In the Wet (40 page)

Dorset Downs homestead stands on a little hill, and we had to disembark from the boat about a mile from the house. I should have had difficulty in walking so far, but the men were most kind; they sent the black boy running to fetch down a quiet old horse for me, and when this came they put me up on it and so I came to the house on the hill. Hugh McIntyre is a bachelor and there is normally no woman there except the gins, but they put me to bed, with Sister Finlay in the next room to me, and there I stayed for the next four days till I was quite recovered.

They have a radio transmitter worked from batteries at Dorset Downs, so they were able to talk to Landsborough after the morning and the evening schedule from Cloncurry. Sergeant Donovan left on horseback for the town the morning after we arrived, but there was nothing urgent in the hospital to require the Sister, and so she stayed with me at the station for the whole four days. By that time I was very anxious to get back to Landsborough. I had missed one Sunday through my infirmity, which worried me a good deal, and I had left my parish magazine half written and so missed the weekly aeroplane that takes it into Cairns each month to be printed. I was most anxious to get back to my work, and when we had some sunshine on the morning of the fifth day I insisted that I must return.

We went on horseback, of course, Sister Finlay and myself, with John Collins and Harpo, both stockmen from the station, to ride with us and bring the horses back. The water was not more than a foot deep on any part of the track so that we had quite an easy ride, but it took us about three hours, and though we walked the horses the whole way I was rather tired when we got to Landsborough. Sister Finlay refused point blank to let me go back to my
vicarage and insisted that I should go into hospital for a few days, and as at any rate I had got back to town I let her have her way.

Sergeant Donovan came up to the hospital the day after we arrived. I was still in bed because the sister had taken away my clothes, a gesture that was kindly meant but really quite unnecessary. I was anxious to get something organised about the headstone, because a grave out in the bush is very apt to become obliterated and forgotten, whereas I have noticed that if it has a headstone stockmen sometimes stop there as they pass by in the course of their work, and dismount and leave a flower or two upon the grave, or even say a prayer if they are quite sure that nobody is looking, which is very good for the stockman. So I talked to Sergeant Donovan about the headstone and the inscription.

“I am most anxious that he should not be forgotten,” I told him. “There was a great deal of good in Stevie.”

“Aye,” said the Sergeant non-committally. “He was all right.”

“I had a great respect for him,” I said. The Sergeant was looking at me a little curiously. “There’s a verse from the Wisdom of Solomon that I should like to see upon the stone.”

“What’s that, Mr. Hargreaves?”

I said, “ ‘Having been a little chastised they shall be greatly rewarded, for God proved them and found them worthy of Himself’.”

There was a pause. “Aye,” he said at last, “that might do.”

I was a little disappointed that he did not display more enthusiasm, but mounted policemen in North Queensland are not noted for their lyrical outbursts. “There’s one thing that I’m not clear about,” I said, “and that’s his name. The surname was Anderson, of course, but was he Stephen or David?”

The Sergeant stared at me. “You’ve got that all mixed
up, Mr. Hargreaves,” he said slowly. “He wasn’t Anderson. We haven’t got an Anderson in Landsborough. His name was Stevie Figgins.”

“But he told me that his name was Anderson!” I exclaimed. “Nigger Anderson. They called him Nigger, because he was a quadroon.”

He shook his head. “Stevie Figgins,” he repeated. “I can show you on his pension papers, in his own handwriting. Did he tell you that his name was Anderson?”

I nodded. “Most definitely.”

“A bloke like that, he’d say anything when he’d a skinful, Mr. Hargreaves. When did he tell you that?”

“In Liang Shih’s hut, before he died,” I said.

He smiled. “He wouldn’t be himself then,” he said gently. “Maybe you weren’t quite yourself then either, Mr. Hargreaves, with the fever and that. I can tell you, Stevie Figgins was the only name he had, and he wasn’t a quadroon, either.”

I was silent for a long time, re-arranging my ideas. At last I said, “Do you know anything about his wife?”

“I know a little bit,” he said. “They used to fight like cat and dog twenty-five years ago, when he was manager of Wonamboola Station. It was probably that that started him upon the booze and lost him the job. She left him then, and later she got run over by a truck in Sydney, and died. That might have been in 1930 or soon after.”

“They didn’t live in Canberra?” I asked.

He laughed. “Canberra? Never come within a mile of it. They weren’t that sort of people, Mr. Hargreaves.”

“Did they have any children?”

“Not that I ever heard of. They might have done, but if there were any they never showed up here. Far as I know, there weren’t any relations. It doesn’t matter, because he’d nothing to leave.”

He went away presently, and I was left to try to reconcile what he had told me with my memories. I found it better to cling to the sheet anchor of reality. Sergeant Donovan was a competent and level headed young man, and I was forced to accept that what he had said about Stevie was almost certainly correct. It tallied, moreover, with my own experience of Stevie up to the night when he had died on Dorset Downs. And as regards that night, I had to admit that for most of it I was running a very high fever, myself.

I took the matter a stage further with Sister Finlay when she brought me a cup of tea that evening. “Sister,” I said, “I want to ask you something. Did you hear any of that long story Stevie told me before he died?”

She stared at me. “What story? I didn’t hear any story.”

“After we put the light out, to save the torch,” I said. “I asked him about his relations, and he began telling me about … all sorts of things.”

She shook her head. “He didn’t say anything. I’m sure of that, Mr. Hargreaves.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I don’t think so. You were sitting there holding his hand, but neither of you said a thing.”

“Are you quite sure of that?”

“I’m quite certain,” she said, smiling. “I was much more worried about you than I was about Stevie, because he was going to die in any case. You went to sleep, Mr. Hargreaves, and I didn’t wake you because I thought it was such a very good thing for you. You slept the whole night through.”

It was fantastic, because I had seen
her
asleep. “You’re sure you didn’t go to sleep yourself?”

She was affronted. “Mr. Hargreaves! I’ve never slept upon a night case yet, and I hope I never shall!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t make it out, because I
thought he told me a long story, all about himself.”

“You were very ill,” she said. “I should forget about it, if I were you. I may have dozed a little once or twice, but I was up and walking about every half hour, having a good look at you and at those wretched animals. Liang and I gave Stevie a couple more of those pipes at about two in the morning, right under your nose, but you never woke.”

That seemed conclusive, anyway. “The animals were there?”

“Oh, yes, they were there. Liang said he’s seen them do that before when they’re all stranded together on an island, in the wet.”

“Do what?”

“Stand looking at the house. It didn’t seem to worry him, but if I’d had a gun I’d have soon driven them away. I don’t like wild animals as much as that.”

I was silent.

Presently she said, “Whatever you think he told you, I should forget about it, Mr. Hargreaves. People often think funny things when they’re running a high temperature, and it doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s part of the clinical condition, part of the disease, that you get mild delusions. When the body’s sick it can’t help affecting the mind sometimes, just a little, and when the body gets well the mind gets well again too, and much more quickly.”

“I see that, Sister,” I said. “It was a very odd experience, and I hope I don’t have another one like it.”

“I’m sure you won’t,” she said. “You’re getting on splendidly. We’ll have you up next week.”

In spite of my protests, she kept me in bed for five or six days longer, partly, I think, because she knew that I would want to go back to my vicarage as soon as I was well. When finally I got back there I found that a transformation had been made. There was glass in all the windows of the one
room that I occupy, and a coat of colour wash had been put upon the walls, and there was a proper bedstead out of one hotel and a cane easy chair out of the other, and a brand new kerosene stove that gives out a tremendous heat and keeps me very warm and cosy in the wet. The people had done all this for me completely of their own initiative, and I must say that I was very much affected.

I settled down then for a very comfortable and lazy couple of months. It is usually April before one can get motor vehicles about again in the Gulf Country, and although when I was a younger man I used to go on travelling on horseback all through the wet I now feel that I am getting a bit old for that. I settled down instead to write a series of articles for my parish magazine, so that I could issue it each month throughout the dry without wasting too much time in writing during the season when the roads are fit for travelling.

We do not very often see strange faces at Landsborough in the wet, of course. But one day about the end of February or the beginning of March a strange aeroplane flew in and landed at the aerodrome, quite unexpectedly. It turned out to be a Dakota of the Department of Civil Aviation on loan for a period to the Department of Works and Housing. The passengers and crew came into the Post Office Hotel to spend the night, and I met them there when I went down to have my tea.

They turned out to be a party of surveyors and architects from the head office of their Department at Canberra; they had spent a couple of days at Brisbane on the way up, and had flown direct from there to Landsborough. Everybody was naturally curious to know what they had come for, and they were forthright people who made no bones about their business. They had come up to reinstate the aerodrome at Invergarry.

I sat at table with the man who seemed to be the head of the party, a grey haired man of fifty-five or so, a Mr. Hutchinson. “There’s no secret about it,” he said. “It’s all been in the papers, though perhaps you haven’t heard about it here. It’s in connection with the expansion of the R.A.A.F.—we’ve got to open up some of the old war-time aerodromes again and make them suitable for squadrons to occupy upon a permanent basis. It’s a big programme—means permanent buildings and hangars. It’ll take about five years to complete, perhaps longer. Take Invergarry, as an example; that’s the one that we’re going to see tomorrow. I understand there’s nothing there at all.”

I shook my head. “I passed by it about three years ago.”

“You did? There’s nothing there, is there?”

“Nothing but the runways,” I replied. “They were all right then. But there aren’t any buildings.”

“None at all?”

“Nothing.”

He turned to one of the others. “It’s as you said, Harry. The Americans took everything away.” He turned back to me. “You’ll think it’s funny that we shouldn’t know,” he said, “but these were American airstrips in the war against Japan, and we never had very much to do with them. And they’re not in places that one goes to every day.”

We talked a little about the job they had to do. Working from the basis of the existing runways, which they had to survey and to map, they had to start in and design a complete new station for the R.A.A.F. out in the middle of the wilderness, capable of accommodating one squadron as a start and for expansion at some later date to take a Wing. “It won’t all happen overnight,” said Mr. Hutchinson. “It will be five years at least before a squadron gets there with its aeroplanes, working as we do under peace time conditions. It might be longer than that.”

I asked quietly, “Will they have helicopters there?”

“Helicopters? Oh, I don’t know about that. Medium bombers is the intention, I believe. Most stations seem to have a helicopter or two about the place these days, though.”

“They’re useful for communications work,” one of the others said.

I sat with them at table for some time after the meal, because the only other place to go was into the bar, and none of the surveyors seemed to be fanatical beer drinkers. And sitting so, and thinking over what they had told me, I thought it best to have the whole of it, and I asked Mr. Hutchinson. “Do you people know Canberra well?”

“We all live there,” he said. “We moved up from Melbourne last year. But I’ve been there off and on about eleven years.”

“Do you know a place called Letchworth?”

“Too right I do,” he said. “It’s just outside the Federal Territory, in New South Wales.”

“Do you know the Yarrow Road in Letchworth?”

He wrinkled his brows. “Can’t say I do. There’s only one or two roads there at all. Simon might know—he worked in Canberra before he joined us. Simie, know the Yarrow Road, in Letchworth?”

A red haired young man spoke up. “What about it?”

“There
is
a Yarrow Road in Letchworth, is there? Mr. Hargreaves was asking.”

“There’s going to be,” the young man said. “It’s not built yet. It’s not even pegged out, far as I know. It’s one of the roads running up the hill away from the railway line, all going to be called after places in England. You’ll find it marked on the twenty-five inch plan, dotted.”

I asked. “There aren’t any houses on it yet?”

He shook his head. “It’s all virgin bush. It’s not even
scheduled for construction yet, Mr. Hargreaves. How did you get to hear about it?”

I said vaguely, “A chap I know was talking about a house he wanted to build some day, on Yarrow Road.”

Mr. Simon smiled. “He’ll have a long time to wait.”

“Have you got any idea when it’s likely to be made?”