Best Australian Short Stories by Douglas Stewart, Beatrice Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

thoughts, and when he briefly answered my questions. I gathered from him that the men at the mine had been expecting rain for four months.
    “And what do you think of the chances?” I asked.
    “Oh, me, I never expect nothin’. Sometimes things happen. I don’t expect ’em, though.”
    “Things happen—what, for instance?”
    “Well, dry spells.”
    I elicited that pleuro happened, and rabbits, and fires, and “this here new fangled fever”. But whatever happened Jeans never fluctuated; he had struck an average of misery, and was bogged in the moral slough. It seemed as if his sensibilities above a certain capacity had been worn out by over-work, and refused to feel more than a fixed degree of trouble, so that whatever might come on top of his present woes, be it fever, or fire, or death, the man remained in his normal condition of grim apathy and spiritless obedience to fate.
    The “homestead” stood upon the flat timbered country beyond the rise. It was just what Jeans’s homestead might have been expected to be—a low structure of bark and slabs, with a chimney at one end, and a door in the middle between two canvas “windows”. It stood in a small clearing; just beyond the house stood the skeleton of a shed, upon which, it being sundown, roosted a few gaunt fowls; a lank cow with one horn was deeply meditating by the front door. There were signs of bold raids upon the stubborn bush, pathetic, ventures; and great butts lay about in evidence of much weary unprofitable work. A dog-leg fence, starting at no particular point, straddled along in front of the house, and finished nowhere about a hundred yards off. Not a new fence either, but an old one, with much dry grass matted amongst the logs—that was the pathos of it. There had been a brave attempt at a garden, too; but the few fruit trees that stood had been stripped of the bark, and the hens had made dust-baths in all the beds. In this dust an army of children were wallowing—half-clad, bare-footed, dirt-encrusted children, but all hale and boisterous.
    At the door we were met by Mrs Larry Jeans, and after introducing me as “him from the city”, the master laboured away, dragging his shuffling horse, and leaving me in the centre of a wondering circle of youngsters of all sorts and sizes, from two dusty mites not yet properly balanced on their crooked little legs up to a shock-headed lubberly boy of thirteen, curiously embossed with large tan freckles, and a tall, gawky girl of the same age in preposterously short skirts, whom my presence afflicted with a most painful bashfulness. A peculiarity about Jeans’s children that struck me was the fact that they seemed to run in sets: there was a pair even for the sticky baby deftly hooked under its mother’s left arm, judging by the petulant wailing to be heard within.
    The Jeans’s homestead consisted of two compartments. I looked about in vain for the “spare room”, and concluded it must be either the capacious fire-place or the skeleton shed on which the hens were roosting. The principal article of kitchen furniture was a long plank table built into the floor; between it and the wall was a bush-made form, also a fixture. A few crazy three-legged stools, a safe manufactured from a zinc-lined case, and an odd assortment of crockery and tin cups, saucers, and plates piled on slab shelves in one corner, completed the list of “fixings”.
    Mrs Larry Jeans was a short, bony, homely woman, very like her husband—strangely, pathetically, like in face and demeanour; similarly bowed with labour, and with the same air of hopelessness and of accepting the toils and privations of their miserable existence as an inevitable lot. She was always working, and always had worked; her hands were hard and contorted with evidence of it, and her cheek was as brown and as dry as husks from labouring in the sun.
    We had tea and bread and boiled onions and corned beef for tea that evening—a minimum of beef and a maximum