1915 (12 page)

Then they were off again, working their horses into a steaming sweat along the Parkes road, finally arriving long after dark. On the way in they had stopped, solemnly shaken hands, and repeated the oath of the Sunday before.

Nothing else seemed worth doing.

While the outlying streets of the town were wide and empty as ever, those near its heart ran with a kind of fever. Figures dashed from door to door. Knots of talkers raised their hats and cried “Hurrah!” as the horses shifted past. The hotels — once they reached the asphalt clatter of the main street — streamed with light and excited voices and the drumming of boots on wooden floorboards. Four men marched down the centre of the road singing “Rule Britannia”, arms hooked around shoulders, stolid as working bullocks. A platoon of boys followed bearing sticks and pick handles; a Union Jack hung from the balcony of the Royal.

New ways of behaviour had descended as if by revelation.

Blacky and the rest would be there, but for once Walter didn't mind. Tonight the clash of persons was dead. One nation stood, swayed, roared, shoulder to shoulder. In the bar, beers were passed head-high in chains of dozens. Pound notes were slapped to the wet counter and no-one seemed concerned about change.

Sure enough, Blacky's gang held a corner. As the latecomers surged towards them a splash of beer fell on Walter's forehead and trickled down his face.

“I've been baptized,” he said stupidly. A slopping glass from somewhere was thrust into his hand. There was Billy already gulping.

“Drink up, boys!” shouted Blacky. “Here's to the stoush!”

“We'll knock their heads together till their brains run out,” giggled Ned.

“I ain't going to wait,” crowed Eddie, “I'm off to Sydney tonight. I'm taking the car.”

“Me too!” Ned squeaked.

The whole room was drunk.

Suddenly Blacky held a pistol — a lustreless cattle-killing Colt. In a second his arm jerked stiff in the air, two shots barked, and the hand dropped. Then Ned held the pistol and another shot rang into the cloud of descending dust and peppery plaster.

Sergeant Gregory materialized with the publican, and Ned was marched off. The policeman entrusted Blacky with the pistol — he'd brazenly asked for it back — and a wag even proposed three cheers for King and Blacky Reid.

“Ned'll take his time now,” pronounced Blacky.

Meanwhile Eddie, propped on the wall, seemed to have dropped out of things. During the excitement he'd hardly reacted. Now he swayed red-eyed, with
hair pasted to his forehead. His lips appeared thicker than usual, as if he'd bitten them earlier in an agony of indecision. He turned to Walter and Billy.

“What about you two?”

“We're going. Too right!”

Walter's first beers had elated him. Now with his third half-emptied he felt sober. This rush to join up, once he'd seen its force in the town, deadened the cold swill in his stomach and made it impossible to get drunk, though the excitement thundered on. A dog went wild among three hundred legs until it was kicked clear. Martha Bryant responded to the toast “Our Women” —

“I like that,” murmured Blacky —

But Walter had caught the same mood as Eddie. He took a fourth beer, a fifth, before the excitement was readmitted. A minute ago he'd fallen to saying, “I'll have to see how things stand with Dad,” when his dad was part of the scheme, but now …
Now!
the whole world was ablaze. Tipping his head back for a final drink, surging out to the cold yard, he was at last on fire as he headed for home.

Billy decided to stay.

 

Alone without distractions Walter's senses crackled through the past or raced forward in electric dashes. He tried to add himself up, to make something of his past self to thrust into the future whole and unbreakable. Because the idea of going to the war was a simple one, with its mix of abandonment and submission, of colour, noise, pride, he really did conclude, under a sky of almost deserted imponderables — once upon a time
he could have named half a hundred stars — that the clash of history whose noise beckoned had done him a favour. He noted the smudged Magellanic clouds over to the south, and caught at his back three stars setting in the west — names out of reach, but without mystery now, because all cavities that once had tantalized, the gulfs of How Big? How Old? Where Does It Go? When Will It End? somehow presented themselves for answer in the span of his own actions. To go! His life pulsed forward in this active phrase, which would solve all, and was itself everything.

His ears ached from the cold, his cheeks lacked feeling. He experimented with a word to Peapod, but through wooden lips it issued merely as a chunk of noise. Cold nights, train smells, warm horse smells, pain in August — his life was marked by the events of late winter and early spring. This was the time when wattles in bloom almost squatted under their own yellow weight, tree after tree aligned through the ranges. It was a year since he'd first clapped eyes on Frances — what if he hadn't? No — even with his letter posted, and then the dwindling summer of no-reply, he felt more alive than he would have otherwise. Was it a trick of the season, to make something go wrong (his fall from Coalheap had started it), then have it fill his thoughts till he was grateful? The months after Christmas he'd felt thwarted and shamed. Well, the rules had changed. The world had changed.

He would write again.

His parents were still up, sitting close to the stove. The iron kettle hummed in waiting. There was no reproach for his wild exit. He described the unrestrained scenes in town, biting alternately a thickly buttered crust and a lump of cheese.

“There's time for thought,” said Mrs Gilchrist on hearing of the urge some felt to rush off immediately.

“War,” said her husband. “It's a fact.” He took a piece of red gum for the stove and turned it over in his lumpy hands.

Walter rephrased all he'd read in the papers, talked on and on, and his parents hung on the words as if he'd coined them. He pictured himself as a far-flung son of the empire called to shield the heart of the mother country. His halting accents gave the platitudes rough force.

“So,” he concluded, “I'll be in it.”

But his mother was unmoved. “We need you here, Wally. You've never mentioned the army in your life.”

“We can manage,” said her husband.

“Not so long ago we couldn't.” She bunched a tea-cloth into a ball and abandoned it on the table, where it uncoiled hopelessly. “Alan, you were all for stopping Wally from going to the university — now he's to be killed.”

“Not a chance, Mum”

“You'll kill him!” she hurled at the father.

“It's up to Wally. I can't say no. Douggie can come home early.”

Why at this moment did Walter wish to condemn his father as irreclaimably weak?

At last she appealed to him. “If only you could give me
reasons
. I don't hate the Germans. None of us do. Why, Mrs Schuler is a German! I do not want my son to kill his fellow creatures.”

“It won't be like that!” But how did he know? Then to grant his mother something, not liking to see her so isolated, he said: “Tom Larsen claims it's all cooked up.”

“He's a ratbag,” said his father.

At the end Mrs Gilchrist's voice lost all trace of supplication. She stated, “Nobody can tell me why,” and there the conversation finished.

 

On Sunday the district poured into the three o'clock service to hear Mr Fox preach on “Germany's policy, the Long Arm and the Mailed Fist”. The national anthem was sung afterwards, and at the door the minister held Walter by the shoulders — the pose almost threatened a kiss — and said, “Half your luck.”

“It's bound to be finished before I get away,” replied Walter deprecatingly. One minute he really hoped it would, the next he was mad to go. Eddie had already. Billy was to set off the following Friday. The Reid boys decided to put the Peppers on the farm forthwith and try their luck. Duncan Grieve and the unmarried Scott brothers rode to Forbes one day looking for work and never came back.

Everything Walter looked at now was sharp-outlined. Tin roofs seemed sliced from crystal, while sprouts of spring grass on the damp creekbanks were brilliant yet sombre, like green velvet. When low clouds parted to let through the sun, patches of the countryside would suddenly illuminate. It was a post-quaternary landscape, the soft heaven of a new epoch. The usual agents of change, erosion and weathering, were replaced by light and emotion. From here Walter was to step he knew not where — except that if he once gave up, and said, as he was still able to,
no
, then this pastel erasure of the ordinary past would cease, never again to tip forward into a million new colours,
nor soften — ever — the infinity of hard rocks, stubborn hills, and motionless plains that threatened to hold him.

Mr Gilchrist purchased “seat of war” maps which were stuck to the dining room wall. He placed a red tag in the North Sea, where, it was said, guns had been heard.

Off they went to the big open air patriotic meeting held the night before Billy's departure: Walter and Billy with their fathers — though Mr Mackenzie was sour about Billy's plans.

“He'll do what he wants. He's done it before.”

“You can rely on me for a hand,” said Alan Gilchrist, whacking his unsteady neighbour on the back.

“I've got a big club handy for the next man who greets me with, ‘anything fresh about the war?'” complained Billy. But in the next breath he added: “What's the news?” and was as anxious as anyone to taste the meeting's excitement.

The theme, announced by the mayor, was that every man who owned stock or had the right of citizenship should help to protect those rights. Though his face formed the hub for spokes of the British flag hung at his back, he said they were not assembled in any spirit of jingoism, but to deal with the most serious question in the history of Europe since the days of the Spanish Armada.

Tom Larsen arrived at Walter's elbow. “Jingoism,” he stated, pointing to the platform as if at a blackboard.

“Didn't you hear him say it wasn't?”

The mayor now roused the crowd with his auctioneer's voice, asking for donations in cash and kind for the comfort of those who went to the front,
and to make sure that the wants of their dependents were provided for.

“That's the stuff,” said Mr Gilchrist.

First Mr Smallcombe sprinted up. Right away he and his brother were donating a rail truck of fat sheep. The chief thing was to feed the men.

“I'll send a truckload of scholars,” muttered Tom, though only Walter heard.

Skinny Jones then danced aloft. He said the occasion was one for special efforts. They had one of the finest countries in the world. There was no place where a man could get better returns for his investments. Jones Brothers would donate half a truck of sheep.

“He's my man,” said Tom, elbowing Walter and releasing a grim hee-haw. “You see? Money's at the core.”

A drunk arrived on the stairs of the podium, balanced like a jelly as he tried to speak, but was captured by Constable Arkwright to cries of: “Put him in the army!”

One farmer shouted, “I'll give twenty-five.” Others: “Put me down for ten … fifteen … a draught mare … oats.” Promises flowed forward in a wild flooding of property into battle: if weapons had been to hand, and an enemy sighted, even the stiffest among them would have given chase. With a voice like a drum and perspiration sprouting from forehead and cheeks, Alan Gilchrist promised the proceeds from his next thirty ewes, and Mr J. Westcott donated a sulky to be disposed of as the committee thought fit.

Too loud this time, Tom said: “I'll drive it to England.”

“Shut up,” said Billy.

“When's the ‘chalky' going?” asked a voice two
rows back. Another voice ferociously struck: “We oughter help him.” After that Tom held his tongue. The gas lamps run up for the occasion barely reached this far — when Walter turned to identify the callers he saw only a log jam of brown hat brims.

The band struck up and the crowd milled round, unwilling to be prised from its discovered one voice. “Rule Britannia”, “La Marseillaise”, the Russian national anthem, and “God Save the King” were played before the meeting broke up.

“Don't that music stir you?” asked Billy as they parted. “
Whoompf!
” he gestured, curving an imaginary bayonet upwards.

Then, as simply as stepping through a doorway, Billy caught the next day's train to Sydney. A week later a letter arrived from Trooper Mackenzie, Australian Light Horse, enclosing money for Novelty to be railed to Liverpool.

 

At the Agricultural Bureau picnic, held two days before Walter left, four hundred picnickers gave three explosive cheers for Walter and the other six who were soon to go, and sang “Auld Lang Syne”. After the formalities Ethel asked if he'd walk down to the creek with her. She wore a loose calico tunic for the sports. Whenever a fold of the material swayed against him he felt the weight of a friendly limb, or hip, and once, he was certain, a breast.

Under a canopy of wattle she suddenly said: “You can kiss me if you like.”

“But we're not going together.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“You'd expect me to write — I couldn't.”

He listened to the frogs in the bristly reeds. She removed her sandshoes and he saw an X-ray picture of toes in dirt-stained socks.

“Don't be a dill. Haven't you kissed a girl before?”

“Too right I have.”

At first she was all bone, and smelt in patches of sawdust from the Ladies' Nail Drive, which she'd won. And of sweat. Then her lips seemed all consideration. He discovered himself flat on his back in the shade, almost a baby, while Ethel manipulated his adult responses from heaven. She took his hand and guided it to the now-taut fabric at her chest. “Move it,” she mumbled. Here he discovered a cushioned, un-Ethel-like part, as wonderfully boneless as her lips. Experimentally he shifted to his side and embraced her. She said, “Oh, yes, hug me,” and guided his shy hand through an armhole where under her singlet it encountered, like a soft toy, the small handful of her breast and its button of nipple. Then he felt her hand fumbling at his fly, which by then was so upraised that part of his concentration had been spent on wondering if she'd noticed. Broad daylight or not, he and Ethel were personally linked — he'd never felt so closely in contact with anyone. His hand plied ceaselessly from one loose-hanging breast to the other, while she did the same between his legs, making him gasp when she released two buttons and slipped cool fingers inside.