The Tracks We Tread/Chapter 6
Chapter VI
“You see, I’m only a station-hand, Effie.”
“Well, that’s all you were when I first loved you, silly boy.”
“It didn’t matter then. Nothing mattered. Now—it matters more than all the world besides.”
“It doesn’t! How can it? I like things to be just the same. The sunshine, and all the slope of yellow down to the creek, and you sitting up here just with me alone. I am I, and you are you; and we’ve got all the sum and the breezes to ourselves. And that is enough.”
“Is it? My little Effie—you don’t know———”
“Oh, look! There’s a butterfly! The first one of spring! Ah!”
Randal came to his feet as she sprang past him with the gladness of a child in her limbs and in her face. The spring air was blowing warm across the hill-top and the veined slopes to the westing, and the smell of young grass and brown earth came up from the paddock-flat where Moody and Lou were ploughing. The hog-backed range to the rightward was puce and opal and blood-crimson, and on the spears of sunlight between the cabbage-trees the Red Admiral flickered like an elusive thought. Randal laughed when the little ringed fingers snatched for it, missed, and glanced in light again. Then he flung his cap, and brought the red-and-black flash to earth.
“What a baby you are, Effie! he said. “There’s your plaything.”
She cast herself on the tussock, slipping delicate fingers under the old soiled tweed.
“Stupid boy—what made you do that?”
“I thought you wanted it.”
“Not like this—with a broken wing. You’ve spoilt it!”
She shook it off into the yellow spines, with a childish pout, and Randal’s face was suddenly hard.
“Not the only broken thing I’ve given you, is it? You had better shake me off, too, Effie.”
The sweet dark eyes were full of puzzlement, and the lip dropped.
“Guy—I never can understand you. I didn’t mean anything———”
Randal kicked aside his gorse-knife—he had been cutting brush in the gully beyond—and dropped down beside her.
“Dearest—dear little girl, I know you didn’t. I—sometimes wish you did. Effie, you are such a child, and I—oh, my little, little Effie, what are we doing! What are we doing!”
“Being happy! That’s enough for to-day, isn’t it? Don’t be such a dear old duffer, Guy.”
She laid the drawn sword of a flax-leaf across his mouth, laughing. Randal caught her hand, gripping it fast.
“Listen,” he said. “You are Life and Death and Heaven and Hell to me. And I—Heaven knows what I am to you. For I think that you don’t know the meaning of those words yet, Effie.”
“I—don’t know. It doesn’t matter, does it? I do love you, Guy.”
Her sweet breath was on his cheek, and her soft troubled face was very close. Randal nearly laughed. Just so would she have spoken to her grandmother.
For an instant the mad longing was in him to teach her, somehow, some way, that passion which, once lit, burns to eternity on the very core of life itself. Already she had taught him all the unrest that is beyond a name. Already she had taught him such desire as will purge all dross from a man, or will kill him, body and soul. She touched his neck gently.
“Do—do you know what love really means, Guy?”
Unseen, below the forehead of the hill Lou was whistling as the plough wore round, and the clank of tightening chains came up sharply. Randal moved.
“Do I know what love is? Yes; I know. Though you were long years dead, and just dust blown along the hills, I would feel you pass by on the wind. I would love you then as now———”
She ruffled up his hair with both upstretched hands, and her eyes were laughing.
“And how do you love me now?” she said.
And then Randal cast the honour that he had been rivetting behind him for a space; and it broke, as it had broken many times before, to be patched again through bitter nights of wakefulness.
A wedge of swan passed dumbly overhead, black on the daffodil sky. Along the crystal of the snow-hills the sunset poured, red as strong wine. The sharpness of it was in the air, and in Randal’s heart. He heard Lou’s laugh below as the leading-chains fell; and the tramp of the horses turning homeward.
“I work for your father,” he said. “And I can’t look him in the face. I meet Murray and Ormond, and others who are no better than I—was. And I can’t look them in the face. For they know what I ought to be, and what I am. And do you think I don’t know what they would call me if they knew—this?”
His arms were very close round her, and she smiled at him wonderingly.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference really if they are in the house while you are in the whare. For you are a gentleman too, Guy.”
“Effie, I think that I am not—or I would not be here. I am just drifting.”
“Well, keep on drifting! I like you much better that way than when you want to stand on the other side of the road and touch your cap. And please, please don’t bother about all the others days, Guy. There’s just now—nothing else ever matters. And can’t you fancy that the broom and manuka in the gully are buttercups and daisies, and we are just children home from school? And there’s a wee, wee rabbit over on the sand-ridge! Come and we’ll chase him home! Come!”
She darted across the tussock slope; and Randal picked up his gorse-knife and followed, the after-glow dark on his face.
Tod was hoarse with delight when Randal came into the whare at the dusk.
“Begorra; it’s the fat luck laid thick ontu us this toime,” he crowed. “Git to your packin’ then, Randal, me boyo. Wirrasthrew, that niver a blackthorn grows woild in this bush at all! Cud I break Pug Chaney’s head wid the fisht of me, du ye think now?”
“What is it?” demanded Randal.
Steve explained briefly.
“North-o’-Sunday. Four on us wi’ drays ter git the totara fur the noo drawin’-room; Scannell wants it sharp. We’re to give a hand if Purdey is pushed. Reckon it’ll take all o’ a week ter git it out.”
“Who’s to go?” asked Randal, with Effie’s good-night yet warm on his lips.
“Me,” cried Tod, swinging his legs from the table-edge. “An’ yersilf. An’ Steve an’ Lou an’ me. Och! Ye’d a right to be lookin’ plazed, me hayro of war in the corner there! Throth! we’ll be straightenin’ Purdey’s Camp till the mother of it wud pass it widout good-day. Ay, will we!”
“Purdey’s Camp fights best when it’s pure drunk,” remarked Lou, biting an end of waxed thread from his half-mended saddle strap. “You’ll find them slogging in up to the knocker. Tod, or Purdey’s eye-teeth tell lies.”
“Won’t they be stoppin’ for males, thin, at all, at all? Plaze the pigs I’ll learn them to foight whin sober. Ah! bad luck to it! Why was not mesilf in the township that noight?”
The cook chuckled, dredging flour into a stew.
“There was a few there as is wishin’ they wasn’t, I’m thinkin’. Does Maiden run wi’ the Lassie pack still, Steve?”
Steve was cobbling a patch in the shoulder-blade of his best waistcoat. A small darn Maiden had once made for him lay next it. He jumped at her name, spearing his thumb with the big needle.
“Dunno,” he said, in savage defiance. “Ask Lou. He sees more o’ her than I does.”
Lou drew a new thread through the wax with a rasping squeal.
“Tod’s gone across to pack,” he said. “If you fellows want to keep any of your belongings you’d best overhaul his swag. He was making off with my dungarees———”
“He’s jest torn all ways wi’ excitement,” said Ted Douglas. “Keep an eye on him, Steve, or Purdey’s Camp’ll make him into paper pulp.”
Tod had looked for battle since his petticoat days, and the joy of two fists put up opposite his own was greater to him than the love of woman and home. These are the men who tread out the ways, alone and reckless, that another man may build thereon. He descended on Purdey’s Camp with challenge in his eye and in his shoulder-swing, and not all the long aching hours since sun-up had stiffened the clatter of his tongue.
Purdey met them at the door of his slab hut; read over Scannell’s note, and gave verdict on the instant.
“Can’t possibly get it all out this week,” he said. “We only tapped the spur yesterday. You men will have to put your backs into it. Lou, you’re good at team work. You and Steve can go to the logging, and I’ll put Pug and Webber on felling. Tod, you’d best take the cross-out. Mair will be your mate. He can wind any man in camp.”
“Sure then there’s a bloomin’ knock-out waitin’ for him, the gossoon,” said Tod joyously. “For there is no toight-lacin’ wid Scannell’s men at all, at all.”
Then Purdey glanced at Randal’s sullen jaws and eyes, and swallowed a smile. Randal would work like a demon while this mood held him.
“Felling for you, too,” he said. “And you’ll find some tough stuff to bite on.” He slid his hands in his trousers-pockets, looking on them with the bland grin of a child.
“I believe I saw some of you in that row in the township last month,” he said. “You take your chances here, you know. I sack the first man who complains.”
He turned into his hut, and Tod wriggled with thankful joy.
“Did I not tell ye we wud turn the Camp insoide out?” he cried. “Four of us, wid fishts all, and Lou havin’ science to top up wid. Come on wid ye, now, whoile we give thim good-mornin’.”
But the belt-rope of work ran rapid and unbroken on Purdey’s Camp. Purdey’s hand swayed each separate lever. At the tram-head the gangs felt it, where they wrought with the lean rails and sleepers, driving Purdey’s will through the bush-heart; where they served the double saws and the axe-blades, and fed sticks to the grips that gaped ever from the tail of the logging-tracks. The bench sawyers felt it, and the trolley-men; and each tailer-out and engine driver down to the least and clumsiest slabby that lumped in the mill.
One and all, they had no time to play with Tod, until the engine called time, and the mill-men slouched across to the huts set in the straggle of raped bush, and the cooking-smell rose on the blue keen air. Then the crowd came down from the tram-head; and the gum from bleeding timber was on hairy chests and hands, and the good sappy scents strong on their clothes.
Then Steve’s heart leapt in him at sound of the bush-talk, which is a language all its own; and Lou sifted through the trampling vivid-voiced mob, picking sharpers and fools in an eye-blink; and Tod arranged three set-to’s to come after the meal, and a double with Steve as partner.
“But you’d best not be servin’ writs on Purdey,” warned Chessin. “He’s got the devil’s own science, an’ a little more o’ his own. Saw him put Pug to sleep wonst for cheekin’ him.”
There was the grate of pride in Chessin’s tone. For the bushmen are men, and they will not serve less than a man. And, one and altogether, they will choose a beating in fair ding-dong fight before the easy handling a weak soul may give.
Tod blinked round the clearing where a full hundred men from the ends of earth struck the great bass chord of virulent life above the tender treble of the wind passing in the tree-tops.
“Wid the four of us—takin’ come-an-go-agin—I think we can manage to howld up to the week-indin’,” he said.
From Purdey’s Camp a twelve-mile tram-line ran up to the terminus. The rails were of wood, and warped by the frost. They were hog-backed over the creeks and gullies, and sinfully greasy in rain. But there, and in the clashing mills, Purdey’s men made few mistakes. For Purdey had the knack of rousing their pride, and pride carries weight with all men who are worthy the name.
Steve roused next morning to the scream of the mill-engines, and the snarl of waking saws. He fought in the man-choked rough-slabbed hut for sea-pie and mutton through the blank chill that goes before dawn, and took the first jigger that sat on the line while the sunrise was drowsy and faint on the tree-tops. For already the bush was calling with the witchery of shaken sunbeams on the laughing brown-eyed cheeks, and the trembling sweet silences of frail ferns that have not seen the day.
No man bred in the streets and the sheltered ways may know the glorious merciless joy that follows the first sob of the blade into green unhandled timber. And though an axeman be past all but the blurred memory, he will turn at that sound from all other music that earth may hold. For the bush is the Eternal Artist whose work no man makes sensuous or coarse, and to them that love her she gives that intuition which gets behind mystery and unbelief to prove that God has made in His own image the Almighty Peace which He lays on Nature the round world through.
In the cook-hut someone was bawling for a stolen crib. The clank of steel burred sharp on the air as a tram-horse bucked in the traces. Lou came over the beaten clearing with his long whip in his arm-pit, and swung to the jigger as Hoffman got it under way. His knee brushed Steve’s when he took the place opposite, and his gay chaff flicked the man at his side to haste. Steve lay to the handles in dogged silence. True hate marches ever with fear to goad it, and, for Maiden’s sake, Steve feared and hated Lou.
One by one the jiggers crawled out behind, strung along the grey line like shifting beads on a string. The utter peace of the morning broke under the grate of wheels and the deep chest-breathing that carried light snatches of song. The tinkle of frost-thinned creeks murmured alongside, and shy tentative trills and flutters in the deeps of the scented gullies told to men that the birds were mating.
Lou swung forward, and his breath brushed Steve’s face. It was whiskey-tainted; but his eyes were clear blue as the sky, and the white skin that showed where the loose shirt gaped was no whiter than his even teeth.
“It’s nice to think we’re good friends, isn’t it?” he said. “There’s whips of places on a logging-track where a man might come to grief—by accident.”
The mockery of the light tone hit Steve. He gripped at the handles.
“I never had nuthin’ ter do wi’ them kind o’ accidents,” he answered.
“Nor I.” Lou blinked up at the welter of gold in the branches. “Hear that tui! He’s making love to his mate. D’you think he’ll ever get her, Steve? They are clumsy beggars, you know.”
“Id is nod dey is de only clumsy beggar,” growled Hoffman. “You did near haf us ofer der culvert! Sit oop, man, und put your back indo id.”
The jigger rocked round a steep angle, and Lou swung to balance with the ease of the saddle-bred. Right and left the old logging-tracks lay on the slopes. In years past they too had waited; ripped, raw, and bleeding, in the dews of the maiden bush, for the cleft hoofs to beat them to barren clay. Now the jiggers flashed from them to new life that called; and to their nakedness and poverty of rotting stumps the lawyer-thorn and vagrant convolvulus gave pity and careless covering.
For a full hour, as the sun warmed and the black gullies waked, the jiggers swarmed upward; labouring along the steep grades, and dipping with swallow-flight to the sturdy bridges that spanned creek and gully and swamp. And then the heart-hunger that jagged Randal always gave before the joy of the axe-helve cold in his hand, and the crackle of underbrush as the men crashed through and away from the life and the noise at the tram-head.
With the instinct which Purdey called a power of the devil, Punch Reynolds could nose out the best timber through the bitterest country that ever broke a man’s heart. He stormed the totara spur, quick-glancing in the shadows for each bole that would run a decent three feet across. Randal and his squad crashed after, obeying the sharp wood-pecker tap of the blaze; and before the axe swung for the scarf the clearers were under his feet, with long knives for the vine and young sapling. Cox ruled the next gang.
“Scannell wants fifteen feats,” he said. “That stick’ll cut two—and that.”
He scored the mark and passed, swearing at the wide-branched tops. For these shouted of second-class timber from each ruddy knot.
Lou swung his team where the great white chips flew, and the blue flame lit his eyes as Tod and Mair sprang back with the cross-cut. For the tree stood one tense second, then leapt on its stump; roaring headlong through the lighter timber, and bringing Steve to earth with a stray branch.
Steve picked himself up, wiped the blood from his neck with his sleeve, and backed his team to the stick Cox had marked.
“I’ll come back fur the chap as floored me when it’s ready,” he said. “What made yer fell the sloven end that a-way, Tod, yer animal?”
Tod lent his weight to the grip where Steve struggled with it.
“Begad; I cudn’t git the thing to turn a somersault, at all, at all,” he declared. “Maybe it’s easier drawin’ from the little ind, boy, dear.”
“Yer a fool,” proclaimed Pug, lifting the iron grip as he would have lifted a pair of scissors, and casting it into place. “Git a move on wi’ them brutes there.”
The chains shrieked as the strain fell on them; the grip bit and held in the bleeding wood, and the bullocks grunted with fore-bent shoulders as the great bole drew slowly from its port.
The logging-way was a cross between a skittle-alley and the ’tween-deck promenade of an ocean tramp. It was moist and chill as the grave, and very nearly as dark. Steve wound into it, where the dank smells and the utter silence gave him creeps up his spine, and the jar of the log on the iron earth and the creak of the twisting yokes sounded hideously loud and unfamiliar. Veil on veil of wide wet spider webs broke before the slow horns, and underfoot the young springs gave up their lives in splintered glass. Far above, where the sun was, a handful of moko-mokos made their prayer to God. Then behind, from mouth of the track, Lou’s whistle soared up to catch the falling notes: but to neither man was there aught of hymn in it. The tune broke to words that stung Steve with their rollicking derision.
Because she says so———”
Came a sudden clatter, hurried oaths, the curse of the whip; once and thrice. Then a full-lunged shout of command:
“Steve! Make way there! Make out! They’ve bolted!”
Steve stood. And there was all of the devil in his face. When that bolting team crashed full-speed into the great butt at his elbow, forty pounds worth of bullocks would go—twice that, and perhaps more. For this was Purdey’s best team, and Purdey was a hard man. Without any doubt Lou would disappear before payment was called, and Maiden——— The thoughts ran with the swiftness of a mainspring unloosed. Then the message of the bush went home. Steve jumped for his team, cut the whip on the rumps, on the quivering flanks, on the nozzles that dripped and blew wide with terror. The log canted and groaned as the brutes sprang; swayed to a clumsy trot; to a canter, and blundered down the steep grade with the grip live-leaping behind. Steve half-swung to the yoke, grimly beating a laggard about the head.
“Ten ter one he’ll git pinched ef they strike—comin’ that pace, too. He must be holdin’ ter ’em. Gosh! He kin swear!”
The off-leader pecked, and Steve’s whip snarled under the wrist-work that had peeled skin in straight lines from more than one bolting piker. The sidling was greasy in clay. Now again it was corduroy that jarred Steve’s spine, and rough-rolling stones giving no foothold. Steve’s breath came in groans, and sweat ran down his face. Yet—because of that something in man which forces him to be true against his will—he flung all power of body and mind to his labour.
The leaders took a corner too fine. The log grunted, swung, and grounded across the track, jamming between stiff tuke-tuke saplings. Steve’s heart leapt in his throat as he sent a glance up the track. For down the greasy sidling Lou’s team was coming at a swinging gallop, and the grip bounded in the air, unsteadied by any weight whatever.
“Lost ’is log, has he? Grip slipped—my soul! he’ll pay for’t in a minute.”
Then Steve stood aside, helpless, while the other man gave payment.
Lou’s right hand was as a twitch on the foremost red nostril, and the brute had its head up, bellowing with pain. Two chains; one; then the charge hit the four-foot totara fair, and crumbled.
Lou found foothold, cat-like, diving in where the fallen leaders writhed, and the eight behind bunched upon them. The flurry of sweat-caked bodies and tossing horns and reddened strained eyes made the very gateway of the Pit, and that gate fell half-open for Lou as he struggled, cursing, with the chains. Quite clearly Steve saw him go down where the hoofs beat. Quite clearly he remembered Lou’s face as he kissed Maiden’s hand in the crush.
“Curse him,” he said, “now an’ always!” Then he went in and brought the man out.
Lou’s left sleeve was ripped to the shoulder, and a stray horn had run out a trench up the flesh beneath. His face was curd-white under the bloody spume that flecked it, and he staggered, half-blind and sick.
“Get out,” he said, when Steve would have strapped the torn flesh. “Lend a hand with these brutes before they kick themselves into blazes.”
They took the danger shoulder to shoulder, without speech and without hesitation. But the sweat of pain ran down Lou’s face, and Steve’s grip on the hooks was unsteady.
When the log was freed and Steve’s team under way again, Lou spoke with tight lips, and the red dripping from his cuff-band to the dust.
“I’m taking all that can walk back for my log. But you needn’t try to trap me again, for I’ll be coming too slow next time.”
Steve straightened as under a whip-cut. The savage showed for a flash in his honest broad face.
“By ———! you’ll pay for that when yer got two hands agin, Lou Birot! Don’t go thinkin’ as I’ll furgit———”
“I don’t mean you to forget,” said Lou; but his light defiance crumbled, and he steadied with an effort.
Something fought with the hate in Steve.
“Yer can’t go back, Lou. Yer ain’t fit. Yer can’t swing a whip———”
“Do you want to feel if I can’t?” demanded Lou, and his eyes were wicked absolutely.
Steve went, never looking back. Lou turned to his team. The leaders were dying where they stood, brought to their feet only by the point of the knife. The power of it goaded them into the under-scrub at the track-side, where they pitched sideways among soft-headed moss and maiden-hair and the flower of the wild strawberry to meet death with wrath and black pain.
Three hours later Lou brought his shrunk team down to the tram-head. There was a heathenish bandage round his arm, and a tourniquet hugging the thick of it. He crawled up the logging-bank, cast off the grip opposite the waiting trolley, stumbled into a ganger’s hands, and lay there.
Purdey bound the woiuid that night with the tenderness of a woman. Then he tongue-lashed Lou into white fury before all the Camp. For carelessness was the unforgivable sin beyond North-of-Sunday, and without doubt, Lou’s grip had never been properly set. Tod carried the truth back to Mains—with a couple of black eyes as a voucher.
“Be aisy till I tell you, thin,” he said. “Sure, it’s the unnathural ugly objic’ Pug Chaney is when he comes out of the ind of a mill wid Steve to do the clappin’ on him. Bedad, it’s Steve is the quare ould slogger an’ all of it! Clane and clever he is, and Lou’ll have to be takin’ afther the devil what owns him to turn Steve over whin they putt up their hands. An’ that’ll be all to watch! It is not Lou takes the whip-cut widout lookin’ for the hand what gives it. No—sorra a fear will Lou do that!”
“But it was Purdey rowed him,” said Ike. “Even Lou must see that.”
Tod looked at him pityingly.
“May ye git your health till ye grow sinse,” he said. “Musha! Ye’ve a right to live to a quare ould age, I’m thinkin’.”