The Quick Return

THE POSITIVELY anti-social recklessness of those who deliberately go in for small farming has, we think, no parallel in human behaviour. It may be likened to the irresponsibility of artists, but it surpasses even this in impudence; for whereas no artist expects more than a few ha’pence and some kicks, these would-be, must-be and will-be farmers actually believe that the world owes them a living, and expect to get it.

The thing is still more amazing when it manifests itself in the young, who are nowadays afforded every opportunity to learn that he who engages in small-scale and solitary effort, does so at his peril. We live, as our mentors so frequently remind us, in an era of expansion. Commerce and industry extend their operations, organisations multiply, and science reaches into outer space, thus setting the pattern which faithfully repeats itself in all our products and activities. Transport increases its capacity, and moves faster, buildings climb higher, newspapers grow fatter, roads grow wider, crowds grow bigger, problems grow tougher, cars grow longer, bangs grow louder and prices shoot ever higher, with wages in hot pursuit. In short, our age is content with nothing less than the super-colossal.

In such a society the properly instructed young person will do well to examine very narrowly the type of toil to which he commits himself. He will, if he is fully in tune with the times, eschew primary production altogether, for the greatest honours and rewards are undoubtedly reserved for the handlers; but if he must engage in production of this kind, it is imperative that he should produce a lot. If he is prepared to weigh in with ten thousand bushels of wheat, or five hundred bales of wool, he will deserve—and receive—the support of a benevolent Government, and the plaudits of a grateful public; but these are not to be expected by one who contributes a few crates of pineapples, or a few bags of beans. There is nothing super-colossal about that.

Similarly, if you let loose upon the world some fruit of your mind which proves tasty to vast numbers of other minds, you may win acclaim, and even some pecuniary advantage; but the provision of nourishment for the few—however wholesome it may be, and however great their hunger—is a dilletante occupation which modern society regards with disfavour and suspicion.

For this there is good reason. The small-scale production of sustenance—whether mental, physical or spiritual—exposes the producer to certain subversive influences—namely, nature and solitude. These influences render him quite unfit for useful participation in the affairs of an advanced civilisation, for they make him think, and wait, and stare, and dream. The small farmer works alone, and thus communes a good deal with nature, in whose leisurely habits he necessarily acquiesces, since he cannot command the human and mechanical assistance by means of which the big farmer goads her into brisker activity. And the small artist—such as, for example, Shakespeare, Beethoven or Michelangelo—betakes himself to a solitary tower (which may, or may not be constructed of ivory, but in which, contrary to general opinion, he works like a beaver, and undergoes peculiar torments), and there coolly assumes that if he needs a year to achieve the right word, note or line, then a year he must have.

Can you imagine such presumption? What makes small-scale activity so undesirable and dangerous is clearly the solitude it involves, and the temptation, inherent in solitude, to think. For thinking takes time, and in an expanding era the one thing which contracts is time. There is simply not enough of it for profitless nonsense of this kind. To do is recognised as the aim and duty of all good citizens; to be is something that could exercise the mind of none but an irresolute mooncalf like Hamlet. To know how is the hallmark of merit; to wonder what, why or whether is little short of sabotage. The proper study of mankind is not man, but matter, and its rich, abundant fruits may be seen all around us, from plastic dish-mops in the kitchen to Sputniks in the sky. And though we are already indebted for so much to those who pursue this study, our expanding society does not yet permit them to rest upon their laurels, but, like the Red Queen, tirelessly urges them forward, crying : “Faster! Faster!” But perhaps this is not a happy simile, for the Red Queen was getting nowhere at all, whereas know-how is well on the way to the planets, and may be expected to set its civilising mark quite soon upon those backward areas.

One might reasonably suppose that the splendour and spaciousness of such an age could not fail to capture the allegiance of all young persons, and render the notions of growing spinach, or writing poems quite ludicrous to them. Heaven knows, we have spared no effort in demonstrating that only suckers make and grow, but clever people handle. It is disturbing, therefore, to find that some still entertain and even succumb to, such atavistic impulses; and among the mature, as they faithfully pursue more useful avocations, one discovers an astonishing number of frustrated farmers and artists. This might be cause for serious alarm if one did not feel secure in the corrective power of modern environment.

There is, of course, one small problem whose solution as yet eludes us; if there were no suckers to do the primary producing, there would be nothing for the clever people to handle. In a defeatist moment, one might envisage our society all organised some morning to proceed with its handling of the primary produce—and lo, there is none! The shops are open, the assistants are present, the middlemen are at their posts, the trains, trucks, ships and factories, all suitably manned, are waiting, and the housewives are setting out with their baskets—but where are the fruit and vegetables? . . . Where are the eggs and butter? . . . The entrepreneurs are in their offices, the editors and publishers are at their desks, the paper-supply—all the way from standing forest to retail stationer—is being attended to, the paints, pianos and typewriters are provided, the concert-halls, theatres and galleries are prepared, the radio networks are ready to give out, the technicians are adjusting their mysteries, and the announcers are clearing their throats—but where are the stories and symphonies? . . . Where are the songs and statues? . . . Where are the plays and pictures? . . . Is this a strike?

Certainly not. Suckers have no idea of collective action. Their tendency to break ranks and march off by themselves quite precludes any such thing. They are notorious for their perverse and tiresome independence, and you simply cannot get them organised. No, no; it is not a strike. It is the triumph of the Zeitgeist. Like the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls, these dopes have failed to mesh with their environment—and they are gone. We are all handlers now, and while we look around for something to handle, we hear the ominous hiss of escaping air as our expanding age begins to collapse like a punctured balloon. . . .

But this is mere fantasy—a nightmare unworthy of the civilised mind. Science is at the controls, and will steer us safely to wherever we are going. As a temporary measure it will, no doubt, permit farming only upon a super-colossal scale, but we may rest assured that in due course it will devise means of producing all foodstuffs in its laboratories. And it will surely toss off (for even scientists have their playful moments) a machine to deliver works of art as needed—and not unsettling ones, either, like those we have been compelled to put up with in the past.

Thus reassured, and able to confront without too much apprehension the knowledge that suckers still infest the earth, we may turn once more to Lantana Lane, which harbours as many to the acre as any spot in the world; and among them, we regret to say, Tim and Biddy Acheson, who are young enough to know better.

Some future author of a thesis upon the decline and fall of suckerdom will eagerly seize upon Tim as one whose life provides an interesting case history in illustration of the transition stage. For Tim did not yield without a struggle to the fatal tendencies which at last landed him in the Lane. Having—in common with his contemporaries—clearly grasped the truth that whatever else one may be, one must not be a sucker, he valiantly suppressed the disreputable urges which he could feel clamouring within him, and became a bank clerk.

It must be evident to anyone that banking is the last word in handling. Other individuals or organisations may handle the primary produce at one, or two, or five, or ten removes, but banks handle what may be termed the produce of the handlers, and are thus the very apex of civilisation. Tim was, therefore, potentially one of the élite. He had a respectable position at a respectable salary in the most respectable of all human institutions, and he could look forward to a respectable future, with the probability of advancement to considerable heights of dignity and affluence. But he relapsed into suckerdom.

Perhaps if he had not been assigned to a branch in a rural district, this might not have happened; but as it was, there were farms all about him, and even from his post at the teller’s window he could see through the plate glass opposite a glimpse of pineapples growing on a distant hillside. . . .

But surely, you will say, shocked, he also saw something of farmers’ current accounts? True. He did, and what he saw kept him warily anchored to his counter for eight long years. But he went on looking at the pineapples, and his suckerdom—quelled, but not yet slain—went on whispering to him its age-old arguments. He needn’t be rash; he could save up, and then have a go. . . . He’d find a nice little place (a bit run down, for preference so that the price would not be too high), and he’d be able to put down the whole lot in cash (or very nearly all of it), so that he wouldn’t start with a debt on his shoulders (or only a very small one), and he’d see that he had a few hundred in reserve to tide him over the first year or two, and he’d work like Hell, and it was a grand, healthy life, and you were your own boss, and with a cow, and hens, and home-grown fruit and vegetables you could live cheaply. . . .

In due course he found himself a girl called Biddy who had a dash of suckerdom in her too, and explained all this to her while she listened, starry-eyed. So they both saved up, and dreamed of the day when they would be married, and live on a little farm of their own.

Here they were, then, at last, in Lantana Lane. Their farm had three acres of citrus—two of which (one of oranges and one of grapefruit) had only recently come into bearing; there were three acres of pineapples (though one of these was overdue for replanting), and there was an eastern slope where bananas would do well some day. Except for the cow-paddock and the fowlyard the rest was under lantana, but Tim planned to use it for avocadoes later on. He said he liked to have several different crops, because if you didn’t catch a good market with one, you were sure to with another. There was a permanent creek, so they would be able to irrigate when they could afford to put in pipes and spray-lines and a pump. There was also a good Jersey cow, and she was in calf; Tim, as an ex-banker, named her Currency Lass, but they called her Lassie for short. Biddy fell in love with her, and so did Tim, though he preferred to stress the point that any heifer calves she produced would fetch a good price. The house . . . well, Biddy thought it could be made quite nice in time, with a new stove, and the white-anted floorboards replaced, and some new guttering, and plenty of paint.

The older citrus trees were fine big ones—and so they should have been, because they had begun bearing twenty years ago, and were now tired of it. Tim was disconcerted when he discovered this, but he consoled himself with the thought of the nest-egg tucked away in his bank account, and reckoned they could get along on what the pines and the new citrus brought in. Meanwhile, he set about the task of abolishing the worn-out trees, and decided to plant avocadoes in their place. He tried grubbing them out, but he soon realised that this was too slow a method to be economically sound, so he told Biddy they would have to plunge, and hire a bulldozer. It had half a dozen other jobs to do first, but it turned up one morning about a month later, and in no time had the whole patch as bare as your hand, and the slaughtered trees all pushed together in heaps for burning. But of course you cannot buy such miracles for nothing, and the bill was no joke. However, as Tim said by way of cheering Biddy—and himself—as he wrote out the cheque, time is money, and if you looked at it that way, they had saved more than they had spent. Biddy darted a sidelong look at her store bill, and wondered how she could pay it with time, but she said nothing.

Tim worked like a slave preparing the new ground, and a good deal more money went into it in the shape of fertiliser, and at last he was ready to replant. But somehow his savings were already dwindling faster than he had expected. As befitted one highly trained in the handling of money, he kept his books with meticulous care, and in the neat columns devoted to expenditure upon cartage, freight, case-timber, wood-wool, rates, telephone rental, sprays, petrol, oil, fence-posts and a new tank, he was able to see how the pounds were melting away. He was not one of those who, at a loss to account for mysteriously vanished pennies and shillings, reserve a kind of desperation-column called Sundry; he knew exactly how much he had spent upon such trifles as nails, stencil-ink, timber-chalk, a roll of wire, a few screws, a few staples, an axe handle, a bag of lime, a sheet of corrugated iron, a new anchor bolt and a new hinge for the gate. The total looked disturbing when set against the total of his takings.

He therefore thought again about his newly prepared land, considered how much the avocado trees would cost, reflected that it would be a long time before they were producing anything, and decided to put in a small crop which would bring in a quick return. Beans, he told Biddy, were the thing; you could get wonderful prices for beans in the winter, when it was too cold to grow them down south. And it need not hold up the avocado planting altogether, because they could put some in by degrees, between the bean rows, as they could afford the money and the time.

So he got pamphlets about beans, and studied them carefully, and bought the best certified seed, and laid out half of his acre with the aid of stakes and twine in admirably straight rows the approved distance apart; and that night—-yawning mightily—he added bean seed, stakes and twine to his expenditure columns. Then he and Biddy spent two interminable days planting, and went to bed at night with such backaches as they had never known before; but for time spent he made no entry in his book.

While they were waiting for the beans to come up, Tim had plenty of maintenance and development work to do, and he did it with a will, feeling optimistic because the weather was behaving perfectly; it was surprisingly warm for April, and there were two nice little showers—about half an inch each time—which fell on the ground as lightly as a caress. Tim got half the old pines out, and a great pile of planting material ready, and what with this, and picking from the younger plants, and making cases, and packing, and doing a hundred other jobs as well, he and Biddy were hard at it from dawn till dark. But they stole a few minutes to visit the bean patch every day after the seed had been in for a week or so, and were quite excited when they saw the first little green loops pushing through. In another ten days that half-acre was a lovely sight with its fine, straight ribbons of lively green against the red earth. Practically a hundred per cent germination, Tim said jubilantly, which showed that it paid to buy good seed; if the warm weather kept up, and there were showers now and then, this crop would put them on their feet again.

The warm weather did keep up, and when the plants were a few inches high, a westerly wind began to blow from somewhere which was evidently warmer still, for in twenty-four hours the rows had began to look yellowish. It blew for three days, and then Joe Hardy said to Tim across the fence that he might as well give them beans away, because they wouldn’t do no good now.

Tim still hoped a drop of rain might save them; in any case, it was time now to begin planting the second half-acre, so he decided to leave the first lot until that was done, and then see how they looked. This time he and Biddy were rather depressed at the end of the planting, and their backaches seemed to hurt more, but Biddy said you couldn’t have that kind of bad luck twice, so they soon felt better. They had not been farming long enough to understand that there are enough different kinds of bad luck to last anyone’s lifetime.

A week later there was an inch of rain, and this lifted their spirits considerably, for the wind-blighted beans seemed to respond quite gallantly, and Tim said he’d gamble on them, even if Joe Hardy did shake his head every time he looked across the fence. The second planting came up well, and there was no more wind; but there was no more rain, either, and by the middle of June Tim had to admit that the whole acre was looking pretty poor.

Biddy was expecting their first baby, and this is a thing which causes young husbands with dwindling bank balances to do a great deal of anxious thinking, so Tim went down to his creek one morning, stared at all the water running to waste, and thought hard. They had a little car, and when they decided to go on the land, they had bought an old and dilapidated ute for the farm work. The thing to do now was to sell the car, and put in some sort of irrigation. If he did it at once, Tim said to Biddy, they might save those beans yet. After all, they had meant to do it some day, and the sooner the better; it was crazy to think you could farm without irrigation. Then he remembered that he would have to get the ute registered for the road if they were to use it to get about in, and at least one of the tyres would have to be replaced; the thought shot through his mind that there was simply no way you could turn which did not lead straight to the expenditure column, but it was such a small and temporary difficulty to set against a great and permanent advantage, that he shrugged it away. Biddy declared herself enthusiastically in favour of the idea, but she, also was visited by a shooting thought; there would come a moment when Tim would have to take her to the hospital, and the ute—having no hood, and practically no springs—was not the ideal form of transport for such an occasion. But this, also, was a trifle to be shrugged away. She just hoped it would be a fine night.

When they sold the car it did not bring quite such a good price as they had hoped, but, on the other hand, the pump cost less than they had feared, because Tim happened to hear of a man who had a good second-hand one for sale. More disturbing was the fact that these transactions took so long to complete; Tim was by now sharply conscious of the perpetual presence at his elbow of that old, bald sexton, Time. But at last everything was assembled, and he began to set up his irrigation system, slaving at the job like one possessed. It was a great moment when all was ready, and it was only necessary to start the pump; but the pump would not start.

Tim is a fair mechanic by now, having learned the hard way, but in those days he knew little about engines, so he asked Jack’s advice, and Jack said the best thing he could do was to get Ken Mulliner to have a look at it. Ken spent the best part of the day tinkering with it, while behind the lantana all along the Lane, the neighbours listened anxiously. When they heard a few halfhearted sputters, they said : “He’s got it going.” When the sputters ceased, they shook their heads, and said nothing. But there is really not much that the owner of Kelly cannot do in the way of coaxing temperamental engines, and towards evening when the sputtering began with a strong, determined note, and kept on, everyone rejoiced in the knowledge that water was at last falling blessedly on Tim’s thirsting beans.

Just after dark, it began to rain.

Tim—half a stone lighter, and looking ten years older than he had a few weeks ago—stood on his verandah with Biddy next morning, watching it come down, and said : “Wouldn’t it?” But after all, water is water, whether it comes from an irrigation system or from the sky, and he was glad enough to see it—at first. The difference is, of course, that you can control what comes from pipes, but you just have to take what the sky sends, and the sky, at present, was in a munificent mood. It poured down eight inches in the first twenty-four hours, and six in the second, and six in the third, and then it settled down to rain quietly for another two days. Tim and Biddy put on their gumboots, waded down through the mud to look at their beans, and presently waded back again, not saying much. The second lot had been practically washed out of the ground, but—as Biddy remarked brightly while she made a cup of tea—most of the first lot was still there, and might produce a few bushels, . . .

After a while Tim said suddenly:

“There’s still time to replant.”

“Y-e-es,” said Biddy.

“Of course the seed’s pretty expensive. . . .”

“And it’d be getting late when they came in. . . .”

“And the market’s not so good then. . . .”

“And Amy Hawkins was saying you have trouble with bean-fly when it’s warmer. . . .”

But Tim was worried, for there was nothing coming in except from the pines (and that wasn’t much), though there seemed to be always plenty going out. Besides, his young orange trees were Sevilles, and everyone said there was not much demand for those; grapefruit, too, caused more head-shaking than he liked to see. He felt that something had to be done quickly, so he decided to replant the second half-acre of beans. He reminded Biddy that Lassie was due to calve next month, and if the calf were a heifer they could sell it for enough to pay for the extra seed and fertiliser. Biddy said yes, of course, and she didn’t remind him that Gwinny had told them all Lassie’s calves except one had been bulls.

So Tim replanted. Biddy was not able to work such long hours now, but she did what she could to help, and in due course the beans came up, and promised to flourish quite as wonderfully as their predecessors. By now Tim was looking quite haggard, and would have liked to relax a little, but after the rain the weeds were fairly leaping up from the ground, so he had to start cleaning his pines. He perceived that he must wait till next year to get the avocadoes in; but he could not have paid for them just now, anyhow.

One morning Biddy got up soon after six (she was sleeping in a bit at present), and found Tim getting the mattock and spade from the packing shed. “Lassie’s calved,” he said, barely looking at her. “It’s a bull.”

She sat down on a crate and watched him walk away with the tools over his shoulder. Well, she thought, there was no harm in hoping. Then a rather frightening flash of perception told her that the harm—oh, the peril, the disaster, the failure and defeat!—would be in not hoping. For what else can keep a farmer going? Maybe the market will improve; maybe the drought will break; maybe the rain will hold off for a week or two; maybe the next lot of case-timber won’t be warped, the price of fertiliser will fall, the hares won’t get the peas, and the next calf will be a heifer. Maybe.

It was one of those clear, cool, still, dewy, cobwebby mornings that make you think of innocence. Everything about it seemed new, young and tentative; the sunlight was delicately golden, the shadows long and light, the blue of the sky pale and pure. A butcher-bird in the custard-apple tree was singing a few phrases over and over in an absent-minded undertone, as if it were only half awake. Biddy felt very strange because she was naturally preoccupied just now with her baby, and she found that she could not disentangle her constant awareness of it from all the things she thought, and did, and saw. Consequently, the loveliness of the morning, the malevolence of fate, the thought of Lassie’s calf, and the recollection of Tim walking away with the spade and the mattock, were all blended with the consciousness of her own coming maternity in a confusing and oddly heart-piercing manner.

She stood up, and went to the corner of the shed. From here she could see Lassie grazing near the fence of the paddock, with the calf beside her; she could catch glimpses, too, of Tim’s head and shoulders behind a clump of lantana near the adjoining fowl-yard, as he bent and straightened in his digging. She wanted to run away from all this, but she began, instead, to walk slowly down the hill towards it, not even trying to understand her strange feeling of compulsion and despair. When she came to the cow-paddock gate, she saw Tim’s .22 rifle leaning against it, and a pair of Willy-wagtails flirting about on the top bar. She turned aside, and walked down along the fence, and Lassie, looking up briefly, acknowledged her presence with a mellow, contralto moo.

The calf, propped unsteadily on its widely-straddled legs, was sucking vigorously, and butting its head against the swollen udder. The wagtails flew down from the gate and perched on Lassie’s back, tipping and fidgeting, and peeping down over her flanks at the calf, which presently stopped sucking, and backed away a few steps. It seemed to become aware, for the first time, that there were other things in the world besides the warm body of its mother, and stood gazing earnestly at a rusty tin lying among the grass. It took a few experimental steps towards this curious object, but paused then, and looked back uncertainly, as if mistrustful of its own success. Lassie was oblivious of its mute appeal for reassurance, however, so it accomplished an awkward turn, found its way back to her, and once more thrust its head importunately against her udder. But it was no longer hungry; having satisfied itself that the one comprehensible fact of its universe was still there, still warm and soft, still provided with available nourishment, it began to circle the cow, keeping very close to her side. Lassie nuzzled it as it rubbed against her nose; for a moment the two heads were close together, and very alike with their mild faces, and their large, dark, long-lashed eyes.

But the calf was now interested in its legs, their odd behaviour, and the remarkable sensations of locomotion. Suddenly it broke into a clumsy gambol which carried it a full ten yards away, and brought it up in confusion, with its front hoofs inexplicably crossed. It stood rocking, looked down at them with an air of perplexity, and then turned its head enquiringly towards the indifferent cow. Once more ignored, it cautiously lowered its black, twitching nose to the problem, and then jerked it up again sharply as a broken stalk of Iantana pricked it. The problem, forgotten, resolved itself, and was replaced by the problem of this hard, injurious substance. The calf stared at it, jumped nervously, backed away, and slowly returned. Its front legs spread themselves widely as its nose went down again, warily explored, lingered for a moment among the blades of dewy grass, and lifted, sniffing, along the broken stem. This brought Biddy into its line of vision; it stared at her for a long time, and she stared back at it. The pale, biscuit colour of its rough coat shone faintly in the sunlight; over its knobby forehead the hair lay in moist, irregular waves; its delicately flaring nostrils, its sensitively twitching ears, its dark, wondering eyes, and the very breath that moved its flanks in a barely perceptible rhythm, seemed to be savouring the promise of life, the miracle of its first—and last—morning.

Biddy turned away, and began to hurry up towards the house as if she were frightened—as indeed she was. She knew all the answers to the wild protest in her heart. You can’t keep a bull calf to eat pasture that is only just enough for your milking cow. You can’t even leave it with its mother till it is old enough to make veal for the butcher, or for your own table, because what you gained in money or in food would not make up for the milk you lost. You can’t spare the time to poddy it when the days are already too short for more productive work. She knew it all, and didn’t believe a word of it. Waste, she was saying fiercely to herself as she stumbled up the steps on to the verandah—just wicked waste! But she was not thinking of veal, or of money; she was not really thinking at all. She did not even know that she was frightened, and if anyone had been there to ask her what was the matter, she would have replied, very sensibly, that she was just feeling a little upset, and she supposed it was all part of The Business. And so it was. Maternity recognises itself across all divisions. It is a touchy thing, jealous of its inviolability, quick to take fright when it sees life being squandered, passionate in resentment against callous disregard of its long, and solitary ordeal. So Biddy was angry and afraid, though she tried to regain her composure by telling herself that one must not be sentimental about these things. Lassie wouldn’t care. Within a few hours she would have quite forgotten the calf. Dairy cows were like that. Everyone said so. (But how did they know? . . .)

Unfortunately all this common sense failed to obliterate from Biddy’s mind the picture of a small creature newly ready for life, and trusting in it; she flung herself face downward on the unmade bed, and when she heard the shot she began to cry as if her heart would break.

But a farmer’s wife may not for long indulge in moods and vapours. There is too much to be done. By now they were harvesting the Sevilles and the grapefruit, and while Tim picked, Biddy made cases. She never managed to drive a nail with one tap and one bang, but she could nearly always do it with one tap and two bangs. She also became very expert at packing, and liked to show Tim how, when she ran her hand over the top layer of exactly graded golden globes, not one of them budged.

But perhaps the less said about the citrus the better. Not many people want Seville oranges, but very many are so addicted to juicy, bitter-sweet grapefruit that they will pay quite astonishing sums for them in the shops, and we are therefore unable to explain why Tim, instead of receiving a cheque for this fruit, should have received a bill for the expenses incurred in dumping it. He was naturally disappointed, but he was far too busy to brood over mysteries.

He had been grabbing an hour or two here and there to get ready for his new pines, and the patch was rotary-hoed, and ploughed, and fertilised, and prepared for contour planting. Though Biddy grew tired rather quickly now, she insisted on laying out some of the butts for him when he began to put them in. They were in good spirits, for the weather was really co-operating; it was warm and sunny, rain had been coming along at nicely spaced intervals, and the beans were leaping ahead.

When the planting was finished, and they stood on their verandah looking out over the farm, they felt quite proud of it. The bearing pines were as clean as a whistle, and the elegantly sinuous curves of the newly-planted ones were a joy to behold. The magnificent appearance of the new beans almost compensated for the fact that Joe Hardy had been right, and the old ones must be written off as a dead loss. Tim had found time one Sunday to mow down the long grass round the house, and straighten some of the fence-posts, so altogether the place was losing its dilapidated air, and beginning to look like a well-tended, self-respecting little farm.

They were not surprised, or unduly alarmed, when the bean-fly got to work. They were prepared for it, and Tim got to work too, and kept them down with spraying. Of course the spray cost money, and the job took time, and meanwhile the weeds were again beginning to make a green film over the earth between the pinapple rows. At last the flies were routed, the bean plants grew ever sturdier and bushier, and their rich green, much darker now, was liberally besprinkled with white flowers. Soon the flowers were replaced by clusters of tiny beans, and still the weather was perfect, so they grew apace, and Tim’s hopes kept up with them. But he was cautious, too; he halved his order for bean bags—because, after all, he could always get more if he found he needed them. Biddy sat in the shed doing the branding with Tim’s stencil, and when that was finished they were all ready for the crop.

Then one day the crop was all ready for them, and they began picking.

“There’s no need for you to help,” Tim protested. “It’ll make your back tired.”

“Look,” said Biddy mutinously, “I held strings to get those rows straight, and I helped to hoe them, and I went along them putting the fertiliser in, and I went along them again dibbling the holes, and again planting the seed, and again covering it over, and again hilling up the plants, and again keeping the weeds down—and now I’m damn well going along them to pick some beans if it kills me.”

So there they both were at daybreak one momentous morning, stooping over the rows, and moving slowly from plant to plant with their kerosene tins. You never saw such beans. They were fat, and crisp, and long and perfectly straight. Biddy found one which she could lay across the top of her tin, and walked half-way down a row to show it to Tim, and there were many only a little shorter. But no one who has picked beans will be surprised to learn that by half-past eight she said apologetically that she thought she would have to stop for a while. Tim replied that it was time they got some breakfast, anyhow, so they straightened their backs with difficulty, and went up to the house. After breakfast Tim returned to the beans, and Biddy joined him again in the afternoon. They stopped at sundown, and when they had finished their evening meal, and washed up, they took the lantern down to the shed, bagged the beans, and got to bed by ten o’clock. Tim said he thought they should be able to afford to get the electric light connected to the shed in . . . But he was asleep before he could complete the sentence, and Biddy had only time to wonder drowsily whether he meant in a few months, or a few years before she was asleep too. In the morning they put the flag out for Doug Egan to stop, and saw their bags safely loaded on to his truck, and began to talk about how much they would fetch.

But it had been warm down south too, and the bean market was considerably depressed; so were Tim and Biddy, when their cheque came back. Still, it was something—if not very much when you thought of the time, labour and money which had gone to produce it. The second picking was a little bigger than the first, and the cheque for it was about the same. Then Biddy was not very well for a week or so, and Tim said she was to take it easy, and not do any more picking. But he had to have some help if all the beans were to be got off before they became post-mature, so he hired a youth from Tooloola to give him a hand. When the cheque for this picking came back, and he deducted the youth’s wages, and the other costs, he perceived that his profit was very small indeed. The crop was now past its peak, so he picked the next lot alone, and this time, when he came to do his reckoning, it was clear that he was not even squaring expenses. Others in the neighbourhood who had been making similar calculations arrived at a similar conclusion. Both Joe and Alf assured Tim that if he and Biddy liked beans, the best thing they could do now was to eat them, because it wouldn’t pay them to send any more to market.

So Tim and Biddy ate beans. Jack Hawkins had tried half an acre, too, so he and his family also ate beans. But even with the best appetite in the world the Hawkins and the Achesons could not eat all the beans those lusty plants were still producing, so everyone in the Lane ate beans, and still there were more going hard and knobby on the stalks. Biddy said rather rebelliously that women in her condition were entitled to food-fads, and what she really wanted was pickled onions; but she took some more beans, and conceded that they were probably better for It. The last figures in Tim’s banks statement were now ominously printed in red, but strangely enough he was more cheerful than he had been for months. It oftens happens this way with suckers. The more you bash them down, the more they bounce, and Tim was already explaining to Biddy why it was quite inevitable that they should have better luck next year.

Biddy need not have worried, of course, about going to the hospital in the ute, because when the time came she could have had her pick of any vehicle in the Lane. It was a very wet night, as it happened, but she went in the Arnold’s car quite comfortably, and despite all her anxieties, exertions and afflictions, little Jeremy was as fine an infant as you could see anywhere. For farming is a healthy life; she had spent much time out of doors, drunk gallons of Lassie’s creamy milk, and eaten pounds and pounds of beans.