Ultima Thule (17 page)

"Her! Lor, Mary! . . . he'd have tired of 'er and her la-di-da airs inside three months," ejaculated Tilly, and fiercely blew her own nose in sympathy. "If ever there's been a good wife, my dear, it's you. But a fig for all the soft sawder that's talked about marriage! The long and the short of it is, marriage is sent to try us women, and for nothin' on earth besides."

The children reacted in distinctive fashion to the sight of their mother crying. Little Lucie, who had heard, if not grasped, all that passed, hung her head like a dog scolded for some fault it does not understand. Cuffy, casting furtive backward glances, angrily stamped his feet so that the water splashed high over his rolled-up knickerbockers. This not availing, he turned and deliberately waded out to sea.

Ah! then Mamma had to stop crying and to notice him. "Cuffy! Come back!"

"What a naughty boy!" sermonised Aunt Tilly. "When his poor mother is so worried, too."

"Yes, my great fear is, Richard's heading for another move. Really, after a letter like this I feel I ought just to pack up and go home."

"What? After you come down 'ere looking like a ghost, and as thin as thin? . . . I won't hear of it, Mary."

"You see, last time he took me completely by surprise. I'm resolved that shan't happen again."

"Hush! hark! . . . was that Baby?" And Tilly bent an ardent ear towards the verandah, where her infant lay sleeping in a hammock.

"I heard nothing. -- There's another reason, too, why I want to stay there, wretched place though it is. It's the . . . I don't feel I can go off and leave the . . . the little grave, with nobody to care for it. It's all I've got left of her."

"The blessed little angel!"

"Later on . . . it may be different. But to go away now would tear me in two. Though it may and probably will mean row after row."

"Yes, till he wears you down. That's always been 'is way. -- Ah! but that is Baby sure enough." And climbing to her feet, Tilly propelled her matronly form up the sandy path.

She returned in triumph bearing the child, which but half awake whined peevishly, ramming two puny fists into sleep-charged eyes; on her face the gloating, doting expression with which she was wont to follow its every movement. For her love, waxing fat on care and anxiety, had swelled to a consuming passion, the like of which had never before touched her easy-going life.

Mary rose and shook the sand from her skirts. "I must see what I can find to say to him, to cheer him up and keep him quiet."

"And our good little Lucie here, and Cuffy, too, shall mind darling Baby for Auntie, whilst she makes his pap."

But the children hung back. Minding Baby meant one long fight to hinder him from putting things -- everything: sand, shells, your hand, your spade -- in his mouth, and kicking and screaming if you said no; and Aunt Tilly rushing out crying: "What are they doing to my precious?" -- Lucie had already a firm handful of her mother's dress in her grasp.

"Now, Mary! you can't possibly write with that child hanging round you."

"Oh, she won't bother . . . she never does," said Mary, who could not find it in her heart to drive her ewe-lamb from her.

"Oh, well then!" said Tilly, with a loveless glance at the retreating Cuffy. "Muvver's jewel must just tum wif 'er, and see its doody-doody dinner cooked." -- And smothering the little sallow face, the overlarge head in kisses, she, too, sought the house.

("Really Tilly is rather absurd about that baby!")

("How Mary does spoil those children!")

With which private criticism, each of the other, Tilly fell to stirring a hasty-pudding, and Mary sat her down before pen and paper. And thus ended what, little as they knew it, was to be the last of their many confidential talks on the subject of Richard, his frowardness and crabbedness, his innate inability to fit himself to life. From now on, Mary's lips were in loyalty sealed.

UNDER the heat-veiled January skies Mahony saw his worst fears realised. His few remaining patients dropped off, no others appeared to take their place; and, with this, the practice in Barambogie virtually came to an end.

There he sat, with his head between his hands, cudgelling his brains. For it staggered credulity that every form of sickness, that the break-neck casualties inseparable from bush life, should one and all fade out in so preposterous a fashion. In the unhealthy season, too, compared with the winter months in which he had settled there. What were the people up to? What cabal had they formed against him? That some shady trick was being played him, he did not for a moment doubt. Suspiciously he eyed Mrs. Beetling when she came to her job of a morning. She knew what was going on, or he was much mistaken: she looked very queerly at him, and often gave him the impression of scuttling hurriedly away. But he had never been any hand at pumping people of her class: it took Mary to do that. And so he contented himself, did he chance upon the woman, with fixing her in silence; and otherwise treating her with the contempt she deserved. He had more important things to occupy him. These first days of blank, unbroken idleness were spent in fuming about the house like a caged animal: up the passage, out on the verandah, round this and back to the passage. Again and again he believed he heard the front gate click, and ran to seat himself in the surgery. But it was always a false alarm. And after a few seconds' prickling suspense, in which every nerve in his body wore ears, he would bound up from his seat, hardly master of himself for exasperation. These infamous people! Why, oh why had he ever set foot among them? . . . ever trodden the dust of this accursed place! A man of his skill, his experience, wilfully to put himself at the mercy of a pack of bush-dwellers . . . Chinese coolies . . . wretched half-castes! -- And, striding ever more gauntly and intolerantly, he drove his thoughts back and salved his bleeding pride with memories of the past. He saw himself in his heyday, on Ballarat, famed alike for his diagnoses and sureness of hand; saw himself called in to perform the most delicate operations; robbed of his sleep by night, on the go the livelong day, until at last, incapable of meeting the claims made on him, there had been nothing left for him to do but to fly the place. And spurred by the exhilaration of these memories, he quickened his steps till the sweat poured off him.

But he was not to be done. He'd shew these numskulls whom they had to deal with . . . make them bite the dust. Ha! he had it: that case of empyema and subsequent operation for paracentesis thoracis, which he had before now contemplated writing up for the Australian Medical Journal. Now was the time: he would set to work straightway, dash the article off, post it before the sun went down that night. It would appear in the March issue of the journal; and these fools would then learn, to their eternal confusion, that they had among them one whose opinions were of weight in the selectest medical circles. With unsteady hands he turned out a drawer containing old notes and papers, and having found what he wanted, spread them on the table before him. But, with his pen inked and poised ready to begin, he hesitated. In searching, he had recalled another, rarer case: one of a hydatid cyst in the subcutaneous tissue of the thigh. This would be more telling; and going on his knees before a wooden chest, in which he stored old memoranda, he rummaged anew. Again, however, after a lengthy hunt, he found himself wavering. His notes were not as full as he had believed: there would be finicking details to verify, books to consult which he could no longer get at. So this scheme, too, had to be let drop. Ah! but now he had really hit it. What about that old bone of contention among the medical profession, homoeopathy? Once on a time he had meant to bring out a pamphlet on the subject, and, if he remembered rightly, had made voluminous notes for it. Could he find these, he would be spared all brain-fag. And again he made his knees sore and his head dizzy over a mass of dusty, yellowing papers. After which, re-seating himself with an air of triumph, he ruled a line in red ink on a sheet of foolscap, and wrote above it, in his fine, flowing hand: Why I do not practise Homoeopathy.

If, as is so often asserted, the system of homoeopathy as practised by Hahnemann and his followers . . .

But having got thus far he came to a standstill, re-dipped a pen that was already loaded, bit the end of it, wrinkled his brows. What next? . . . what did he want to say? . . . how to end the sentence? And when he did manage to catch a glimpse of his thought, he could not find words in which to clothe it. . . the right words. They would not come at his beck; or phrases either. He floundered, tried one, then another; nothing suited him; and he grew more and more impatient: apparently, even with his notes before him, it was going to be beyond him to make a decent job of the thing. He had been silent too long. Nor could he, he now found, work up the heat, the orthodox heat with which he had once burnt: the points he had formerly made against this quack and his system now seemed flat or exaggerated. So indifferent had he grown with the years that his present attitude of mind was almost one of: let those who choose adopt Hahnemann's methods, those who will, be allopaths. And, as he sat there struggling to bring his thoughts to heel, to re-kindle the old fire, the tardy impulse to express himself died out. He threw his pen from him. Cui bono? Fool, fool! to think of blistering his brains for the benefit of these savages among whom his present lot was cast. What would they understand of it, many of whom were forced to set crosses where their names should have stood? And when he was so tired, too, so dog-tired physically, with his feverish runnings to and fro, and exhausted mentally with fretting and fuming. Much too tired (and too rusty) to embark on a piece of work that demanded utmost care and discrimination . . . let alone cope with the labour of writing it down. Suddenly, quite suddenly, the idea of exertion, of any effort whatever, was become odious to him . . . odious and unthinkable. He put his arms on the table and hid his face in them; and, lying there, knew that his chief desire was fulfilled: to sit with his eyes screened, darkness round him, and to think and feel just as little as he saw. But, a bundle of papers incommoding him, he raised his hand, and with a last flash of the old heat crumpled notes and jottings to balls and tossed them to the floor. There they lay till, next morning, Mrs. Beetling swept them up and threw them on the kitchen fire.

And now silence fell anew -- a silence the more marked for the stormy trampling that had preceded it. Said Mrs. Beetling to her crony, the ostler's wife: "I do declare, 'e's that mousy quiet, you never c'd tell there was a livin' creatur' in the 'ouse -- not no more'n a triantelope nor a centipede!" No longer had she to spend time dodging her master: shrinking behind open doors to avoid crossing his path, waiting her opportunity to reach bedroom or dining-room unobserved. He never left the surgery; and she could work with a good grace, scrubbing floors that were not trodden on, cooking food the lion's share of which it fell to her to eat.

Meanwhile a burning February ran its course. To step off the verandah now was like stepping into a furnace. The sky was white with heat: across its vast pale expanse moved a small, copper-coloured sun. Or the hot winds streaked it with livid trails of wind-smitten cloud. The very air was white with dust. While, did a windstorm rise, the dust-clouds were so dense that everything -- trees, Lagoon, township, the very garden itself -- was blotted out. Dust carpeted the boards of the verandah, drove into the passage, invaded the rooms. But never a drop of rain fell. And then the fires started: in all the country round, the bush was ablaze: the sky hung dark as with an overhead fog; the rank tang of burning wood smarted the lungs.

In the little oven of a house the green blinds were lowered from early morning on. Behind them, in a bemusing twilight, behind the high paling-fence that defended house from road, Mahony sat isolate -- sat shunned and forgotten. And as day added itself to day the very sound of his own voice grew strange to him, there being no need for him ever to unclose his lips. Even his old trick of muttering died out -- went the way of his pacing and haranguing. For something in him had yielded, had broken, carrying with it, in its fall, the black pride, the bitter resentment, the aggressive attitude of mind which had hitherto sustained him. And this wholesale collapse of what he had believed to be his ruling traits made him feel oddly humble. . . and humiliated . . . almost as if he had shrivelled in stature. Hence he never went out. For the single road led through the street of malicious eyes: and now nothing would have prevailed on him to expose himself to their fire. More and more the four walls of his room began to seem to him haven and refuge. And gradually he grew as fearful of the sound of footsteps approaching the door as he had formerly been eager for them. For they might mean a summons to quit his lair.

But no steps came.

Had he had but a dog to lay its moist and kindly muzzle on his knee, or a cat to arch its back under his hand, the keenest edge might have been taken off his loneliness. But for more years than he could count, he had been obliged to deny himself the company of those dumb friends who might now have sought, in semi-human fashion, to relieve the inhuman silence that had settled round him. Nothing broke this -- or only what was worse than the silence itself: the awful mill-whistle, which, five times a day, marked the passage of the empty hours with its nerve-shattering shriek. He learnt to hate this noise as if it had been a live and malignant thing; yet was constrained to wait for it, to listen to it -- even to count the seconds that still divided him from its blast. His books lay unopened, withdrawn into their primary state of so much dead paper. And it was not books alone that lost their meaning and grew to seem useless, and a burden. He could forget to wind up his watch, to pare his nails; he ceased to care whether or no his socks were worn into holes. The one task to which he still whipped himself was the writing of the few lines necessary to keep Mary from fretting. (To prepare her, too. Absolutely nothing doing . . . incredible . . . heartbreaking.) Otherwise he would sit, for an hour at a time, staring at some object on the table before him, till it, the table, the room itself, swam in a grey mist. Or he followed, with all the fixity of inattention, the movements of a fly . . . or the dance of dust motes laddering a beam.