Lantana Lane (22 page)

“Oh, blast,” said his voice in a tone of mild annoyance, “this stick's rotten. I'd better go and get the brush-hook.”

And with these words he departed, taking the torch with him.

Darkness closed about Sue and the Thing which she was grasping. Perhaps, since it wrapped itself so fiercely about her wrists, we might say with equal exactitude, that it was grasping her. At all events, they were joined together in a struggle as fearful and implacable as man's struggle with sin. There was a terrible sound of thudding and threshing; the earth vibrated, the fence-posts creaked; something splintered. The wire netting strained outward under the writhing weight hurled desperately upon it; then it strained inward as Sue, dragged forward, lost her footing and fell against it on her knees. Awful thoughts jostled each other in her mind. It was very old netting. It probably had other holes in it. There might be one quite near. It could give way anywhere. She might suddenly feel great, cold, powerful coils encircling her. She scrambled to her feet, dug her heels into the ground, and pulled with the strength of terror. The Thing in her hands—the hard, chilly, muscular, squamiferous Thing—leapt and wrenched and dragged against her. She could hear its other extremity banging against the bit of corrugated iron on the gate. Perhaps it could get under the gate? . . .

She screamed.

“What's wrong?” called Henry from the packing-shed.

“What's
wrong
?” shrieked Sue between gasps of panic and exertion. “Have I got to stand here all night hanging on to a bloody snake's tail?”

“Calm down, old girl,” said Henry rebukingly. “It's only a carpet—it's harmless. Tony must have left the brush-hook out somewhere, damn it. Don't let go, will you?”

“I
can't
let go!” yelled Sue furiously. “I
daren't
let go! It might be coming out under the gate I How do I know where its other end is? Oh I Oh, Heavens!
Hurry up
. . . .!”

The last words were a squeal of despair, for the Poor Inoffensive had changed its tactics. It had now anchored itself firmly to a post of the fowlhouse, and was settling down to a really serious tug-of-war. Sue lifted her voice in frantic appeal.

“Quick! Oh, Henry—
quick
! It's pulling!”

“Good grief,” cried Henry disgustedly, “what do you expect? I'll be there as soon as I find this ruddy brush-hook. All you've got to do is hold it.”

Sue's plight was now dire indeed. She gave ground inch by inch. Her hands, dragged down and down, touched the earth, scraped along it, and came up against the wire. In darkness atavistic memories stir, and ancient evils breed. Never, since the first day of the Creation had there been a darker darkness than this. She was no longer grappling with a mere marauding reptile, but with a monstrous and malevolent force out of the time when time itself was young, and innocence was first imperilled. . . .

Well, it is remarkable what powers of exorcism may reside in a four-and-ninepenny Woolworth torch. “Hullo,” said Henry, approaching behind a blessed beam of golden light, “got you down, has it? Never mind, just hang on a few minutes more—I've got the brush-hook.”

When the execution had been accomplished, and the still writhing remains flung upon the wood-heap, Sue stumbled up to the house on legs which wobbled slightly.

“What's the matter?” enquired Henry when he saw her in a good light. “I thought you liked snakes?”

Sue has not told us what she replied to this, nor have we asked. There are moments in every marriage when husbands must expect to hear, in precise and forceful terms, just what their wives think of them.

Sue is still kind to spiders, and goofy about frogs. She still pleads for mice, and declines to tread on scorpions. But she no longer rushes to intervene when there is a scurry out of doors, and someone calls for a stick. To her, nowadays, as to all true daughters of Eve, every snake is The Serpent.

K
EN
M
ULLINER'S
property stretches down the steep, eastern slope at the end of the Lane, and some distance out on to the flat below, but when he bought the place there was no access to this level area save by a narrow foot-track winding round the contours of the hill, and hemmed in by Stinking Roger eight feet high. Enriched by the slow wash of topsoil from above, watered by a spring, and sheltered by protruding ridges on either side, it was too good a bit of land to lie idle, and Ken's neighbours were always urging him to do something about it. Once he did begin to put in an hour here and there making a road with pick and shovel, but he happened to mention it to Bruce before he had done more than about five yards; Bruce, having enquired how long this had taken him, went into a mathematical trance from which he presently emerged to inform Ken that, if he kept on working at the same rate, he might expect to get it finished in about thirteen years. Ken stared, and said : “Strewth, I don't want a road
that
bad!”

The next summer, in one of his sporadic fits of industry, he cleared half an acre at the bottom, and planted tomatoes. There had never been tomatoes grown in the neighbourhood to equal them, but by the time Ken had trudged up that slope half a dozen times, lugging his harvest in kerosene tins, he lost interest—particularly since, having thus got it to the top of the hill, he sold it at the bottom of the market.

“What you want's a flying-fox,” Aub told him.

“Got to have two to work those,” Ken objected. Aub shrugged.

“Okay, what you want's first a wife, and then a flying-fox.”

“Look, mate,” said Ken, “if having a flying-fox means having a wife, I'll leave the flaming land under lantana till kingdom come.”

And there the matter rested for a long time.

Then, a year or so ago, he won fifty pounds in the Casket. He gave the Lane a fine beer-party, but-—to everyone's amazement—did not afterwards disappear for a spree in the city; instead, he announced his intention of hiring a bulldozer to make a road down his hill. Everyone deduced from this that he must be seriously contemplating matrimony at last; there seemed to be no other way of accounting for such a sober and responsible decision. Yet it was a long time, now, since Maud had visited the Lane, and a long time since Ken had left it; nor had she been writing to him. (Of course we are not vulgarly inquisitive about each other's correspondence, but when you collect the mail you cannot help seeing the handwriting and postmarks on envelopes.) Moreover, we had only recently learned from Myra that Maud was all but engaged to a sports commentator. Aunt Isabelle immediately wrote to Mrs. Jackson to find out what girl Ken had been going around with in Rothwell lately, but Mrs. Jackson replied that, so far as she knew, there were just the usual half-dozen, so we all subsided into baffled curiosity.

Bill Brown at Rothwell has two bulldozers, and the one he sends up to do jobs in this neighbourhood is usually driven by a youth named Barry James. Bill came up and looked over the terrain critically when Ken summoned him to give a quote; he chewed a blade of grass, pondered a while, and said:

“Looks okay, Ken, but you never know when you might strike a band of rock.”

“Suppose you don't?”

“Easy as falling off a log. Meat pie and a cuppa tea. But you might, see, so I couldn't guarantee to do the job under a hundred quid.”

“That's fifty more than I got.”

“H'm. How about I give you fifty quid's worth, and we call it a deal?”

“Suits me.”

“Mind you, it might take her down to the bottom, or it mightn't. Depends.”

“Well, give it a go, sport. I got nothing to lose.”

So Barry set to work one morning at eight o'clock.

Once youths took pride in being good horsemen, but nowadays they prefer something with an engine, and Barry loves his bulldozer as devotedly as that character in the poem loved his Arab steed. He has wonderful hands, too, and a wonderful seat, even when the thing is lurching down a steep hill on a sideways cant of forty degrees, and shoving the landscape in front of it. He likes to have a job in which he can demonstrate its speed and efficiency, so he fairly licked his lips when he saw Ken's hill. He likes an audience, too, so he was pleased to see that Mrs. Jackson and her two boys, Len and Derek, were present. He was even more pleased when these lads told him they had spent two solid days pestering their mother to bring them, but he was not surprised because (having been thirteen himself only six years ago), he understood that the sight of something huge and powerful making so much mess in so short a time has an irresistible appeal for boys.

Presently Dick strolled across the road to watch for a while. He was closely followed by Aub (who lost no time in persuading him to take two to one against the job being finished that day), and hard upon their heels came Bruce Kennedy, accompanied by Marge. Bruce's interest was, as ever, academic and statistical; having estimated the time required to complete the road by manual labour, he now wished to observe the bulldozer in operation, and make further calculations for comparison. As for Marge, she was there in the spirit of one who visits a gaol or a slum; such things are deplorable aspects of the civilised world, but the responsible citizen must look them in the face. For Marge—as she sadly acknowledges—was born a century too late. She feels that since human beings have never been really sure what they ought to do, and have usually guessed wrong, it was better in the days when they had to do it slowly and laboriously, because that did impose some slight check upon their enthusiastic blundering. She is therefore profoundly out of sympathy with machines—particularly ones which can devastate the face of nature with a speed formerly reserved to earthquakes.

Barry, as may be imagined, was gratified to find his gallery thus increased, and sprang lightly to his lofty perch; even the man from Snowy River can never have sprung to his saddle with so gallant and insouciant an air. His actions then became reminiscent of a pianist who, with eyes fixed upon the ceiling, runs his hands over the keys to establish a rapport with his instrument. Gazing at the sky, he pulled, pushed, pressed and turned various knobs, gears, switches and what have you, with the result that the monster lifted its snout from the ground, and began to growl fee-fi-fo-fum in a menacing undertone. This indication that the show was about to begin made Len and Derek caper with excitement, and utter loud cries of encouragement, but Barry paid no attention to them. His face was solemn, his eyes intent, his whole bearing that of one dedicated to the performance of a momentous enterprise.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Jackson had just finished beating up a cake for the morning smoke-oh, but when these sounds reached her ears, she tidied her hair, put on a clean apron, and hastened out to join the audience. Making her way to Marge's side, she assumed her most social manner, and addressed the assembled company as follows:

“Good morning, Mrs. Kennedy, it's real nice of you and Mr. Kennedy to come along and watch . . . and Mr. Dawson, too . . . and Mr. Arnold . . .” She bowed graciously in the direction of the men who—a trifle startled to find themselves thus transformed from mere spectators into guests—mumbled confused acknowledgments, and felt that they should have put on ties. “I always think,” pursued Mrs. Jackson, “that it's nice to show an interest in what your neighbours are doing. It's neighbourly, I always say, though of course it can be carried too far. I'm pleased you could all find time to come, because Ken's always saying how farmers never have a minute to call their own.”

Marge and the men, now haunted by the suspicion that they were gate-crashers irresponsibly neglecting their duties in order to indulge a vulgar curiosity, maintained an uneasy silence, but at this moment the monster's growl became a roar, and Mrs. Jackson turned to regard it with a proprietorial eye.

“Wonderful, isn't it?” she remarked complacently. “Progress, I mean. The things We invent, and the things We can do with them! All the same, Mrs. Kennedy, the sermon last Sunday was on not being vainglorious about the works of men, and that same evening it came back to me when I was looking at the sunset, because when all's said and done, there's nothing like nature, is there? Bert and the boys couldn't think what had come over me, the way I stopped what I was doing all of a sudden, but it seemed to take hold of me, if you know what I mean, and do you know what I said? . . . I just turned round to Bert, and I said : ‘Well,
really
! . . .' And then it sort of came into my mind that all our inventions are done under Providence too, and I was telling the boys only this morning that we shouldn't give way to pride about bulldozers, and television, and electricity, and fission and things like that, because when you come to study it out, it's all God.”

“Oh, yes,” said Marge—but rather unhappily. For though she had no quarrel with this statement, she could not but suspect that before the grass and weeds grew once more over the torn hillside, the rains would have washed many tons of earth from it into Black Creek, and thence into the Annabella River, which in turn would deposit it in the ocean, where it would nourish neither pineapples, nor tomatoes, nor even uneconomic weeds. This she could not feel to have been God's intention, and she wished that we might employ the marvels we invent with a little more wisdom and restraint.

She was rescued from her morbid thoughts by jubilant yells from the boys, and some eager muttering from the menfolk. She turned her head in time to see the monster move forward towards a slope which, to her horrified eyes, seemed almost vertical, and since no barrier interposed itself save a clump of lantana, she clutched Bruce's arm in panic, and cried : “What's he doing? . . . He can't possibly go down
there!
. . .”

Bruce was far too absorbed to take any notice of her, so she continued to stare, at once appalled and fascinated. In some dark and nasty corner of her mind she would have quite liked to see the law of gravity take charge of this snorting object, and send it crashing down the hill to destruction; but her vindictiveness did not extend to Barry—a nice lad, who had probably never read Samuel Butler, and could not be expected to recognise himself as one of the race of machine-tickling aphids foreseen by that perspicacious Victorian.

And, she conceded, you had to hand it to the boy that he knew his stuff. For the monster, when it appeared to be teetering on the very brink of disaster, suddenly veered away, lowered its head with a snarl, sank its teeth deep into the turf, tore up a large section, swung it sideways, and contemptuously spat it out down the hill. It then backed, and prepared for another onslaught. Marge said nervously:

“I still don't see how he can help turning over on that slope.”

“You needn't worry,” said Dick reassuringly; reassuring ladies is frequently necessary in beauty salons, and he has quite a technique. “It's perfectly safe. It makes its own road as it goes.”

And so it did. After only a few more charges had been made, and a few more tons of earth tossed aside, the plan began to take shape. Where there had been a steep slope of green grass, there was now a perpendicular red gash some five feet high on the upper side, a long, red bank on the lower, and between them a sweetly sloping red strip, already recognisable as the beginning of a road.

Now the monster had tasted earth, and was working with rapid and methodical ferocity. It charged again and again, with lowered snout; its blade ripped great slices of the ground away, rose, swung outward dripping soil, stones and sods of mangled grass, and hurled them down. Shrubs which a man might have spent an hour grubbing out, it scooped up and tossed over the bank in seconds, and rocks which he could not have moved with a lever, it flung about like pebbles.

Ken came to stand beside Marge, and she noticed that he was wearing an expression which, from time immemorial, has caused dismay and foreboding in the minds of the anxious sex—that which a mother descries on the angelic countenance of her infant son, when he first discovers the enchanting fact that many objects will break if he flings them on the floor. It is an expression with which the passing years will make her exceedingly familiar. She observes it again when, seated on the floor beside his tower of blocks, he demolishes the edifice with one ecstatic sweep of his arm; and many times throughout his boyhood when, with infinite relish, he throws stones at bottles, prowls about with a tomahawk, hacking at everything he can find, pushes rocks over cliffs, registers delight when a tree falls, and counts himself favoured by Heaven if he may witness the collision of two cars, or the derailment of a train. For bangs, crashes, the sounds of splintering and the roar of explosions are as music to his ears.

In due course he arrives at physical maturity. Whether man ever attains maturity of any other kind is a question which woman answers crisply in the negative; but he does, in time, become an adult member of the sex which built the Pyramids and the Rockefeller Centre—to say nothing of castles, cathedrals, bridges, banks, mansions, milk-bars and suburban bungalows without number—and he therefore regards himself as one dedicated to constructive activity. His helpmeet, however, is not deceived. Since her weakness is confined to muscular development, and does not at all affect her eyesight, she has not failed to note that the types of construction which most excite his enthusiasm are those which demand, as a preliminary, excavation or demolition on a massive scale. She will most willingly concede that his structures, when completed, deserve her commendation. They are grand; he has made them very nicely; she will pat him on the head, and tell him so. But she well knows that it was the preparatory mess which he really enjoyed; and what is more, she knows that even now, in some unacknowledged corner of his being, he would just love to put a few sticks of gelignite under them. She therefore reads without surprise of the belligerent past, and quails at the thought of a belligerent future; she perceives that ever since he became the only tool-using animal, he has been building things, and knocking them down again, and she is piercingly aware, if he is not, which process it is that makes him look as Ken was looking now.