying the table for dinner. Tonight was an occasion – whether for cheerfulness or irony, depended on her. It was their wedding anniversary and Lance had promised to be home by sunset.
Normally, he paid little attention to wifely demands for punctuality, explaining patiently at first, and later with irritation, that in the territory no one could possibly live by the clock. It was big country, the herds were scattered. A man could travel only as fast as a tired horse; and horses fell lame, wandered in their hobbles or were taken with colic from cropping too long in the rank river grasses. She must expect him when he came and learn to be neither scared nor impatient and, above all, not to nag. A nagging woman was worse than saddle-galls to a bushman. More importantly, the stockboys had scant respect for a henpecked boss. They reasoned, accurately enough, that a man who could not control his woman, could hardly control his cattle or his men either.
But tonight – his eyes had brightened as he said it – yes, tonight was different. He would not go to the muster, but out to the valley, where the breeders were. He would be home by dark – give an hour, take an hour, in the fashion of the bush. Then he had kissed her and ridden off and the memory of the kiss was the one small light in the gathering darkness of doubt and disillusion. Perhaps tonight it would flare up into a renewal of passion, of hope for both of them.
In the dining-room, Big Sally, queen of all the house-women, was laying the last of the silver. She was married to one of the stockboys and her heavy body was swollen and shapeless with continued child-bearing. She was dressed in a black cotton frock with a starched apron over it, but her feet were bare and her broad, flat face incongruous under the white maid’s cap. She looked up, grinning, as Mary Dillon entered and said in her thick, husky voice: ‘All right, missus. Boss come soon, eh? Catch ’im bath, clean clothes. Eat good, drink good. Maybe this time make ’im piccaninny longa you?’ Her big body quivered as she went off into long gurgles of laughter and, in spite of herself, Mary laughed too.
‘Maybe, Sal. Who knows?’
The big lubra chuckled wheezily.
‘Boss know. Missus know. You dream ’im right, he come…’
She bustled out, with a slap of bare feet and a rustle of starched linen, while Mary Dillon stood looking down at the white napery and the bright silver so incongruous here in the middle of nowhere.
‘You dream ’im right, he come…’ The aborigines believed that, in the making of a child, the act of union was only the beginning, but that an enlivening spirit must be dreamed into the womb. Perhaps this was the lack between Lance and herself – the dreaming. They wanted a child, wanted it desperately, each for a different reason; she, because of the hunger for completion, the need to fill the loneliness in which she lived; he, for the promise of continuity, a son to carry on the conquest of the land, push out the frontiers and hold them against time and nature. But so far, it seemed, they had not dreamed right, and soon there might be no dreams left.
For want of anything better to do, she walked to the sideboard and began refilling the whisky decanter from Lance’s last bottle of Scotch. Then, almost without thinking, she poured a glass for herself, laced it with water and drank it slowly. It was cocktail-time in the city and this was her ritual commemoration of the life she had left behind. But there was defiance in it too – a small symbol of rebellion.
Once, in their first year of marriage, Lance had come home late to find her sitting by the fire with a drink at her elbow. He had frowned and then chided her, smiling:
‘Never drink with the flies, sweetheart. This is the wrong country for it. I’ve seen too many station wives hit the bottle because they’d slipped into the habit when they were lonely and bored. It’s not pretty to watch, believe me. If you want to drink, let’s drink together – and if we hang one on, there’s not much harm done.’
The insinuation angered her and she blazed out at him.
‘What do you expect me to do? Hang around for forty-eight hours waiting for you to come home for a cocktail? If you can’t trust me in a little thing like this, how can you trust me in the big ones?’
He was instantly contrite.
‘Mary, I didn’t mean it like that! I know this country better than you do. I understand how it can take people unaware. It’s – it’s like a half-tamed animal, strong, compelling, but dangerous too, if you don’t handle yourself carefully. That goes for men as well as women. The territory’s full of fellows who’ve gone native, or hit the bottle, or just simply surrendered themselves to the madness of solitude. We call ’em “hatters” – like the Mad Hatter at Alice’s tea-party. At first meeting, they’re normal enough, but at bottom, crazy as coots.’
His voice softened and he laid his gentle work-roughened hands on her shoulders.
‘I love you, Mary. I know these first years aren’t going to be easy for you. So, I try to warn you. That’s all.’
The touch of him and gentleness of him charmed the anger out of her, as it always did. But this time, she could not bring herself to surrender; and, each night, at the same time, she took one drink-no more, no less – in futile affirmation of her right to be herself.
Still carrying the drink, she walked into the living-room, sat down, picked up a month-old newspaper and began leafing through it idly. The news was as dead as if it had happened on another planet, but the gossip columns and the fashion plates piqued her to jealousy of the women who lived a walk away from stores and boutiques and the daily novelties of a city. Society in the territory was limited to a clatter of voices on the pedal-radio, a picnic race-meeting and a yearly dance afterwards on one of the larger properties, where the women wore frocks that had been in mothballs for a year and the men got cheerfully drunk round the drink-table, or danced stumbling and tongue-tied to an out-of-tune piano.
It was enough, perhaps, for the others-the weathered matrons, the leggy adolescents who had never seen a city; but for her, Mary Dillon, all too little.
Memories flooded back, soft, insidious, cajoling. The drink warmed her. The paper slipped unnoticed to the floor. She dozed fitfully in the chair.
Suddenly she was awake. Big Sally was shaking her gently and the clock on the mantel read 9.45. Big Sally looked at her with questioning eyes.
‘You eat now, Missus. Boss no come. Dinner all burn up finish!’
Anger took hold of her and she stood up, knocking over the glass so that it shattered on the floor. Her eyes blazed, her voice rasped hysterically.
‘Put the boss’s dinner in the oven. Give the rest to the girls. I’m going to bed!’
The dark woman watched her go with soft, pitying eyes, then shrugged philosophically and began to pick up the fragments of glass from the floor.
Mary Dillon hurried into the bedroom, slammed the door and threw herself on the bed, sobbing in bitterness and defeat. Lance had failed her, the country had defeated her. It was time to be quit of it all.
From his hide among the pandanus roots, Lance Dillon looked out across thirty yards of moonlit water to the myalls’ camp-fires on the beach. They were squatting on their haunches, roasting a quarter of meat from the slain bull, and the smell of burnt hair drifted across the water. Each man had built a small fire at his back and the flames leapt up, highlighting the corded muscles and the sleek skin of their shoulders and breasts.
Their weapons were laid on the sand and they seemed absorbed in their meal and their talk, but at every sound – the cry of a night-bird, the leap of a fish, they became tense and watchful; their eyes searched the river and their teeth shone like new ivory out of their shadowy faces. Dillon huddled back against the wall of the bank and cautiously daubed more mud on his face, lest a chance gleam of fire or moonlight should betray his presence.
He had found this place no more than five minutes before the hunters had come stalking him down the banks, and he had been here six hours already. It was at a point where the river swung out into an elbow, with a wide beach on one side, and on the other a steep bank plunging down into deep still water. The bank was thickly grown with bush and the searching roots of the pandanus palms reached down, ten feet or more, like a fish cage into the stream, so that the driftwood piled about them in a kind of barricade.
He was in a dangerous spot – ‘croc water’ the bushmen called it – but he had to choose between the certainty of a myall spear, and the chance of a big saurian, sleeping in the mud. Cautiously, he parted the driftwood and eased himself in behind the roots. His feet plunged deep into the muddy bottom and braced themselves on a buried tree-trunk. The water was waist-deep and he had to bend his shoulders painfully to find headroom under the tangled roots. But the spot was in shadow, the driftwood was thick, and on their first down-stream cast the myalls had passed within a yard of him.
When he saw their retreating backs, he had to fight against the panic temptation to break out and head for open country; but he knew that they would soon understand that they had missed him, and then they would come back. So he stayed, the water bleaching his skin, the leeches battening on him, a black spider dangling within an inch of his eyes, a cloud of insects buzzing frantically about him. As the cold crept into his blood, his wound began to throb painfully and he forced a thick twig between his teeth to stop their chattering.
He experimented cautiously, trying to find an easier position, but the dangers in movement were only too apparent. A piece of driftwood, dislodged and floating down-stream, an eddy of mud in the current, would betray him in a moment to the practised eyes of the pursuers. Nothing to do but wait it out and hope they gave up at nightfall.
They came back sooner than he expected. He saw them, fifty yards off, beating the banks more carefully, probing shadowy overhangs and the hollows under the bushes. One big buck was working his way swiftly towards his hiding-place. Dillon eased himself slowly down into the water until it was lapping at his chin. Then when he could see only the buttocks and knees of the pursuer, he took a deep breath and immersed himself completely in the dark water. The myall came abreast of the pile of driftwood, jerked some of it away and thrust his spear into the hollow behind. His feet churned up the muddy bottom and Dillon, an inch below the surface, held his breath until it seemed his heart must burst and the top of his head blow off. Then the myall moved away, splashing up-stream, and Dillon surfaced and gulped in great draughts of air. When he had recovered sufficiently to look about him, he saw that the screen of driftwood was breached, dangerously, and he set himself to repair it, piece by careful piece, while the myalls worked their way up-stream again, calling to each other in husky musical voices.
The ducking and the exertion dislodged the bandage and started the wound bleeding and he had to battle against the old fear of the crocodiles, while he struggled to adjust the tourniquet and the sodden dressing. Suddenly, he was desperately weary, from hunger, exertion and loss of blood and he knew that he could not stay conscious much longer. Yet, if he let himself lapse into sleep, he would slide into the water and stifle.
Painfully, he turned his head, searching in the half-light for a root or a projection that might hold him. Finding none, he undid the buckle of his belt and slid the strap out from the loops of his trouser-top. The sodden trousers sank slowly down to his ankles, but he did not care. He looped the belt high round his chest and buckled himself to one of the slim, tuberous palm roots, so that when he leaned back, his body hung, suspended under the armpits. The friction of the belt on the rough cortex might hold him while he dozed. He tested it, once, twice and again; then let his body go limp, while his mind surrendered itself to the illusion of rest.
It was no more than an illusion, pain-haunted and full of feverish terrors. Black grinning faces swelled and exploded close to his own. Bull horns gored at his ribs like spears. Mary’s face, cold and withdrawn, mocked his appeal and, when his hands groped out to her, she retreated from him, hostile and pitiless. He was burning in a dark sea, drowning in a cold fire. He was swinging, a fleshless skeleton, from a twisted tree.
Then, mercifully, he woke, to moonlight and silver water, the gleam of camp-fires and the torturing smell of cooked meat. The upper part of his body was cramped and constricted, and from the waist down, there was no sensation at all. With infinite care, he began to move, easing himself out of the belt, flexing himself to reach the fallen trousers and drew them up again to his waist, biting his lips to stifle a cry as pain started in every nerve. Finally, he was standing again, his feet firm on the sunken log, his back flat against the muddy bank.
A night in this place would kill him for a certainty. Before dawn, he must break out of it, find food and warmth and set the sluggish blood moving again. Soon, when the myalls had gorged themselves with meat, they would lie down like animals on the sand, and sleep till sunrise. Then, he must move; but how and where? There was the river in front and a wall of mud at his back and over all, the cold and treacherous radiance of the hunters’ moon.
Mundaru, the buffalo man, was puzzled. Squatting on the sand, with fire at his belly and his back, and the meat of the totem making another warmth inside him, he thought back over each step of the trail from its beginning in the high grasses to its end in the river shallows. He timed it again; how many paces a fit man might run and walk while the shadows extended by a spear’s length. He added more distance and more time to the calculation to allow for some unexpected reserve of strength in the white man – and was still convinced that he could not have out-distanced them.
Therefore, he must have left the river and struck out to open country. But at what point? Mundaru, himself, had scouted every inch of one bank and he was confident that he had missed nothing. The bucks from the other bank had sworn with equal conviction that they had overlooked nothing. But Mundaru was not so sure. This was the difference between one hunter and another, the reason for the old tribal law that the weak must share with the strong, the keen of eye must hunt for those who failed to read the signs. In the morning, he himself would cross the river and look again.
He sat a little apart from the others, a painted man, his jaws champing rhythmically on the tough meat, his eyes now scanning the water, now staring into the last leaping flames of the cook-fire. He did not speak to them, nor they to him; but their thought was clear. He was diminished in their sight by his failure to come up with the white man. They were asking themselves whether they had made a mistake by committing themselves to his leadership; whether there was not some defect in his totem relationship; whether the white man had not some malignant magic working against them and against Mundaru in particular. If their doubts persisted, they might well leave him in the morning and carry back the news of his failure to the tribe, and to Willinja, the maker of magic.
Mundaru, himself, could not go back – not without shame, not without fear of the uncompleted, ritual cycle. He must follow to the kill or to his own death, as he had when he wore the feathered boots and looked on the stone which was the secret name of a man.
Now, he had walked all round the thought and come back to the starting point. He had seen all there was to see, good and bad. He was ready for sleep. He yawned, scratched himself, and stretched his body on the sand, working a hollow for himself between the two fires. Then he drew his spears to within a hand’s reach and, without a word to his companions, closed his eyes. But sleep would not come. His thoughts flew back, like a green parrot, to the camp, where Menyan would be sleeping by the side of her husband, Willinja, the sorcerer.
She was named for the moon, the new moon, slim and young. When she was still a child, her father had promised her to Willinja, because he needed the favour of a man who understood the secrets of the dream-people, who could make rain and call death into the body of an enemy. From the moment of this promise, she was wedded to Willinja. She slept at his fire. His women taught her. She learned all that a wife should know to be valuable to her husband. But he did not take her until she had become a woman and had sat in the secret place, covered with leaves and eating none but the foods permitted to a woman at the time of blood.
From this moment, she was lost to Mundaru. But he still desired her. He sought occasions to meet her alone, to speak with her, out of sight of the other women. He was young, while her husband was old. He was pleasing to her. Her eyes told him that; but she was afraid of her husband – as Mundaru was afraid. Because Willinja’s cold eyes could look into the marrow of a man’s brain and his spirit travelled abroad out of his body, seeing what was done in the most secret places.
Even now, on the edge of sleep, Mundaru could feel his hostile presence, shepherding his thoughts away from Menyan. He must not fight him – yet. But with the white man dead, and the white man’s strength absorbed into himself, then, he might be ready to enter into open conflict. A small, cold tremor of anticipation shook him, then burrowing deeper into the warmth of the sand, he composed himself for sleep.
The bucks watched him, with sidelong speculative eyes. They talked a little in low voices, then they too stretched themselves on the sand and before the flames had died to a dull red glow, they were snoring like tired animals.
To Lance Dillon, penned in the small, liquid darkness under the pandanus roots, had come a small ray of hope. It was a moonbeam, slanting down from a point above his head and falling on the black, still water in front of him. Inch by inch, he slewed himself round in the confined space until, looking up, he could see a narrow opening between the upper roots and the mud bank. It was, perhaps, three feet above his head, and he judged it almost large enough to take his head and shoulders. If he could reach it and pass through it, he might scale the high bank under the shadows of the bushes and head across the grass flats away from the sleeping myalls.
It was a big ‘if’. He was very weak. One arm and shoulder were useless and this gymnastic effort might well prove too much for him. The slightest noise would brings the myalls leaping to their feet and splashing across the river. The first problem was the bank itself. The black soil was damp and slippery and its contours were clotted into large projections, any one of which might break away and fall noisily into the water.
With infinite care, he began to scoop out with his hands, a foothold just above the water-line. As each handful was dug, he laid it gently in the water, letting it float soundlessly away from his palm. He dug deep, so that his feet would not slide, he groped around the mouth of the hole, feeling for friable pieces that might fall away under pressure. Then, when the two lower holes were dug, he reached up and hollowed two more above his head.
It was a child’s labour, but before it was done, he was trembling as if in ague and the sweat was running down his face. Then, new risks presented themselves. His clothing was full of water. The moment he climbed upwards, it would spill out, noisily, into the pool. The roots above his head were matted and rough. They might tangle themselves in his belt or in the loose, flapping fabric.
Bracing himself against one of the log roots, he bent down into the water and took off his boots. The simple operation took a long time. The laces were leather, tight-drawn and slippery. He had to rest many times before he was free of them. Trousers and shirt came next, and, as he worked his way out of them, he could feel the leeches, squamous and bloated, clinging to his flesh. He tried to pull them off, but they clung all the tighter. He must endure them a while longer while they drained him of blood he could ill afford to lose. He crouched mother-naked in the pool, debating whether to try to salvage his clothing against the heat of the coming day. Finally, he decided against it and let the sodden garments sink to the bottom of the pool.
He was ready now – ready to make the attempt on which his life depended. He looked up towards the narrow opening where the moonlight gleamed, then, with a wracking effort, hoisted himself into the first foothold. Behind him, in the water, floated the spearhead and the broken haft which had slipped, unnoticed, from his grasp while he was preparing himself for sleep.