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

of onions. The last onion crop had been a comparative success somewhere within half a day’s journey to Scrubby Gully. Tea served to introduce more children; they dangled over the arms of the unhappy mother, hung to her skirts, sprawled about her feet, squabbled in the corners, and overran the house. Jeans helped to feed the brood in his slow, patient way, and after tea he helped to pack away the younger in little bundles—here, there, and everywhere—where they slept peacefully, but in great apparent peril, whilst the bigger kids charged about the room and roared, and fought, and raised a very pandemonium of their own.
    Every now and again Mrs Jeans would lift her tired head from her sewing or her insatiable twins, and say weakly, “Now, you Jinny, behave.” Or Larry would remark dispassionately, “Hi, you Billy!” But otherwise the youngsters raged unchecked, their broken spirited parents seeming to regard the noise and worry of them as the lightest trial in a world of struggling and trouble.
    I asked Jeans how many children he thought he had. He didn’t seem certain, but after due deliberation said there might be thirteen in all. He had probably lost count, for I am certain I tallied fifteen—seven sets and one odd one.
    When the washing-up was done, and half of the family were bedded down, Larry dragged a tangle of old harness from the other room, and sat for two hours painfully piecing it up with cord, and his wife sat opposite him, silent and blank of face, mending one set of rags with another—I perched upon a stool watching the pair, studying one face after the other, irritated at length by the sheep-like immobility of both, thinking it would be a relief if Jeans would suddenly break out and do something desperate, something to show that he had not, in spite of appearances, got beyond the possibility of sanguinary revolt, but he worked on steadily, uncomplainingly, till the boy with the unique freckles came hurrying in with the intelligence that the old horse was “havin’ a fit’r somethin’”. Jeans did not swear. He said, Is he but?” and put aside his harness, and went out, like a man for whom life has no surprises.
    The selector was over an hour struggling with his hypochondriac horse, whilst I exchanged fragments of conversation with Mrs jeans, and went upon various mental excursions after that spare room. It appeared that the Jeanses had neighbours. There was another family settled seven miles up the gully, but Mrs Jeans informed me that the Dicksons, being quiet and sort of down-hearted, were not very good company, consequently she and Jeans rarely visited them. I was indulging in a mental prospect of the jubilation at a reunion of the down-hearted Dicksons and the gay and frivolous Jeanses when Larry returned from his struggle with the horse. He resumed his work upon the harness without any complaint. His remark that “Them skewball horses is alwis onreasonable” was not spoken in a carping spirit, it was given as conveying valuable information to a stranger.
    At eleven o’clock my host “s’sposed that p’r’aps maybe” I was ready to turn in. I was, and we went forth together in quest of the spare room. The room in question proved to be a hastily-constructed lean-to on the far corner of the house, at the back. Inside, one wall was six feet high and the other was merely a tree-butt. My bunk was built against the butt, and between the bunk and the roof were about eighteen inches of space. That bunk had not been run up for a fat man. After establishing me in the spare room Jeans turned to go.
    “Best bar the door with a log, case o’ the cow,” he said. “If she comes bumpin’ round in the night, don’t mind. She walks in her sleep moonlight nights.”
    It only needed this to convince me that I was usurping the customary domicile of the meditative cow. The room had been carefully furbished up and deep carpeted with scrub ferns. But the cow was not to be denied.
    Weary as I was, I