Return to Coolami by Eleanor Dark Read Free Book Online

nervy grating of her mind, to remember that she’d played a game and lost and was now paying her forfeit—
    She had, indeed, made for herself a little Litany of a scrap of conversation she had had with Bret. It began after a while to have, by sheer force of repetition and reaction a steadying influence:
    â€œYou’ll burn your fingers.”
    â€œYou won’t hear me yell if I do.”
    No yelling, therefore. Not even when it became most awful. Not even when they were both discovering that the mind, soul, psyche or what you will of a human being is a fathomless wood where he may lose himself indefinitely – where he may find green glades with sun in them and banks of violets, or bogs of viscous slime smelling heavily, sickly-sweet of menace and corruption—
    Not so simple to be clean in a wood like that. To be rational, honest, controlled, just – everything which,they had tacitly agreed, would save this dreary marriage of theirs from total failure. You were in a bog before you knew it was there, floundering, struggling, crawling out to lie breathless and befouled, wondering just where and how you had lost your footing. Rational – no, not always possible to achieve that, either, when you were lost, quite lost, quite confused, your nerves screaming with the panic of your utter solitude. Not honest either when your every action came from motives so obscure, so primitive and tangled that you could not always recognise them yourself—
    But no yelling—
    Not even when sometimes it had seemed that the ultimate destruction was coming. Sometimes Bret started it – a look – a touch— Sometimes she started it herself, goaded on by an obscene devil of perversity to endanger the only treasure she had left – to risk the defilement of her last remaining shrine—
    The shadowy range loomed over them. Drew called to Bret:
    â€œWhat’s the grade like?”
    And Bret said:
    â€œGood.”
    The Madison roared and leapt at it. The hill dropped away behind them.
2
    Bret was thinking about the thousand sheep he had to get, somehow, by the end of next week, from Coolami to Manton’s place out of Gunnedah. He was wondering, with a faint corrugation of worry between his brows,who he’d send with them now that Giles was needed for the shearing and Jim – and there wasn’t Jim any longer.
    A pity in a way that Ken – and yet, no, it wouldn’t have been any use his sticking to the land when he wanted the law. He was cut out for law, too – his sharp inquiring mind, his precision of thought, his fluent, caustic tongue. All the same, Bret realised uneasily, he himself had been finding something a bit blank, a bit solitary about life and work, since Jim’s death. He’d been restlessly aware during the past year that he no longer had any one to talk to about Coolami. Ken and Kathleen, of course, had their share in it. They were fond of it, too, as a home, as a background. But they didn’t run it, plunge themselves into it, know it and understand it to the last of its seventy thousand acres as he did – as Jim had done.
    An odd thing really, that of the four of them he, the eldest, should have had more in common with Jim, the youngest, ten years his junior, than with either of the other two. It had begun, probably, after their father’s death when he was 24, and Jim, home for holidays, had mustered sheep with him and fenced paddocks and slept near him at night in a rolled blanket by a camp fire. It must have been then, too, that he began to rely on the boy, half-unconsciously, for companionship. There hadn’t really been any one else. Their mother was like a pale flame flickering just before it goes out. She’d been ill, then, for years, and her husband’s death had finished her – only ten months after him she’d died—
    And Ken had been at the university, very absorbed, appearing rarely, disappearing suddenly