Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land Part 7

McKeith's face changed: it became dark and a dangerous fire blazed in his blue eyes.

'Because they found that the Blacks repaid kindness with ingrat.i.tude--treachery--foul murder--' He pulled himself up as though afraid of losing command of himself if he pursued the subject: his voice thrilled with some deep-seated feeling. Mrs Gildea, who understood the personal application, broke in across the table with an apposite remark about her own early experiences of the Blacks. Lady Bridget impatiently addressed McKeith.

'Go on. What do the Blacks do now to you people to make you treat them unkindly?'

'What do they do now--to us squatters you mean?' Colin had recovered himself. 'Why they begin by spearing our cattle and then they take to spearing ourselves.'

'Did they ever spear you?' she asked.

Colin smiled at her grimly.

'Well, you wouldn't have noticed, of course, that I've got just a touch of a limp--it's only if I'm not in my best form that it shows. I owe that to a spear through my thigh one night that the Blacks rushed my camp when I was asleep. And I'd given their gins rations that very morning.'

'And then?' Lady Bridget's voice was tense.

'Oh then--after they'd murdered a white man or two, the rest of us whites--there wasn't more than a handful of us at that time up on the Leura--banded together and drove them off into the back country. We had a dangerous job with those Blacks until King Mograbar was shot down.'

'King Mograbar! How cruelly unjust. It was his country you were STEALING.' She accentuated the last word with bitter scorn.

'Well! If you come to that, I suppose Captain Cook was stealing when he hoisted the British flag in Botany Bay,' said McKeith.

'And if he hadn't, what about the glorious British record, and the March of Civilisation?' put in Vereker Wells.

Bridget shot a scathing glance at the aide-de-camp.

'I don't admire your glorious British record, I think it's nothing but a record of robbery, murder, and cruelty, beginning with Ireland and ending with South Africa.'

'Oh! my dear!--I warn you,' said Lady Tallant, bending from her end of the table and addressing the Leichardt'stonians generally. 'Lady Bridget is a little Englander, a pro-Boer, a champion of the poor oppressed native. If she had been alive then she'd have wanted to hand India back to the Indians after the Mutiny, and now when she has made Cecil Rhodes Emperor of Rhodesia, she'll give over all the rest again to the Dutch.'

Bridget responded calmly to the indictment.

'Yes, I would--if Cecil Rhodes were to decline the Emperorship of all South Africa--which I should make his job.... But you'd better add on that I'm a Socialist too, Rosamond, because I've become one, as you know. I think the working man is in a shamefully unjust position, and that the capitalists are no better than slave-drivers.'

'Oh, not out here, my word!' exclaimed a Leichardt'stonian who happened to be one of the old squattocracy. 'The landowners and the capitalists are not slave-drivers, they are slave-driven. We've got to pay what the Trades' Union organisers tell us--or else go without stockmen or shearers. Fact is, our Labour War is only just beginning; and I can tell you, Sir, that before a year is out the so-called bloated capitalist and the sheep and cattle station owner will sing either pretty big or very small.'

'I don't think it will be very small--on MY station,' murmured McKeith.

'But it's quite true about the Labour War. They're organising, as they call it, already all along the Leura.'

The Governor asked to have the Labour situation explained from the squatters' point of view; and for a few minutes McKeith forgot to look at Lady Bridget. He was on his own ground and knew what he was talking about.

'It's this way,' he began. 'You see, though, I'm cattle--and I'm the furthest squatter out my way. But there are a few sheep stations down the river, and there isn't an unlimited supply of either cattle-hands or shearers, so we've got to look sharp about hiring them. Now, last year, we--of course I'm cla.s.sing myself with the sheep-owners, for we all stand together--hired our shearers for seventeen shillings and sixpence a day. Then, up come the Union organisers, form a Union of the men and say to them: "You've got to pay ten shillings down to the Union and sign a contract that you won't shear under twenty shillings a day."

The Organiser pockets the ten shillings, and makes three pounds a week and his expenses besides, so it pays HIM pretty well. Well then, the shearers go to the squatters. "All right," say they, "we'll shear your sheep, but it's going to be twenty shillings instead of seventeen and six." The squatters grumble, but they've got to have their sheep shorn, and they pay the twenty shillings. Next year, I'm told, the word is to go round that it's to be twenty-two and sixpence. Well sir, we're to see what's to happen then!'

The Labour talk lacked local picturesqueness. Sir Luke preferred the Blacks, and started the question of danger to white men in the out-districts. How far had officialdom penetrated into the back blocks?

He understood that Mr McKeith had explored for the laying of a telegraph-line to the Big Bight. Could Mr McKeith give him any information about all that?

McKeith explained again. He had stopped a week, he said, at the last outpost of Leichardt's land civilisation. The telegraph master there lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard--there were four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an a.s.sault by the natives, and of rifles at work through gun-holes in the zinc tower.

Lady Bridget listened in silence. Now and then, she looked up at McKeith, and, though her eyes gave forth ominous red-brown sparks, they had in them something of the same unwilling fascination Joan Gildea had noticed in the eyes of Colin McKeith.

CHAPTER 10

In the drawing room, before the men came in, Bridget talked to Joan Gildea. They hadn't yet had, as Biddy reminded her, a regular outpouring. The outpouring it should be stated, was always mostly on Bridget's side.

'When did you start Socialism?' Mrs Gildea asked. 'That's something new, isn't it?'

Biddy gave one of her slow smiles in which lips, eyes, brows, what could be seen of them under her towzle of hair--all seemed to light up together.

'Why, I've always been a Socialist--in theory, you know. I've ALWAYS rebelled against the established order of things.'

'But latterly,' said Joan, 'I haven't heard anything about your doings--not since you wrote from Castle Gaverick after--after Mr Willoughby Maule's marriage?'

The light died out of Bridget's face. 'Ah, I'll tell you--Do you know, Rosamond saw them--the Willoughby Maules before we all left. She met them at Shoolbred's--buying furniture. Rosamond said SHE was dragging after him looking--a bundle--and cross and ill; and that he seemed intensely bored. Poor Will!'

There was silence, Bridget's thoughts seemed far away.

'But about the Socialism?' prompted Mrs Gildea.

'Oh well, Aunt Eliza made up her mind suddenly to consult her new doctor--Aunt Eliza's chief excitement is changing her doctors, and she grows quite youthful in the process. They say that love and religion are the chief emotional interests of unattached women. I should add on doctors when a woman is growing old. Don't you think, Joan, that in that case, all three come invariably to the same thing?'

'Love, religion and doctors! As emotional interests, do they come to the same thing for elderly women?' repeated Mrs Gildea, as if she were propounding a syllogism. 'No, certainly not, when the elderly woman happens to be a hard-working journalist.'

'Oh, there you have the pull--I suggested the idea to Rosamond the other day and she gave a true Rosamondian answer. "They don't come at all to the same thing," she said, "because usually you have to pay your doctor and SOMETIMES your lover pays you." Rather smart, wasn't it?'

'Yes, but I think you'd better warn Lady Tallant that the Leichardt'stonian ladies are a bit Puritanical in their ideas of repartee.'

'Oh, Rosamond is clever enough to have found that out already for herself;' and the two glanced at Lady Tallant, who seemed to be playing up quite satisfactorily to the female representatives of the Ministerial circle.

'I suppose you made friends with some Socialists when you were in London?' went on Mrs Gildea.

'My dear, I would have made friends with Beelzebub just them, if he would have helped me to escape from myself.'

Bridget sighed and paused.

'But you ARE getting over it, Biddy--the disappointment about Mr Maule?

You ARE growing not to care?'

'I don't want to grow not to care--though, of course, now I should prefer to care about someone or something that isn't Willoughby Maule, I feel inside me that my salvation lies in caring--in caring intensely.... But you wouldn't understand, Joan. You weren't built that way.'

'No,' a.s.sented Mrs Gildea doubtfully.

'But,' went on Biddy brightly, 'I think sometimes that if one could get to the pitch of feeling nothing matters, it would be a way of reaching the "letting go" stage which one MUST arrive at before one can even BEGIN to live in the Eternal.'

There seemed something a little comic in the notion of Bridget O'Hara living in the Eternal, and yet Mrs Gildea realised that there really was a certain stable quality underneath the flashing, ever changing temperamental sheath, which might perhaps form a base for the Verities to rest upon.