【荆棘鸟】第十章 03

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 “Isn’t this nice?” Luke asked, apparently¹ not upset at her lack ofenthusiasm. 

     “Just turn a key and press a button on the dashboardand the car starts. No cranking a handle, no hoping the darneddonk catches before a man’s exhausted². This is the life, Meghann,no doubt about it.” 

     “You won’t leave me alone, will you?” she asked. 

     “Good Lord, no! You’ve come with me, haven’t you? That meansyou’re mine all night long, and I don’t intend giving anyone elsea chance.” 

     “How old are you, Luke?”“Thirty. How old are you?” 

     “Almost twenty-three.”“As much as that, eh? You look like a baby.” 

     “I’m not a baby.”“Oho! Have you ever been in love, then?” 

     “Once.” 

     “Is that all? At twenty-three? Good Lord! I’d been in and out oflove a dozen times by your age.” 

     “I daresay I might have been, too, but I meet very few people to fall in love with on Drogheda. You’re the firststockman I remember who said more than a shy hello.”              “Well, if you won’t go to dances because you can’t dance, you’reon the outside looking in right there, aren’t you? Never mind, we’llfix that up in no time. By the end of the evening you’ll be dancing,and in a few weeks we’ll have you a champion.” He glanced at herquickly. 

     “But you can’t tell me some of the squatters off other stationshaven’t tried to get you to come to the odd dance with them.Stockmen I can understand, you’re a cut above the usual stockman’sinclinations, but some of the sheep cockies must have given youthe glad eye.” 

     “If I’m a cut above stockmen, why did you ask me?” she parried. 

     “Oh, I’ve got all the cheek in the world.” He grinned. 

     “Come onnow, don’t change the subject. There must be a few blokes aroundGilly who’ve asked.” 

     “A few,” she admitted. 

     “But I’ve really never wanted to go. Youpushed me into it.” 

     “Then the rest of them are sillier than pet snakes,” he said. 

     “Iknow a good thing when I see it.”She wasn’t too sure that she cared for the way he talked, but thetrouble with Luke was that he was a hard man to put down.Everyone came to a woolshed dance, from squatters’ sons anddaughters to stockmen and their wives if any, maidservants, governesses,town dwellers⁴ of all ages and sexes. For instance, thesewere occasions when female schoolteachers got the opportunity tofraternize with the stock-and-station-agent apprentices⁵, the bankjohnnies and the real bushies off the stations.The grand manners reserved for more formal affairs were not inevidence at all. Old Mickey O’Brien came out from Gilly to playthe fiddle⁶, and there was always someone on hand to man the pianoaccordion or the button accordion⁷, taking turns to spell each otheras Mickey’s accompanists while the old violinist sat on a barrel or awool bale for hours playing without a rest, his pendulous⁸ lowerlip drooling because he had no patience with swallowing; it interferedwith his tempo⁹. 

     But it was not the sort of dancing Meggie had seen at MaryCarson’s birthday party. This was energetic round-dancing: barndances, jigs¹⁰, polkas, quadrilles, reels, mazurkas, Sir Roger de Coverleys,with no more than a passing touching¹¹ of the partner’s hands,or a wild swirling¹² in rough arms. There was no sense of intimacy,no dreaminess. Everyone seemed to view the proceedings¹³ as asimple dissipation of frustrations¹⁴; romantic intrigues¹⁵ were furtheredbetter outside, well away from the noise and bustle¹⁶.Meggie soon discovered she was much envied her big handsomeescort. He was the target of almost as many seductive or languishinglooks as Father Ralph used to be, and more blatantly¹⁷ so. As FatherRalph used to be. Used to be. 

     How terrible to have to think of himin the very remotest of all past tenses.True to his word, Luke left her alone only so long as it took himto visit the Men’s. Enoch Davies and Liam O’Rourke were there,and eager to fill his place alongside her. He gave them no opportunitywhatsoever, and Meggie herself seemed too dazed to understandthat she was quite within her rights to accept invitations todance from men other than her escort. Though she didn’t hear thecomments, Luke did, secretly laughing. What a damned cheek thefellow had, an ordinary stockman, stealing her from under theirnoses! Disapproval¹⁸ meant nothing to Luke. They had had theirchances; if they hadn’t made the most of them, hard luck.The last dance was a waltz. Luke took Meggie’s hand and puthis arm about her waist, drew her against him. He was an excellentdancer. To her surprise she found she didn’t need to do anythingmore than follow where he propelled her. And it was a most extraordinarysensation to be held so against a man, to feel the muscles of his chest andthighs, to absorb his body warmth. Her brief contacts with FatherRalph had been so intense she had not had time to perceive discretethings, and she had honestly thought that what she felt in his armsshe would never feel in anyone else’s. 

     Yet though this was quitedifferent, it was exciting; her pulse rate had gone up, and she knewhe sensed it by the way he turned her suddenly, gripped her moreclosely, put his cheek on her hair.As the Rolls purred home, making light of the bumpy¹⁹ track andsometimes no track at all, they didn’t speak very much. BraichyPwll was seventy miles from Drogheda, across paddocks withnever a house to be seen all the way, no lights of someone’s home,no intrusion of humanity. The ridge²⁰ which cut across Droghedawas not more than a hundred feet higher than the rest of the land,but out on the black-soil plains to reach the crest²¹ of it was like beingon top of an Alp to a Swiss. Luke stopped the car, got out andcame round to open Meggie’s door. She stepped down beside him,trembling a little; was he going to spoil everything by trying to kissher? It was so quiet, so far from anyone! 

     There was a decaying dogleg wooden fence wandering off to oneside, and holding her elbow lightly to make sure she didn’t stumblein her frivolous²² shoes, Luke helped Meggie across the unevenground, the rabbit holes. Gripping the fence tightly and lookingout over the plains, she was speechless; first from terror, then, herpanic dying as he made no move to touch her, from wonder.Almost as clearly as the sun could, the moon’s still pale lightpicked out vast sweeping²³ stretches of distance, the grass shimmeringand rippling²⁴ like a restless sigh, silver and white and grey. Leaveson trees sparkled suddenly like points of fire when the wind turnedtheir glossy²⁵ tops upward, and great yawning gulfs of shadowsspread under timber stands as mysteriously as mouths of the underworld. 

     Lifting her head, she tried to count thestars and could not; as delicate as drops of dew on a wheelingspider’s web the pinpoints²⁶ flared²⁷, went out, flared, went out, in arhythm as timeless as God. They seemed to hang over her like anet, so beautiful, so very silent, so watchful²⁸ and searching of thesoul, like jewel eyes of insects turned brilliant in a spotlight²⁹, blindas to expression and infinite as to seeing power. The only soundswere the wind hot in the grass, hissing³⁰ trees, an occasional clankfrom the cooling Rolls, and a sleepy bird somewhere close complainingbecause they had broken its rest; the sole smell the fragrant,indefinable scent³¹ of the bush.Luke turned his back on the night, pulled out his tobacco pouchand booklet of rice papers, and began to roll himself a cigarette. 

     “Were you born out here, Meghann?” he asked, rubbing thestrands of leaf back and forth³² in his palm, lazily. 

     “No, I was born in New Zealand. We came to Drogheda thirteenyears ago.”He slipped the shaped tendrils into their paper sheath, twiddledit expertly between thumb and forefinger³³, then licked it shut, pokeda few wisps back inside the tube with a match end, struck the matchand lit up. 

     “You enjoyed yourself tonight, didn’t you?” 

     “Oh, yes!” 

     “I’d like to take you to all the dances.” 

     “Thank you.”He fell silent again, smoking quietly and looking back across theroof of the Rolls at the stand of timber where the irate³⁴ bird stilltwittered querulously. When only a small remnant of the tubesputtered between his stained fingers he dropped it on the groundand screwed his boot heel viciously down upon it until he was sureit was out. No one kills a cigarette as dead as an Australian bushman.  Sighing, Meggie turned from the moon vista³⁵, and he helped herto the car. He was far too wise to kiss her at this early stage, becausehe intended to marry her if he could; let her want to be kissed, first.But there were other dances, as the summer wore on and woreitself down in bloody³⁶, dusty splendor³⁷; gradually the homestead gotused to the fact that Meggie had found herself a very good-lookingboyfriend. Her brothers forbore to tease, for they loved her andliked him well enough. Luke O’Neill was the hardest worker theyhad ever employed; no better recommendation than that existed.At heart more working class than squatter³ class, it never occurredto the Cleary men to judge him by his lack of possessions. 

     Fee,who might have weighed him in a more selective balance, didn’tcare sufficiently³⁸ to do so. Anyway, Luke’s calm assumption that hewas different from your average stockman bore fruit; because of it,he was treated more like one of themselves.It became his custom to call up the track at the big house whenhe was in at night and not out in the paddocks; after a while Bobdeclared it was silly for him to eat alone when there was plenty onthe Cleary table, so he ate with them. After that it seemed rathersenseless to send him a mile down the track to sleep when he wasnice enough to want to stay talking to Meggie until late, so he wasbidden to move into one of the small guesthouses out behind thebig house.By this time Meggie thought about him a great deal, and not asdisparagingly as she had at first, always comparing him to FatherRalph. The old sore was healing. After a while she forgot thatFather Ralph had smiled so with the same mouth, while Luke smiledthus, that Father Ralph’s vivid blue eyes had had a distant stillnessto them while Luke’s glittered with restless passion. 

     She was youngand she had never quite got to savor³⁹ love, if for a moment or twoshe had tasted it. She wanted to roll it round on her tongue, getthe bouquet⁴⁰ of it into her lungs, spin it dizzying to her brain. Father Ralph wasBishop Ralph; he would never, never come back to her. He hadsold her for thirteen million pieces of silver, and it rankled⁴¹. If hehadn’t used the phrase that night by the borehead she would nothave wondered, but he had used it, and countless⁴² were the nightssince when she had lain puzzling as to what he could possibly havemeant.And her hands itched⁴³ with the feel of Luke’s back when he heldher close in a dance; she was stirred by him, his touch, his crispvitality. Oh, she never felt that dark liquid fire in her bones for him,she never thought that if she didn’t see him again she would witherand dry up, she never twitched⁴⁴ and trembled because he looked ather. 

     But she had grown to know men like Enoch Davies, LiamO’Rourke, Alastair MacQueen better as Luke squired her to moreand more of the district affairs, and none of them moved her theway Luke O’Neill did. If they were tall enough to oblige her to lookup, they would turn out not to have Luke’s eyes, or if they had thesame sort of eyes, they wouldn’t have his hair. Something was alwayslacking which wasn’t lacking in Luke, though just what it wasLuke possessed⁴⁵ she didn’t know. Aside from the fact that he remindedher of Father Ralph, that is, and she refused to admit herattraction had no better basis than that. 

     They talked a lot, but always about general things; shearing⁴⁶, theland, the sheep, or what he wanted out of life, or perhaps aboutthe places he had seen, or some political happening. He read anoccasional book but he wasn’t an inveterate⁴⁷ reader like Meggie,and try as she would, she couldn’t seem to persuade him to readthis or that book simply because she had found it interesting. Nordid he lead the conversation into intellectual depths; most interestingand irritating of all, he never evinced any interest in her life, orasked her what she wanted from it. Sometimes she longed to talkabout matters far closer to her heart than sheep or rain, but if she made a leading statement he was expert at deflecting⁴⁸ her intomore impersonal⁴⁹ channels.Luke O’Neill was clever, conceited⁵⁰, extremely hardworking andhungry to enrich himself. He had been born in a wattle-and-daubshanty exactly on the Tropic of Capricorn, outside the town ofLongreach in Western Queensland. His father was the black sheepof a prosperous but unforgiving Irish family, his mother was thedaughter of the German butcher in Winton; when she insisted onmarrying Luke senior, she also was disowned. 

 

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