Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land: a story of Australian life

by Mrs. Campbell Praed

CHAPTER 4

They were landed at Leuraville on the evening of the fourth day. A tender took them off with the mails—as it happened, they were the only passengers for that small sea-township. Ordinary business folk going north, preferred the smaller coasting steamers which put in at every port. The postmaster, the portmaster, the police magistrate, and a few local notables were waiting to receive them at the wharf. McKeith greeted them all heartily and rather shyly introduced them to his bride. The local men were shy also. They mostly addressed her as Mrs McKeith. The police magistrate—Captain Halliwell, lean, dark, sallow, with a rather weak mouth, but more carefully dressed than the others, and with an English voice, called her Lady Bridget. He was a retired officer of the ROYAL ENGINEERS. She had been told and now remembered that men in the ROYAL ENGINEERS were popularly said either to be religious or cranks. This man was a Christian Scientist which he announced when apologising for not offering the hospitality of his house, a new baby having arrived the day previously, ushered into the world, he explained, by prayer and faith and without benefit of medical skill.

Bridget knew something about Christian Scientists. She plunged at once into faith-healing ethics with the police-magistrate, while Colin saw about getting the trunks off the tender. How odd it seemed to be talking about London and Christian science in a place like this!

Leuraville too seemed part of a dream. But her face soon lost its bewildered look. She became interested in her surroundings, although there was no suggestion here of savage freedom or romantic adventure.

Leuraville showed low and hot and ugly. A red sun near its dropping, drew up the miasmic vapours from the mangrove-fringed reaches stretching on either side of the wharf. Some light crafts were moored about. A schooner was loading up with cattle—wretched diseased beasts. Bridget watched them with shuddering repulsion—being hoisted up and slung aboard with ropes. The men at their task swore so abominably that the police-magistrate stepped up to them and remonstrated on the plea of a lady's presence. Bridget had never heard such swear-words. She was used to the ordinary 'damn,' but these oaths were so horribly coarse. Colin, who was asking local questions of the other men appeared to take it all as a matter of course. The men stopped their work to stare at Lady Bridget. They wore dirty corduroys hitched up with a strap over flannel shirts that were open at the neck and left their brawny breasts exposed. There were other loafers in flannel shirts, hitched up trousers and greasy felt or cabbage-tree hats, and there were two or three blacks of the demoralised type seen in coast townships. Now, one of the bullocks got loose and rushed blindly down the wharf, and Bridget shrieked and clung wildly to her husband's arm until it was headed back again.

Colin laughed at her terror.

'It's all right, Biddy. But how's that for a Bushman's wife. You'll see lots of cattle up at Moongarr.'

Moongarr was the name off his station which was to be her future home.

'I hate cows. Once I was charged by a wild cow and I've been afraid of them ever since.'

'That isn't a cow. It's Mickey Field's poley-tailed bullock being shunted off to the Boiling-Down Works on Shark Island,' said a local man.

The police-magistrate found his opportunity.

'You wouldn't be afraid, Lady Bridget, if you realised that cow as an expression of the Divine mind.'

Bridget laughed. Her sense of the queerness of it all was almost hysterical. She had the Irish wit to make the men grin at her prompt answer, which when it became bruited up and down the Leura, earned her the reputation of being sharp at repartee.

'But do you think,' said she confidingly, 'that the cow would be after realising ME as an expression of the Divine Mind?'

'Eh, you needn't think you're going to knock spots off my wife, any of you,' cried Colin delighted at the sally. And now he walked and talked like a man on his own soil again, as more of the townsfolk came about—extraordinary people, Bridget thought. Loose-limbed bush-riders, really trim, some of them, in clean breeches and with a scarlet handkerchief doing duty as a belt, unkempt old men, a Unionist Labour organiser addressing a knot of station-hands out of work—even a Chinaman—a Chinky, McKeith called him, who, it appeared kept a nondescript store. That was in the days before the Commonwealth and the battle cry of 'White Australia.'

All of them showed the deepest interest in the small, pale, picturesque woman walking by Colin's side.

It seemed incredible to Biddy that she should be walking like that beside the big Bushman, in this sort of town, and that he should be her lawful protector.

The street they walked up began from the wharf with two-storied respectable buildings—the Bank, the Post-Office, the police-magistrate's residence, some dwelling houses, within palings enclosing gardens—clumps of bananas, pawpaw apple trees, a few flower beds, bushes of flaunting red poinsettia, and so forth. There were stores, public houses, meaner shanties straggling along a dusty road that lost itself in vistas of lank gum trees.

The Postmaster hoped that Mr McKeith's lady would not find the hotel too rowdy. It was one of the two-storied buildings, and had a bar giving onto the street, and a veranda round both upper and lower storey. A number of Bushmen and loafers were drinking in the bar, and others were on the edge of the veranda dangling their legs over it into the street. All of them stopped their talk and their drink to stare at Lady Bridget. The landlady—a big, florid Irish-woman in black silk, with a gold chain round her neck came out onto the veranda and greeted McKeith as an old friend, holding out her hand to Lady Bridget. She took the husband and wife up to their rooms, a parlour opening on the balcony, a bedroom over the bar and a little room at the back of it.

'It's a rough sort of shop, Biddy,' said Colin, when the woman had departed. 'But it will do for a shake-down for to-night. If the steamer had come in earlier I'd have taken you straight up to Fig Tree Mount, where the buggy will be waiting for us; and after that we'll begin our camping out, and you'll be in the real Bush. But we've lost the train, and must wait till daylight to-morrow. You'll be tired my dear—and you must be feeling strange,' he added kindly. 'I'll go and have your traps brought up and leave you to fix yourself. I want to see one or two chaps and find out whether my drays are down as far as Fig Tree for stores and what's going on up along the Leura.'

Bridget noticed that the change in McKeith seemed yet more accentuated. His manner was more curt and decided—rougher than before. He appeared to have taken on the tone of the Back-Blocks. Yet she admired him. She did not dislike the roughness.

But she felt a womanish aggrievement at his having left her to undo her own things. And the rooms were horrible—the meagre appliances—the course cotton sheets, the awful Reckitt's-blue colouring of the painted walls. And then the dreadful noise of the men drinking below in the bar! If this was the Bush! But Colin had said it was not the Bush.

He left her again after dinner which was horrible likewise—burned up steak, messy fried potatoes and cabbage, an uneatable rice pudding. He did not seem to mind. The result of his enquiries had left him grim and preoccupied. Yes, he had taken on the Bushman, and had more or less dropped the lover. The practical Scotch side of him was uppermost, and he appeared more disturbed over station affairs than at her want of appetite. She resented this unreasonably. She had not wanted him to play the lover in these surroundings, they would have been fatal to romance, but she had not bargained for his glumness. He was angry at the non-arrival of his draymen and the probability that they were drinking at a grog-shanty on the road. He would certainly sack them, he said if that were the case. And he had disquieting news from Moongarr. Pleuro had broken out among the cattle. What was Pleuro? Lady Bridget wondered, but she was not sufficiently interested in cattle to ask the question. And the Unionist labour men were making themselves a nuisance—going round the stations burning the grass of squatters who employed non-Union stockmen and shearers—in one instance, threatening to burn a woolshed. And there hadn't been any rain on the Leura for a month past, and weather prophets were predicting a drought.

It was dreadfully prosaic and boring. After he had gone out again to transact further business, Lady Bridget went to bed and squirmed between the cotton sheets, remembering ruefully the luxuries of Government House. Never in all her life had she slept between cotton sheets or washed herself in an enamelled tin basin. The noise in the bar became intolerable. She could hear the swear-words quite distinctly. They were disgusting. She tried to stop her ears .... Oh what a dreadful life this was into which she had plunged so recklessly!

Her thoughts went back to the old-world—to the luxurious veneer covering the younger Gavericks' petty economies—stealing the notepaper at country-houses for the sake of the address—cadging for motors and dinners—'keeping in' with the people likely to be of use; pulling strings in a manner which Bridget knew would have been too utterly galling to Colin McKeith's self-respect. And she thought of her father and his financial unscrupulousness! But none of these could have conceived of life without certain appurtenances of that position to which they and she had been born. The only one who was self-respecting among the lot was old 'Eliza Countess' as they designated her. It struck Bridget that Eliza Countess and Colin McKeith had points of character in common—it was true they both came from Glasgow. She thought of the parsimonious rectitude—which had of course included linen sheets and fine porcelain and shining silver—of old Lady Gaverick's establishment, of its stuffy conventionality—though that had been soothing sometimes after a dose of Upper Bohemia; and Bridget wept, feeling rather like a wilful child who had strayed out of the nursery among a horde of savages.

At last she could bear it no longer. They were singing now—a terrible thing with a refrain of oaths and GEE-UPS, and whistling noises like the cracking of whips—a bullock drivers' camp ditty. Bridget shudderingly decided that a row in Whitechapel could be nothing to this in the matter of bad language. She got up and paced the sitting-room in her dressing-gown, wondering when her husband would come and rescue her from these beasts. Watching for him she could see through the uncurtained French windows the starry brilliance of the night, and the moon now in its middle quarter. And down below, the houses and shanties along the opposite side of the street, the fantastic tufts of the pawpaws, the long white road stretching away into the ragged blur of gum-forest.

Presently a firm step sounded on the veranda and came up the stairs.

When Colin opened the door, he saw standing by the table, which had a kerosene lamp on the red cloth, and, even at this time of the year, winged insects buzzing around, and sticking to its greasy bowl—a small white figure like an apparition from another world, in its wonderful draperies of lace and filmy white, the little pale face framed in a cloud of shining hair, and the strange eyes wide, scared, and with tears glistening on the reddened lids.

She cried out at him.

'How could you have left me alone here with those horrible drunken men down there making such a noise that I thought every minute they would break in on me? And swearing! I've never dreamed of such dreadful language; and I can't stand it—I won't stand it a moment longer.'

'You shan't. It's abominable, I've been a thoughtless beast.'

He swooped out through the open door, down the wooden stairs which creaked under his wrathful steps. Bridget heard him call the landlady, 'Mrs Maloney! Come here!' in a voice of sharp command. Presently she heard him speaking to the men in the bar, not abusively, indeed almost good humoured tone, but imperatively.

'Look here, mates.' The uproar stopped suddenly. 'You're decent blokes I know, and you've all had mothers if you haven't had wives. Well, there's a lady up there—she's my wife, and she's never heard bullock-drivers swear before, and you've scared her a bit. Just you stop it. Shut up and be off like good chaps.'

Some dissentient voices arose; an attempt at drunken ribaldry, strident hisses, 'Sh! Sh!' Cries of 'Shame.' 'Chuck it!' Then again, McKeith's voice, this time like thunder. 'Stop that I say—one more word and out you go, whether you like it or not.'

On that, came the noise of a scuffle and the fall of a heavy body across the veranda. And of McKeith, once more breathing satisfaction:

'All right! I haven't killed him—only given him a lesson .... But just you understand I'm not taking any of your bluff. You've GOT TO GO. If you don't, it'll be a case of the lock-up for some of you. And if you do—quietly mind, there'll be a shout all round for the lot of you to-morrow. Drink my health and my wife's, d'ye see? Here Mrs Maloney, chalk it down.'

In five minutes he was back in the sitting room, looking rather dishevelled, and with his coat awry. But there was silence below except for the putting up of shutters, the sound of shuffling feet along the road and snatches of the bullock drivers' chorus which gradually died away in the night.

McKeith went up to his wife who was still standing by the corner of the table, and put his arm round the little trembling form.

'Oh! Biddy—my darling. I've been a brute. I'm not fit to take care of you. I ought to have thought of all that. But one gets used to such goings-on in the Bush, and they aren't bad chaps—the bullockys, and you've got to discount their lurid language a bit. I don't know whether it is that bullocks are more profane than most animals, but it's certain sure that you can't get them to move without swearing at them.'

Then, as she said, half crying, half laughing, 'I see. So this is my baptism into the Bush! You should have taught me the vocabulary, Colin, first.'

'Don't be too hard on me. You won't have this kind of thing at Moongarr. That's the worst of these cursed coast townships. I shouldn't have left you alone, but if I hadn't, we couldn't have got off properly to-morrow, and I'd set my heart on having things ship-shape for our first camping out. Everything's fixed up now—I've been wiring like mad up the line .... The buggy's at the Terminus all right, and I've got the black-boys there, and the tent and all that. It's going to be an experience you'll never forget. THAT'S to be your baptism into the Bush, my dear .... If only there's water enough left in the Creek yet .... But if there isn't we can dig for it. Oh, Biddy, think of it—a night like this—moonlight and starlight—MY starlight—MY star, that I used to look up at and wonder about, come down to earth. No, no, I won't maunder, I won't be a romantic zany—not till to-morrow night—I know the very spot for our camp ....'

He began to describe it—a pocket by the river bed—pasturage for the horses—then pulled himself short. No! He wanted it all to be a surprise .... She was to have just the very thing she had often said to him she would like best .... And now it was getting late and they must be up in good time to-morrow. Would she go to bed and try to sleep....

He took her to the door of her room .... Was she as comfortable as she could be here, anyhow? .... He knew it must seem cruelly rough to her; but it wouldn't be his fault in the future if she didn't have things as she liked them—so far as conditions would permit .... And after all, there women who enjoyed a wild life with their husbands. There was Lady Burton—and scores of other women—Biddy had asked him to have patience—and he meant to be patient—he worshipped her too much not to be patient. Well, she must be patient too with him, and with this queer old Bush which she would get to feel as much at home in as he did himself—in time.

He left her at her bedroom door, kissing her hand with the native chivalry that sat well upon him, and went back to his pipe and the waking dreams of an ardent but self-restrained lover who had practical as well as romantic considerations to weigh. Bridget went to sleep with the smell of his tobacco—and yet did not seem to mind it in the least—coming in whiffs through the door cracks and filling her nostrils. She too dreamed—a vivid dream, but by some law of contrariety, not of any idyllic camping ground in the Never-Never Land. She dreamed that she was seeing the Carnival at Nice—a medley of dancing waves, azure sky, palms, gold-laden orange trees and white green-shuttered houses—flowers, CONFETTI, masks, grotesque pageantry, the merry music of the South. And though he had never been with her at Nice, Willoughby Maule came into her dream. They were doing impossible things—dancing together in the Carnival crowd, flinging confetti, bobbing and grimacing before the comic masks. Then the carnival scene seemed to turn flat, and to become a painted picture on the drop curtain of a stage, and she started up at the sound of knocks such as one hears before the curtain rises in a French theatre.