THE NEW LIFE
I
MR. ROWLAND SMYTHE paid his next visit to Atlas at the end of January, just one month after Alldyce Cameron lost his greatest and most magnificent catch. Smythe came in his big car, driven by his chauffeur, accompanied by his dispatch-cases, which now held the fate of several huge properties. With one of these dispatch-eases between his feet he faced Feng Ching-wei from his chair on the veranda of Feng’s bungalow.
“About four miles this side of Tin Tin we met a madman driving a truck,” he said in his cheerful non-business tones. “Did he pass through here?”
“No, he started from here, Smythe. It was Tom Mace going to see his sweetheart. After the tragedy of Little Frankie I sent Eva, the nursemaid, to Ann Shelley. Ann rang up yesterday to say that she had at last banished Cameron’s influence from her mind, and thought it an opportune time for her former sweetheart to win her back. This morning Mace came in with a load of carcass wool, and it took two hours of my time to get him to see that the girl was more sinned against than he was. When, finally, he did make up his mind to woo his Eva, he lost no time getting away.”
“What is he going to do when he gets Sir John’s money?”
“He hasn’t decided,” Feng said slowly. “But they are going to be married soon–according to Mace. And they are coming to live at Atlas–according to Frank.”
“Hum! Where’s Frank?”
“Out with Boynton and Reynolds’s sheep.”
“Any idea how many left?”
“Frank estimates about fourteen thousand,,”
“I suppose Frank can’t pay anything off that loan? Over fifty thousand, you know. My people are not pleased about it, and I fear that if they get a good offer for Atlas they might accept it.”
“What would happen then?” Smythe sighed and his face expressed anxiety. He said deliberately:
“The value of Atlas and all station properties to-day is what they will fetch. My firm, as you know, controls hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in pastoral propositions. This world depression, with the consequent slump in wool, is putting the wind up them. If they got an offer of fifty thousand for Atlas, they’d send Frank packing with a bonus of five hundred pounds.”
“They could foreclose on Atlas?”
“They could, and they would,” replied Smythe. “They most certainly will if Frank falls down on the payment of interest. How much money has he got?”
“He told me he has now about fifteen hundred pounds. Against my advice he paid a further thousand off Westmacott’s selection to Mrs. Westmacott. Your beastly firm can’t run him off Westmacott’s place.”
“I am pleased to hear it, Feng; indeed I am. But how the devil is he going to keep Atlas? The interest will very quickly eat up his fifteen hundred, and he has expenses to pay as well.”
“He is going to keep Atlas, Smythe. And you are going to help him.”
“Well, I am doing what I can. I should be really saddened to see him lose it.”
“I believe you would. You maintain that your firm would accept fifty thousand pounds for the Atlas indebtedness to them. If I paid forty-four thousand of that money, would you yourself find six thousand at five per cent?”
Smythe looked long and steadily at his host.
“I did not think you had so much money. But the interest on your forty-four thousand, plus that on my six thousand, wouldn’t make the position of Atlas any better. It would be buying out one set of creditors and taking on another set.”
“Listen!” Feng urged intensely. “When Old Man Mayne died he left me two thousand pounds he said my father lent him in a drought period. He also left me a further sum of twenty-five thousand, as you well know. That was eleven years ago. I have never touched that principal, which has been earning good interest. To it I have added most of my earnings from Atlas, and twelve months ago I realized all my securities, and placed a few hundreds over forty-four thousand in my bank. All that money has come out of Atlas–a free gift to me. It shall go back into Atlas–a free gift.”
From the pale round face and the black, now blazing, eyes Rowland Smythe gazed across the empty Gutter of Australia. His life had been crammed with experience of human foibles, among which was nothing like this. Surely with such a guiding spirit Atlas never could sink into bankruptcy!
“Smythe, now that that woman has gone from Atlas, she will soon fade from Frank’s mind,” Feng continued. “Dead, I bear her no animosity. There is much I can now forgive her. We did not understand her, nor she us. It is a fact that already Frank’s spirit is recovering from that strange indecision produced by the slavish desire to please her. He is becoming his old shrewd, far-seeing self.
He is like a man long chained to a stake and now set free. The drought won’t last for ever. He’ll pull Atlas through it and raise Atlas from the dust.”
“It is a pity he never married Ann Shelley.”
“He will, presently.” “Oh!”
“I shall will it.”
“And you think you will succeed?”
“I am sure.”
For a moment Smythe regarded Feng Ching-wei pensively. Then:
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll pay in six thousand pounds to your bank account on the first of February. On that date post your cheque to my principals. You’ll want money with which to carry on. I’ll find another ten thousand by the fifteenth of next month, making fifteen thousand in all. Atlas can pay me a four per cent. interest. Hang it! No money could be safer or in safer hands.”
“Thanks! In three years after the drought Atlas will have paid back that money. Excuse me for a minute. I must go along to the office and ring up Ann Shelley.”
When Feng had gone, Mr. Rowland Smythe sat with narrowed eyelids. If only that fool of a nephew had applied himself to business instead of aping the writings of those damned Russians, he might have become as admirable as this Chinaman.
2
In the chair before occupied by Mr. Rowland Smythe now sat Ann Shelley. It was the day following the financier’s visit, and she drank tea with Feng on the latter’s veranda.
“We have been good friends, Ann, haven’t we?” he was saying. “I think I prefer the word ‘pal’ to ‘friend’ in describing the relationship that has existed between us for so many years. Perhaps the strongest strand of the rope which binds us in palship is our love for Frank. You do love him, don’t you–in the way I do?”
“Yes, of course, old boy,” she said with conviction.
“Then I will first tell you what I have done for him, and next will point out to you what you can do for him,” Feng said. “When he brought home Ethel Dyson I met her in a hostile spirit. I could not help that, because for several years before he went to England I had counted on your future marriage to him. However, when he did marry Ethel Dyson, although I was hostile, I determined to be fair. When able, I counselled Frank on the way to retain her affection, but when I saw that her ideas of financial economy were–well, peculiar; when I saw that she never would regard Atlas as we do; when I saw that her love of social excitement and her ambition of social power far transcended her regard for her husband; I knew that even had this drought not happened Atlas eventually would have been ruined. Ethel Dyson was the kind of woman who ruins everything and everybody she comes across.
“When she eloped with Cameron I foresaw what would have happened had she not died. I believe that Cameron would have tired of her quickly, and that he would not have married her had she secured a divorce. Assuming that she had lived, I think Frank would have divorced her because she asked for it. But when Cameron refused to marry her, she would have been disinclined to go back to her people, and would have asked Frank to re-marry her. And I believe he would have done so.”
“And you sent her the copy of Eva’s confession so that she would cast off Cameron and seek re-marriage with Frank the quicker?” Ann asked, with a touch of sarcasm.
“I sent her the confession in the first place to strike at them for what they had done to Frank; and in the second place to make her see the impossibility of coming back to Atlas. I considered that when she knew that the man to whom she had given herself was directly responsible for the death of Little Frankie, she would realize that the barrier she herself had erected would be too strong to allow her to regain her former life here. Evidently, at the last, she recognized that.”
He saw her gaze fixed on him and blandly looked into her grey eyes, now perplexed and troubled. She heard him say:
“Ever since that day I saw her in Cameron’s arms in the garden-house, I have been governed by one ambition, which was to remove her from Atlas and put you in her place. My ambition has been partly realized, Ann. The remaining part has yet to be fulfilled.
“Smythe came the other day to say that his firm was troubled about their financial advances. We agreed that it was only a matter of time, drought or no drought, when Frank would lose Atlas. Smythe said his people would take fifty thousand pounds for Atlas, which was in their hands. We agreed to buy them out. He is to advance privately six thousand pounds at four per cent., and I am giving back to Atlas forty-four thousand pounds which Atlas has given me. On February the first Atlas will belong to Frank, with but a small mortgage of fifteen thousand on it.”
“You will give back all the money Old Man Mayne left you, and more besides?” she exclaimed.
“Yes, dear. I am giving my all, save, perhaps, two or three hundred pounds. Wait! Come with me.”
With wonder in her heart Ann Shelley followed him through the french windows to his studio-drawing-room. He led her to the curtained alcove in which she had seen that amazing picture of herself. And there he switched on the alcove lights and then drew aside the curtains.
And Ann Shelley cried out.
The picture of herself, with her face flushed, her lips parted, and the lovelight in her eyes, was slashed to ribbons.
“Ann, dear,” Feng said softly, “I painted that picture after Frank had given you up to marry Ethel Dyson. When I heard that Frank’s wife was dead, and that he was again free to marry, I–did–that. Whilst you were promised to no man I dared to love you, although I saw the impossibility of marriage with you. I sinned against none, against neither you nor Frank. But when he became free again, you became his and he became yours. And, as I have torn and slashed the picture, so I have torn out and slashed my man’s love of you from my heart.”
Turning to her, he placed his hands gently on her shoulders.
The light from the alcove fell on their faces. Her lips were trembling, her eyes were dimmed with unshed tears. He was smiling in that inscrutable way of his. His voice was low but steady when he said:
“I have nothing else to give. For Frank’s sake I have given all I have. He’s my pal. He’s your pal. You follow my example, Ann, and give him all you have–yourself when he is ready to ask and to accept.”
“You know I shall do that, Feng,” she assured him, the tears now falling from her unhidden eyes.
3
“Hey! Wake up, Mr. Mayne, and listen!”
Frank Mayne was shaken into wakefulness in the living-hut at White Well, where he and Todd Gray now lived, directing the battle against the horrific drought. It was one o’clock in the morning. A low, persistent hum reached him.
“What is it, Todd? Wind?”
“Come outside and have a look.”
Together they passed out into the cool night air. A full moon hung in the clear sky above their heads. Its brilliant light shone directly on the southern edge of the one vast cloud in the north. Its base appeared to rest on the horizon. Upward from the earth a huge black column, and above the column in sprouting mushroom shape tier upon tier of ice and snow, a glittering aerial mass, a celestial arctic field. And from the north came that persistent hum.
“Rain!” Todd said, his unshaven face lit with joy.
“That cloud is dropping water on Westmacott’s old place,”
Mayne declared. “Tons and tons of water, Mr. Mayne. Gawd! I wish I was over there in it. Do you know where that cloud is going?”
“Not yet.”
“It is travelling directly west. It’s the pilot-cloud that heralds the breaking of the drought. When was the last time we see a cloud moving from east to west? Years and years ago! That cloud is gonna go half-way across Australia to meet the east-coming rain-clouds. It will come back with ’em and the drought will be over.”
“Hope so, Todd. We must take a run over to Westmacott’s old place to-morrow, and find out how many points of rain have fallen.”
“Of course. And I’m goin’ to paddle in the puddle.
They watched the single great cloud pass over the western horizon, when all the sky became brilliantly clear. Almost as soon as it was light they drove across to the selection, now belonging to Mayne. They had penetrated some three miles when they reached the almost knife-edge of the country on which the rain had fallen. Beyond, as far as they could see. the clay-pans were covered with sheets of water lying on the barren land, gleaming diamond-like in the sunlight. The natural water gutters were still running water. A surface tank that had been bone-dry was now half-filled, and water was still pouring into it along the feed channels in racing brown torrents.
“Two inches fell about here if a point,” Mayne said, and laughed for very gladness. “Ten inches is gonna fall over all Atlas in a day or so,” Todd said, laughing too.
“It doesn’t look like it by the sky and the wind direction to-day, Todd.”
“All right. I’ll bet you. I’ll bet you a quid it rains before Sunday.”
“I’ll take you.”
And, when they arrived back at White Well:
“Here, Mr. Mayne, look here! See these ants carrying their eggs from their groud nest up into this tree.”
“You confounded optimist! They’ve been doing that for years.”
“Have they? They haven’t done it for three years. I’ll bet you a fiver it rains before Sunday, anyhow.”
“I’ll take you. That’ll be six pounds you will owe me, Todd.”
That afternoon Mayne overhauled the windmill at White Well, and Todd Gray worked in the kitchen cooking enough food to last three days, as was their practice now, for the eternal scrub-cutting was kept going. Without the efforts of those two men the Atlas flocks would have dwindled to a few scattered mobs.
Standing on the staging at the top of the mill, Frank Mayne whistled whilst he replaced a broken cog-wheel. Light-heartedly he whistled, despite the scene of barren desolation his elevation revealed. Far away over the sand waste a line of slow-rising dust marked the passage of a flock coming to water, tiny white dots dancing in the mirage.
For lately Mayne had been returning from that world of despair and despondency which had held him for three long years. He was coming back to real life, conducted by the figure of hope which is at the side of every man. He whistled because his heart was lightened of the terrible fear of losing Atlas, the fear that had been banished by Feng’s magnificent gift and Smythe’s ready assistance. If Todd won his bets, then Atlas would start afresh with about ten thousand sheep. From sixty-six thousand to ten thousand in three years!
The lines of anguish about his tanned face were almost erased by Time. No longer did he regret Ethel Dyson. If he had ceased to love her when she fled with Cameron, he had never been able to hate her. After all, she had come to Atlas in a bad period, had seen it at its worst. The jealous bush, in avenging herself on him, had vented its spite on her. Still, thoughts of Little Frankie saddened him, yet the past was coming to appear to him as a tranquil memory.
The sun of hope blazed warmly in his soul this day in early March. When once the drought broke–and after the terrible rainless period there would be no false breaks–he would show the world how to run a sheep-station. The old prosperous days were bound to return. Rain would quicken this dead land into a surging upward rush of new life. Why, in two weeks’ time that, country where the rain had fallen would be covered with a green carpet, and in a month grass would be growing six inches high. Green grass, grass with the wonderful greenness of emeralds. It seemed but a foolish dream, but one that would come true.
Yes, those old days would return, those far-off days of content and happiness, when he and Feng and Ann–Ann! Dear, comradely, lovable Ann! What an ass he had been, what an ass! Perhaps, when he had pulled Atlas out of––
“Hey, Mr. Mayne! I’ll bet you another fiver it’ll rain before Sunday,” shouted Todd Gray from the ground below.
“I’ll take you!” returned Mayne, and he deliberately dropped grease on Todd’s spotless white trousers worn when cooking. “That will be eleven pounds you owe me, Todd. Must have a lot of money, eh?”
Wonderfully enough, Todd’s quick anger was not roused by the black grease-drops. He shouted up at Mayne:
“Come down out of that, a-laughing up there like a young gal wantin’ to be kissed. Look wot’s coming! Look behind you!”
What Frank Mayne did see when, turning, he looked to the north and west, drove him to the ground with the agility of an old-time powder-monkey. From due north to south of west the horizon was blotted out by a rapidly rising wall of dark-brown sand.
Standing at the foot of the mill, they watched the sand-wall rising with incredible speed toward the zenith. Reaching the sun, the sand yellowed it, reddened it, finally dimmed it to greyness and wiped it away.
“It is going to be dusty,” Todd observed dryly. “I’m for home and beauty to shut the winders, and bury me ’ead in a blanket, so’s I shan’t eat abut seventeen millions of atoms.”
“So’m I,” Mayne responded, and together they raced for the shelter of the hut.
Mayne lingered outside the twin huts whilst Todd within slammed shut and fastened securely the trap-door, glassless windows. Earthward from the zenith towered the approaching wall, a vast billowing curtain that threatened to fall on the huts, on all Atlas, and bury their world beneath countless tons of sand. An alternately rising and falling hum, as of some monstrous top, reverberated on Mayne’s ear-drums. The face of the sand-wall was ever changing in a short range of colour tints, from the red of those masses pushed outward to catch the light of the eastern clear sky, to the black of vast caverns and orifices made by portions sucked back into the mass. The humming sound grew louder and higher in pitch. Behind the sand-wall lurked the cyclone devil.
Whilst he looked the scrub about a mile distant vanished, eaten up by the racing horror. He saw the dun-coloured specks of sheep half a mile distant overwhelmed, eaten up. Glancing upward, the wall, which now had no summit, seemed to be falling outward and downward upon them. At its base countless little columns of dust rose from the plain to stagger drunkenly into it, as though in ludicrous futile effort to beat it back. Till the last three seconds Mayne stayed, rooted to the spot by the wonder of it. He found Todd Gray seated on his bunk, a blanket beside him.
“She’s gonna be a hum-dinger,” he said with perverse glee. “She’s gonna bring rain.”
“Not it! We must have had fifty of these storms since last it rained, Todd,” said Mayne chidingly.
“Not this sort. Remember that cloud coming from the east and going to the west. A pilot-cloud that was. Going out across the continent to pilot back the rain. Anyway, if you don’t believe me, I’ll bet you another––”
The sand-wall struck White Well with a sound of w-wo-woo-woof-ff. The dimly seen interior of the hut vanished. Within five seconds it was utterly dark. The air was filled with sand. The roof-iron rattled and strained for a short space, and then followed a silence. The darkness continued, perhaps for ten minutes. The silence became oppressive. Todd spluttered and coughed.
“I told you it’s gonna rain. A sand-storm without wind is as abnormal as an astronomer without a telescope. If they could capture and store all the static created by this sand, they’d have enough power to drive all the machinery in the world for a hundred years.
Hark! It’s gonna rain!”
With a towel now pressed to his mouth and nostrils, Mayne listened. As though he stood on a beach listening to the countless water-bubbles exploding after a wave had spent itself, so now he heard the hiss of sand falling on the iron roof, sand that had been lifted high in the air from somewhere in the heart of Australia, and carried thus far by a mighty wind that now had died, permitting the sand to fall. The light began to return. Vibrations stirred the air–
strange vibrations as though caught by imagination rather than by physical nerves. It was as though, at some vast distance, a cosmic bombardment was in progress.
“She’s coming,” Todd said. “Hark at ’er!”
“But she’s going–has gone, almost,” Mayne objected, thinking of the sand-storm.
“Oh, that! I’m talking of the break in the drouth. Let’s go outside. That’s thunder, for a million.”
“Wind most likely,” was Mayne’s pessimistic view.
The air quickly was clearing. To the south-west the sand-wall hung from the sky as the train from the dress of Satan’s bride. Above them the sun appeared, a grey disk rapidly becoming a dirty brown. Streaks of blue lay over the north-western horizon, and whilst it widened they saw huge blotches of white. The hut roofs, the fowl-house roof, the crossbars of the gate to the fowl-run, the dog-kennel, the branches and the twigs of the pepper tree, everything was covered with sand, loaded as a snowstorm would have loaded every object on which it fell.
The sun became blood-red and set without growing in brightness. From the thinning sand to the north and west masses of white came out as though on a developing photographic plate. The white blotches were clouds. A wind rustled through the pepper tree, and from it fell sand as though from a sieve; from roofs and gate-rails it blew a cloud of sand. The air was filled with strange rumbling noises. The wind freshened, and quickly the thinning sand veil was wafted eastward and they could see the sky clearly. Masses of clouds were growing from nothingness, were forming in the sky before the eyes of the two drought-shrivelled men. Masses of clouds, seemingly miles deep, were rushing together, propelled by high atmospheric whirlwinds. Jove and his army were mobilizing with ever louder thunderclaps and ever more brilliant lightning bolts.
“She’s coming! I told you so! Look at ’er!” shouted Todd Gray. “You owe me sixteen quid.”
Water-drops fell on the fine sand laid smoothly over all the land by the storm. They made dull circular marks as large as florins. The heated earth turned the water splashes into vapour that rose to the nostrils of the entranced men, smelling of newly turned, sweetened earth, of an alchemist’s mixture of the scents of every herb and flower and young grass-shoot on all the surface of a luscious earth.
The landscape of barren sand and blackened, dying scrub was fading behind a wall-this time a wall of falling water. Lightning sizzled as water on a red-hot stove, so close was it at times. Thunder beat on their ear-drums with terrific force, and shook the ground on which they stood. And above it–or below–to Mayne and Gray dwarfing the roaring elements, another sound, the gug-guggling of water running away along the sand-choked gutters.
They discarded all restraint. Why do horses gallop, and steers buck, and sheep playfully bunt at the approach of rain? urged by the same irresistible force, these two who had fought drought to the last ditch tore off their clothes and capered in the puddles with the rain thudding upon them, streaming down their bodies. They laughed and shouted as men made mad, threw back their heads to allow the pelting rain to fall into their open mouths.
“She’s come! She’s come!” screamed Todd.
“She’s over! She’s over!” yelled Mayne, and, seizing the fierce-eyed little cook, he whirled him round and round in the nudest and maddest of lunatic dances. It was over–Drought!
THE END