Return to Coolami by Eleanor Dark Read Free Book Online Page A

– not really minding very much what happened to the goose thatwas Coolami, provided his golden egg reached him promptly each quarter—
    And Kathleen – twenty, in the thick of her first love affair – very stormy, very hectic, very brief. Love had got her that way at the beginning and had gone on getting her that way, till now, at 31, she’d learnt to take it a bit more casually; he grinned, thinking of her standing in front of her easel in a blue overall, brushes bristling from her fingers, the floor littered with bits of this and that, paint in her dark hair where she’d pushed it fiercely back from her lovely face, which was lovelier now, he thought, by a good deal, than it had been when she was twenty. Kath, certainly, was one of those women who improve with age. The clamours and impetuousness of youth had subsided now, and her eyes had a laugh in them instead of a blaze. She’d learnt a certain very valuable detachment; her discarded amours strewed the path of her life in very much the same cheerfully haphazard way that her rubbish littered the studio floor. And her pictures grew better and better—
    So that she hadn’t had much time either to think of Coolami. Only Jim, in scrawled impatient letters from school, demanded whether there’d been rain yet, and how many of the sheep had been shorn and if Bret was putting in corn or lucerne down on the river flats? And what the hell was the use of his staying on for the Leaving when he wasn’t going to the ’varsity? When he was just coming straight home to Coolami? Why shouldn’t he leave when he was sixteen? “You know very well I’m a blob at exams, anyhow.”
    And so on. Yes. Bret acknowledged now, they’d both talked the same language, he and Jim; loved the same—
    Now that was funny. He hadn’t been thinking of Susan at all, and suddenly in a queer back lane of words which could suggest what they hadn’t really meant, his thoughts bumped her suddenly. There she was in the middle of them, barring his way. They tried angrily to pass, dodged, doubled, protested.
    â€œThe same
things
! The same
land –
the same work—!”
    And the same woman?
3
    What
was
this love, anyhow? He could say quite honestly that he didn’t know – and get strangely little satisfaction from the statement. There’d been Myrtle, bless her, just before the war, when he was eighteen; Myrtle, four years his senior, big and rosy and kind. Myrtle, whose father had been a share farmer on Coolami until he died and whose husband, a good chap called Roberts, had taken his place; Myrtle, who now, nearly forty, broad in the beam, but still rosy and hearty, would look at him over the heads of her five small Robertses with a grin which told him she remembered as kindly as he did a long summer evening by the creek on Coolami—
    That was all right – pleasant, wholesome, something you could look back on without a sour taste in your mouth. Not like the war episodes – not like Lilian, either, for whom he’d lived six feverish months before he discovered she was engaged to some one else all the time—
    It must have been that, he supposed – the jar of feeling himself very badly and callously let down,which had kept him unmarried so long. Not that he’d cared, a year later, what happened to Lilian. He’d never known till it was all over how very shallow a feeling it had really been—
    And after that nothing – except Coolami. And that, undoubtedly, the most satisfying, the most lasting. He’d been content with that. Nothing complicated about it, nothing dark and difficult, no tearing of yourself by many warring impulses, no plungings into sudden unsuspected emotions, no reactions of weariness and disgust—
    Just work – a deep absorption, a passionate interest. Triumphant hours, anxious hours, even despairing hours. They didn’t matter, the ups and downs of