The Big Fellow, page 16
“There’ll be something doing now,” people told one another. “The Big Fellow won’t just set aside a Sunday for prayer.”
It was a drought that had scorched a great area of country, and it was not merely political matters that had brought Donovan there; he had been seized by an urge to see for himself how serious the damage was and what could be done for its alleviation. No hint of human conflict here; the whole battle was with sinister forces of nature. Since the beginning of the year there had been no rain; most of the natural pastures had dried out, and there was a smell of dust and the mud of caked waterholes. Lack of transport, people complained, prevented starving cattle being taken away to southern areas where they might find agistment. It was the least the Government could do to provide transport.
Driving about in shirt sleeves from one shrivelled settlement to another, his coat thrown over the back of his car-seat, Donovan talked with graziers and local councillors, listening to their suggestions, making his own promises. In many places the surface water had disappeared, the main sources of supply being soakages in the dry river-beds. He met children trudging to school through the dust with their water-bottles, men struggling with tanks they had painfully filled.
“Don’t think all this is new to me,” he told them. “I was brought up in the dry country. My first money at Golconda was earned carting water at five bob a gallon. And you can take my word for it that wasn’t the easiest job on the field. One journey a day to a soak where it had to be squeezed out like milk from a skin-and-bone cow. My own allowance wasn’t enough to wash the dust from my throat.”
For a week or two he was all activity. He sent wires to the military authorities for a fleet of army tankers; he rented areas in the watered country for cattle that could be shifted; in the sample-rooms of township hotels he formed committees that would act as intelligence units for the whole district, collecting information and acquiring supplies of fodder and seed for summer-growing grain crops. This was organizing work into which he could put his whole heart and mind: it gave him a sense of being in contact with the dark, vital root of life. His vision of the world seen from the air faded. He was back in his natural element, among demands and ideas with which he could cope.
Moving from one dairying district to another, where cattle were still being milked in spite of stricken pastures and stud-bulls were being fed on peanut-hay, Donovan remembered that this was the country that old grandfather McCoy had helped to pioneer nearly a century before. Now, even in this dry season, it looked largely tamed and humanized. The farmers who welcomed him to their trim homesteads seemed men who had never known any life other than the one they were leading: they had no memory of sniffing the air for the strange aboriginal scent, or of working at night to hear the corroboree chants of blacks around their fires. The perspectives of history had closed up so that settlement for them had begun when the first tractor-mounted blades had mown hay on the river-flats and the railway had been extended to carry cotton crops to the coast. The fanatical Irishman who had been seized by frenzy at finding his wife and child tomahawked at his door, and had ridden the hills for months shooting at every black he saw, was not even a legend. Donovan could not find any old farmers who had heard of him.
“McCoy? There’s been no one here of that name in my time,” they told him.
Smells of rain-sweetened dust were in Donovan’s nostrils before he climbed into his plane again. One after another the showers came sweeping across the skyline in grey curves; they cleaned the air and brought a rich darkness to the soil. There was not enough weight in them to set the dry creeks running, but they gave promise of relief until the monsoonal rains.
He had intended to drive straight home from the airfield: instead he found himself making a detour through the town to call in at Warman’s.
“Mrs Brouyer’s away,” he was told.
“Away? Where?”
“She didn’t say. Left word she was going to the country and wouldn’t be back for a day or two.”
Donovan’s chagrin revealed to him the undercurrents of his own mind. Several times while he was away he had written to Neda: he had torn the letters up without finishing them. And he had felt satisfaction in the belief that she had fallen back to a minor place in his thoughts, that more important things were absorbing him, that his preoccupation with her was a passing mood. She no longer had power to distract him with those evasive movements of hers, coming to meet him, sliding away. Now that he had played his part by setting the boy free he could leave her to herself.
He discovered that he had been deluding himself.
“You’ve been overdoing it, Macy,” said Hugh McCoy, meeting him in the street. “Taking too much on your shoulders. Don’t think I’m fussy if I tell you that you’re showing the strain.”
Donovan said jauntily that what he had been occupied with had been just routine. “Clearing things up before Parliament meets,” he went on. “I’m finding that my place isn’t on the bridge but somewhere down in the engine-room with an oil-can.”
Hugh McCoy gave him a shrewd, penetrating glance.
“Remember what you promised me long ago? That you’d come to me for a check-up at least once a year?”
“Hell!” said Donovan with a twinkle. “Do I look such a wreck that I make you recall that? What about putting me through the hoops now, then?”
It was hardly more than a joke between them; to Hugh McCoy mainly a chance for friendly contact with this man for whom he felt an attraction he could never quite fathom. He had been conscious of this attraction ever since the days when Donovan, a strange fellow he had never heard of, had been brought to St Monica’s with a knife-wound and he had been raised from his bed at midnight to attend to him. Yet they rarely met; they had little to say to one another. McCoy, acutely conscious of his own slow pulse and hoarded reserves of strength, was overwhelmed by Donovan’s abundance, even a little envious of it. He himself had been let down, he felt, by his lack of stamina; any success of his had been achieved by taking thought, by putting one foot patiently ahead of another. During the war he had had two shattering experiences: one when a plane crashed in nosing out an air-strip in the New Guinea jungle, another when he had deliberately let himself be infected by scrub-typhus. His tall, thin figure had contracted a slight stoop, though as he attended his patients and made his rounds at St Monica’s few people guessed he had an injured spine and was a little deaf in one ear.
They were not disabilities that troubled him. He was more concerned, in his moments of self-contemplation, with the aridity of his inner life. The conflicts that had agitated his youth—between faith and reason, between romantic impulse and sober restraint—had not been so much resolved as smothered by an intense concentration on his professional work. He kept late hours; he studied the current medical journals as if they were sacred books; he controlled with a firm hand his imagination and his senses. Yet he was drawn to people like Donovan who moved through life with a natural zest. How different things would have been for him if Sandra could have done so! She was deaf, he had always felt, to the direct voice of things; there was an abstraction in her eyes: she took delight in nothing around her, but looked to the skyline for what would escape her forever.
Donovan chuckled as he stripped off his shirt in the surgery and revealed an expansive chest, the skin dark of texture in spite of the few occasions it had lately been bared to the sun.
“Looks like the cover, doesn’t it, Hugh, of a complete set of healthy organs? Don’t tell me there’s anything wrong there.”
Hugh McCoy’s face was sober as he applied the stethoscope and took his soundings. Was it a true instinct, he was wondering, that had made him feel the moment he met Donovan that all was not quite well with him, that his nerves were nearer than usual to his skin, that something inwardly disturbing was at work? Or had he himself been affected by his discussions of the Mount Clutha affair with Judy? His eyes fastened on a little white bead, hardly bigger than a pea, above Donovan’s left nipple.
“You haven’t yet got rid of the old scar, Macy.”
“No.” Donovan grinned. “I’m keeping it as a reminder not to lose my head again.”
Hugh McCoy looked at him with a smile.
“You did lose your head, then? I don’t think you admitted that at the time. I thought it was the other fellow.”
“I was the one started it,” said Donovan. “He only used the knife on provocation. Those days I had a good deal more swagger than sense. And that time I’d been on a jag for weeks and was hell-bent on making trouble. I’d nothing against this fellow, poor young devil, except that he looked like another Italian I had it in for.”
McCoy’s eyes became reflective.
“It was touch and go. If that knife had gone in a little lower down … But I suppose we’re all alive by virtue of such chances.”
“There’s St Christopher,” Donovan quipped. “You can always take out an insurance by wearing one of his medals. Kitty used to think it’d be murder to let our youngsters cross the road without a decorated chest.”
Slipping on his shirt, he talked racily about his visit to the drought-stricken areas, the battered cars trailing about with half-filled tanks, the fight to save the stock, the anticlimax of the rain.
Hugh McCoy watched him as he listened. He remembered his own journey of exploration to that grey country as a young man, in search of his grandfather’s homestead and remnants of the scattered tribes. It was a memory that touched a nerve in him; but just then he was more concerned with Donovan. Was Macy as easy in his mind as he pretended to be? Wasn’t there a disparity between the breeziness of his talk and the restlessness of his movements, the way his voice flickered out abstractedly for a few moments and then came on at full pressure? He noticed, too, that Donovan kept picking up objects from the table and putting them down again.
Going downstairs to the street with him, McCoy said tentatively, “I’ve been seeing a good deal of Peter lately: Kathleen brings him to the house. Peter’s got rather an uneasy conscience, you know, for having left you in the lurch. Not missing the help he used to give you, are you?”
“I am; a good deal more than I thought I would. But don’t carry word of that to him—the young absconder!”
“And not letting this loose talk about Mount Clutha get on your mind?”
Donovan stopped suddenly and looked at him.
“That?” he jerked out.
His eyes flashed, and a thunder-cloud darkened his face. It was as if some obscure passion that had been working in him had gathered and come to a point of expression.
“I’m not suggesting it’s been troubling you,” said Hugh.
“I know, but—God in heaven!—what are we coming to! Here am I working day and night to keep the industry of the whole country going, here am I with the whole weight of it on my shoulders, and they try to trip me up, the bloody triflers, with a niggling charge like that!”
The easy good humour had left him: even his eyes had become enlarged, showing their whites. This outburst seemed so absurdly out of proportion to the careless question tossed him that Hugh McCoy looked at him with embarrassment.
“I’d taken for granted it didn’t really involve you,” he said quickly.
“It doesn’t,” said Donovan, recovering himself. “There are plenty of things that keep me awake at nights, but that’s not one of them. Don’t worry, Hugh, old boy. If I’m brought down it won’t be because of any money that was passed beneath the table.”
It was what Hugh McCoy wanted to hear. There was a forthrightness in Donovan’s words, he felt, that would reassure Judy. Yet he was not reassured himself. That sudden eruption of Donovan’s: it seemed to reflect an inner turmoil; if Mount Clutha wasn’t the cause of it, it probably had its origin in something more vital.
Chapter XVI
It was easier, Peter Mahony was feeling, to pick up the threads of his work than he had expected. The cyclone had passed, and all its shattering effects on him were falling back into the region of dimly remembered fantasies. He had vaguely hoped that everything would be turned over so that it showed a new face; he had counted on life beginning to move to quite a different rhythm, but he had come to taking pleasure, as he sauntered off to his lectures, in the familiar look of things—the boats moving indolently up the river, the notice-boards announcing students’ activities, even the posters outside the newspaper-shops shouting the result of a football match as if it were more important than the meeting of the Big Four in Paris. Where did reality lie? In this bright aspect of things, or in the apocalyptic visions of upheaval and change that had for so long kept his mind in a ferment?
Living in a couple of rooms on the North Quay, he was too absorbed in his work to let the question worry him very much. Even the industrial clashes that were keeping Donovan absorbed only touched the fringe of his attention; they were not primarily his affair. He was trying to live down his reputation as a charming young fellow who had no particular interests of his own, but could throw himself easily into those of other people. He was aware of his own softness, his tendency to live in his emotions. There was no original force in him, he told himself, such as there was in men like Seyler or Donovan; the best thing he could do was to fit himself for a useful professional job by a period of hard grind.
But with his release from the atmosphere of the Donovan home and his estrangement from Sheila had come a slight stiffening of his spirit. The sight of Sheila’s handwriting on a letter or postcard waiting for him in the hall hardly roused a flicker of feeling in him.
What a tiresome creature I must have seemed in those last few weeks [she wrote]. Nagging at you, nagging at everyone. The notion of getting away to Japan went to my head and I couldn’t think of anything else. If you can forgive me, Peter dear, please do.
And again, with a hint of urgency:
Why don’t you write, Peter? You old deserter—why don’t you write? You’ve never known what it was to be in a strange country with not a soul in sight you could exchange a personal word with. Sometimes I feel I’ve got lost in a fantastic world—a world in which there are no good fairies, only dwarfs and dragons.
No mention of Michael: no suggestion that it was a blind urge to catch up with him again that made her set out on her adventure! Peter felt a coldness spread through him when he thought about her. Those affectionate phrases—wasn’t there a smear of coquetry over them? She couldn’t deny herself, even now, the temptation to touch nerves that had once made a quick response. He wasn’t even curious about what had happened between her and Sealy. How could it matter? No chance of Sheila’s ever suffering very deeply through her feelings! Wasn’t it her very lack of feeling that made her want to pose now as a tormented soul, doomed to inner loneliness and frustration?
Lonely be damned! he thought savagely. She’ll find someone to console her before very long.
He did not want to be reminded of her. He was glad to be free from the turbulent emotion he was secretly ashamed of, knowing it had the mawkishness of calf-love.
Yet sometimes when he went down to the old home on Saturday afternoons he was made aware that a remnant of that emotion remained, quivering a little in his secret depths. The sight of the two-storeyed house, standing on a rise above the river-road, a wealth of greenery foaming about it, its balconies fringed with iron lace, always touched him with a faint nostalgia. It had all the solidity of a fixed home. He was carried back to the afternoon, two years before, when he had first met the man who had taken Sheila away from him. Smell of river-mud, of dust from military lorries, of coal-smoke from incoming transports, of frangipanni dropping its fragrance from cliff gardens above the road—himself walking out from hospital in the muggy heat. He had collapsed at the steps above the drive. Then, as he lay on the lounge half asleep before dinner, Sheila had come bursting in with a tall American at her heels:
“Oh, Peter, darling, whatever have you been doing to yourself? You’re all crumpled up: you look as if you’d been dragged along at the tail of a truck … He does, doesn’t he, Michael? This is Michael, Peter—you’ve heard me talk about Michael … No, don’t get up—he knows you’re a hospital case.”
Life overflowing from her, flushing her cheeks with rose, pouring out in her movements and gestures as she picked up the light rug and spread it over his feet. But his gaze was on the man behind her. The indolent, good-natured smile, the long lashes drooping lazily over liquid brown eyes, the handsome sallow features that seemed covered with a film of oil! And the feeling that it was for this fellow that Sheila was making such a show of concern over him! What a relief when Kitty had come in from the races, bubbling as usual over some small win she had had, bringing out the whisky decanter, carrying Sheila off to the kitchen to prepare a meal.
A change had come over his relations with Kitty since the days when the house had been his home. He had been uneasy with her then, feeling that she resented his presence; he had shrunk into himself when left alone with her. There was always the figure of young Kevin between them. What misery he had suffered with the youngster on Sunday mornings when the others went off to second Mass! The effort to amuse him, to keep him from turning on the garden hose or cutting off dahlia-heads with his stick, and then, when his mother came home, the inevitable scene—Kevin running to her and complaining that he had been knocked down or that his ball had been taken from him. He remembered how acutely he had felt an outsider as he hung about the garage, telling himself he could stand it no longer and that this time he would have to go bush or run away to sea. There was such deliberate restraint in Kitty’s voice as she scolded the blubbering youngster and called him a cry-baby; but afterwards, at mealtimes, her eyes had seemed almost blind in their cold resentment:
