Copyright Story. The Logans of Whyanella Creek.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXII, Issue XXIV, 11 June 1904, Page 54

Copyright Story. The Logans of Whyanella Creek.

By

A. E. DAWSON.

(Author of “ Hidden Manna,” etc.)

If I wanted to know the clay of the Month, or how many “ l’s ” there are fn parallel, 1 should never ask Howard Kerr. But. if 1 wanted to know what had become of any man who had dropped out of the world known to most of us: what sea-serpents and bunyips really look like: whether hypnotism is practised in the West African oil-rivers; how it feels to be swimming alone in the open sea. south of Cape Horn, or what was the true story of anything that ever happened in the Bush; then, if he were within a few days’ journey of me, I think I should ask Howard Kerr. Kerr and I were locked out of the old “ Europa ” in Lisbon, during the smalt hours of a certain summer's morning, and we sat down together in the little garden at the end of Rua d’Aura, and Kerr told me about Mark Riddell and the Logans. It appears that Mark Riddell was en-gJ-jed in London by the agents of the company which started the ‘'Sydney 'limes,” to come out to Australia as editor of that paper. When Riddell was in the Suez, the company failed, and by the time he had arrived in New South Wales the " Times ” had stopped issue. Then came to him a desire to make a living out of the soil. The lush i noduetiveness of tiie South fascinated fim, and it was delightful to hear him orate on the text of “ Nature's neglected gifts to humanity.” Habitually reserved, and inclined to take a cynical view of things, he budded, halftimidlv, under the influence of his early courting of Nature, and to a friendly listener, would dilate in language redolent of fruit and flowers, rather than of corn and oil, on his mistress’ wealth of beauty. He journey to the north, and the luxuriant greenness of the great Clarence and Stephens watersheds, laid hold upon the man. The juicy, vines that tangle in and out the stately timber of the North seemed to have twined their clinging tendrils round his heart, and the tail grass to have cheeked his unwilling feet, when he turned his face inwards towns and civilisation. But that to which he bared his head with the admiration of a devotee, was the wattle. The waving, golden, fragranee-bear-irg wattle, with its sensuous rustle iii afternoon sunlight, and its glove-fitting bark, which peels in dripping slices, like the skin of a mango; the wattle was the finishing touch to his fanaticism. and he took up land with the avowed intention of making a living out of the Bush, generally, and in particular. by the cultivation of wattlebark for the use of tanners. It was part of his phase that he should regard the Logans of Whyanella ( reek, as Arcadians of pre-historic honesty of purpose, and accept their overtures, as being inspired by the guileless generosity of simple children of the soil. He lodged at their slab and weather-board homestead, took up his tract of land through old Vincent Logan, bought his horses from the married son. and his stores through the old woman; and he employed the three single sous, on Sydney wages, to build his house, and help him with the wattles. One may take up: “Church and school land ” in that locality, on a twenty-one years’ lease, and at about the rental one would expect to pay for a bathing machine. It was a corner of old Logan’s run that Riddell rented, but he [>aid that child of the soil considerably more for this unfenced, uncleared patch of bush than Logan paid the Government for the entire Whyanella run. For years the Logans had jogged comfortably through life: doing a little cattle dumping, horse-breeding, and timber getting: and an enormous amount of real loafing. Now they rested on their tors, and prepared to cud their days

comfortably, on the little income which, with care, could be extracted from the supply of Riddell's store*, the rent of his pretty, but practically useless patch of their land; his wages, and incidental profits to be made from horse deals, and other friendly offices. Mark Riddell did not see Fanny. Logan’s elder daughter, when he first arrived at Whyanella Creek. Mrs. Logan said her daughter was away in the paddock across the creek: and, therefore, of course. Fanny could not have been putting on her best frock, in the little room built out by the side of the kitchen. In any case, when at last. Fanny did step across the little verandah, into the room where there were almanacs and aniimacassars; then Riddell decided that Mrs Logan's daughter was a Bush beauty. well worthy of the Arcadian surroundings in which she lived. She really was beautiful in a sense, this 20 year old brunette, born in the Bush of Irish parents. Her eyes were so blue, her lips so full, and crimson, and the curves of her figure, so rich and provocative. There was the grace of a panther in her movements. and the hot sunshine of Australian summers, running swiftly through all her veins, flooded her rounded cheek and sloping neck, when she shook hands with Mark Riddell- Anyone would have admired her beauty, and to the Englishman, in the full fanaticism of the phase through which he was passing. Fanny Logan seemed the physical embodiment of all the throbbing life of that green, and creeper-tangled country. So he liowed to her with even more enthusiasm that he had bared his head to the wattles. On that first evening at Whyanella Creek. Riddell walked down to the sliprails of the home-paddock, to smoke Iris pipe and talk to old Logan. ■ As the two mon* stood there .the Englishman was startled by the sound of a horse's feet, thundering down the little wooded hillside beyond the fence. Then a pony, ridden by a young girl whose hair was flying loose in the cool breeze, came galloping across the little open patch of green, and. clearing the three-rail fence with liardly a break in its stride, scattered a little cloud of leaves and broken twigs over Riddell, as its rider, with a final shout of childish laughter, reined in sharply, and sprang to the ground, near the two men. This was Norah, aged 13. and Logan's youngest child. At six years of age Norah had ridden almost every horse on the run. and, up till within a year of the evening on which Riddell first saw her. she had ridden more often without a saddle than with one, and had sat her horses like a boy. A picture of liberty, was this child, as she stood before Riddell, one half-bared, brown arm through the bridle of her horse, her great, black eves flashing, the fearless timidity of childhood, and the crumpled, silver curls of bark peel clinging to her wind-tossed hair, giving evidence of the recklessness of her gallop through the apple-tree scrub, outside the paddock. Then the pielure vanished. Norah had taken one comprehensive, look at the stranger, and. with an abashed murmur of “I didn't know!” has sprung upon her pony again and galloped oft to the homestead. Very soon after this. Mark Riddell look up his patch of the run: but continued to live at the Logan's homestead whilst he. with old Logan's three unmarried sons, worked at his little slab house, just as men wrecked on a desert island might work at something they had no particular desire to complete, but yet meant to carry out in strict accordance with their amateur theories, as to what such work should be. At intervals. the three Australians would sit down and fill their pipes, whilst Riddell discoursed in glowing language of the richness of Nature's gifts to dwellers in the country round about Whyanella. They smoked, as he raved of the neglect-

ed wealth of the place. and nodded acquiescence. as he told them how, later on, he would establish schools of agriculture. and places for social intercourse. He insisted that every inch of the land was suited to wine-growing, and, to clinch his argument, he sent down to Mattei's vineyard on the Stephens river, and ordered casks of red wine, which accordingly became the staple beverage of the Logaa household, vice tea condemned on hygienic grounds, by Kiddell’s authority. Through all these days, little Norah, with her wild look of freedom, and her streaming blue-black hair, lay on the grass, or sat on logs, near the half-built slab house, her chin resting on her little brown hands, and her great eyes following Riddell's every movement. That steady gaze of hers was purely untamed childhood of the Bush; but when she spoke to him. it was wonderful to note the soft inflection in her voice, the tender tone of which, became all a woman's. Then one of her brother's would speak; and Norah would throw her head back like a wild eolt, sniffing a presence from another world. Her answer would be flung out in her own wild, child's way. startling Riddell, like a sudden gust of wind from the bottom of some rocky gully, in which dead leaves are whirled about, and grey wallabies sit, like figures hewn out of granite. In the evenings old Logan and his sons would hover, for a while, in deferential half-companionship, about the verandah. where the Englishman sat smoking. Then Fanny, in her best attire, would sit down with her work in her lap, inside the open window and behind Riddell; and the men folk would drift away into the shadows that surrounded the kitchen and the built-out part of the house. She became the emblem of human beauty in the Englishman's phase of Nature-worship. A sentence in Fanny’s melodious voice was enough to show Riddell, in the dim half-lights of the evenings in the Bush, that her brother Larry required a newsaddle, or that old Logau wanted a little help in connection with the purchase of a team of bullocks. A breath from her crimson lips, or a movement of the smoothly curving arm in the window sill, was amply sufficient to prove to the Englishman. as he sat. drinking in the night's wattle-scented fragrance, that it would be positively brutal on his part not to supply at once the needs of these children of the forest. So he supplied them. After bidding Fanny good-night on one of these evenings, Riddell stood hesitating a moment at the door of his room, and listening to a curious series of sounds that seemed to come from the outhouse by the kitchen, on the other side of the big lemon tree. Riddell shivered, because the idea of physical pain was. to him, horrible, and these sounds that he heard resembled, so it seemed to him, those that would l>e made by a whip-thong or leathern strap in falling heavily on some creature's body. The Englishman turned, and took two steps across the dark room, pausing again, as he heard a little human moan. Then, as he walked towards the outhouse. he heard in old Logan’s gruff voice the muttered words: “’And you'll tell him just what I tell you to, and nothing else—and that'll teach you to; you—what? Take Then the sounds ceased, as Riddell's steps approached the outhouse; and when he pushed open the crazy door of the place old Logan was saying: ‘‘Well, Norah, child, if that oil o' cloves won't ease your toothache, I don’t know what will! Poor child! Ye’d better go to your mother; and—what, Mr Riddell! Sure I thought you were in bed and asleep. Here's the child raving with the toothache. There, go to your mother, Norah, and see what she can do for you!” And the old Irishman dropped something on the floor behind kim, as Norah walked out past the Englishman, her little brown hands clenched and her black

eyes blazing from between long, wet lashes, which glistened in the moonlight.

It was shortly after the evening or Mark Riddell's queer fancy about some animal being thrashed, that his first parcel of wattle-bark was sent to market by river-punt. The success of this first achievement was somewhat marred by the fact that, whilst the price obtained for the ten tons of wattle-bark was eighty pounds, Riddell's accounts showed that its placing upon the market in a finished state had cost just twelve pounds ten shillings per ton. As old I.ogan pointe out. however, it was "Fine Bark." and “sold as easy as shelling peas." Possibly this reflection, and one or two others connected with Vincent Logan’s oldest daughter, were what caused Riddell to retain still much of his enthusiasm, in the face of one os two warnings from disinterested sources and the half open ridicule of the settlers round about Whyanella. Sometimes he wondered idly what might be the meaning of little Norah's curious way of following hint about, and her strange looks. He came to the conclusion that this child was a beautiful, unaccountable product of the Bush; anti he forgot her looks, as he forgot most other things, when he sat listening, in the dreamy evenings, to the murmur of her older sister’s voice. Coining unexpectedly to the Logan’s homestead one afternoon. Riddell heard a sound of low moaning in the little out-house behind the kitchen. Be tried the door, but found it locked. And when, that evening, he asked Fanny who had made that moaning noise, she told him that her little sister had violent toothaches, and sometimes would lock herself up in the outhouse, and refuse to be comforted. On the following day he spoke sympathetically to the child about this. She stared at him, with big tears standing in her black eyes, and laughed in her wild way,, as she said: “Yes! Toothache’s dreadfull” Then came a day of disaster for the Logan family. It was strange that so much should have happened on one day. During the month that preceded it,-Rid-dell had had one or two uncomfortable reminders that his capital was running short. But the bursting of the thundercloud was reserved for this one day. In the early morning he rode into the little post-town of Marulah, and called for his letters. From one of these letters ha learned that he had been paying double the rent of the whole Whyanella run, for the use of one corner of it. In another. the commercial hopelessness of his position was candidly dwelt upon by a Sydney friend; and after he had read this he was approached on the subject of his relations with the Logans, by the only storekeeper of Marulah, and by the one well-to-do farmer of the district. In five minutes the Englishman’s face was flushed in the beginning of an angry awakening to the facts. At the end of an hour he rode away from the little post office, sick with disgust and contemptuous anger, after hearing the truth of one or two little transactions with the Logan family, which, even in the early days of his fanaticism, had rather worried him. This, then, was the end of his little phase of Natureworship—his life on the soil—and he knew it. What ’gave the situation its real sting, however, was his sudden recognition of the crude manner in which the whole family, taking advantage of his enthusiasm, had swindled him -in all the details of his connection with them. He thought over the past few months of his life as he rode out to Whyanella, and realised that, with the single exception of Norah, every member of the family had, in some way, partaken of the feast. “And I suppose the very, child, with her black hair and savage eyes, would have robbed me if she could,’’ he muttered, as the roof of Logan’s homestead came into view on the far side of the little creek.

"Ab he walked his hone quietly across the Whyanella home paddock, the Englishman heard one or two sobbing cries of pain issuing from the kitchen, behind the lemon tree. “That child ought to have all her teeth taken out,” said Hidden to himself, as he recognised Norah’s voice. As he drew nearer to the house he heard the child scream: “I won’t! I won’t! and I’ll tell him about the hoUes if you •" Then the sltarp, half-hysterical notes died away into a muffled sound, and when Riddell dismounted outside the kitchen door he saw no sign of little Norah. Old J.ogan and his wife were l>oth standing in the dark, old kitchen; the windows of which were like swing doors hung on leathern hinges. Fanny, not expecting the Englishman's return at this early hour, was unprepared to meet him, and Riddell caught a flying glimpse of a not verypleasing dishabille, *as the girl whisked herself into the little room opening out of the kitchen, and slammed its creaking door. . Standing there, in the sunlight which fell in quivering patches on the ground below the lemon tree, Mark Riddell told old I-ogan and his wife of all he had learned that morning. He was at pains to show them that their ends would have been better served, had they not hurried the collapse of his little attempt to make a living out of the soil. The Irishman was abashed, but his wife waxed insolent; to cover her lord and master’s shame. Then without a word to any other member of the family. Riddell walked across the paddock to his own still uncompleted slab house, and, gathering together a few personal odds and ends to carry in his saddle-bag, he rode away front Whyanella, to arrange, in Marulah, for the removal of his horses and other effects. And as he walked his horse through the apple-tree scrub, beyond the slip rails, he met Norah; her white face tear-stained, and her little body quivering with pain. He asked her what had caused the swollen weal he saw on one of her brown arms, and Norah said she had burned it. “Poor child!'’’ he muttered thinking of the pain of her toothaches. Then he said: “Good-bye, little girl,” in a terne made tender by the sight of the child's tear-stained face, and rode slowly on. never mentioning that he would not return that night, or —ever. Norah stood there in the apple-tree scrub, gazing after him, with a hungry look in her wild eyes. After his return to eivilsation. Mark Riddell remained quietly in. Sydney; making his living comfortably enough, as a moderately successful journalist, He resumed "his old reserved ways, anil his views of life, being tinged only by the greyness of cynicism, lacked colour. Just four years after the finish of his Bush life, Riddell was sent up North, to write descriptive articles for the “Weekly Mail.” He reached the town of Maitland at three o’clock one autumn afternoon, when the farmers were praying for the break-up of a five months drought, and, immediately after Ids arrival, he hired a horse to ride out to the Show Ground, beyond East Maitland. As he rode Riddell gazed across the brown and scorched up meadow land, to where the great bush of the Clarence river watershed loomed, dark and cool-looking against the glaring sky. He had not been in the Bush for four years. And for three years, he had not thought of the curious little phase in his life dining which he had lived in a slab-house. “Thirty—no thirty-five miles. over there is Whyanella Creek,” he muttered, as lie rode along the dusty road: “I wonder if the slab-house is still there! The vines I planted must have grown, and—- H’m! No, she was part of the fraud. But the child—l wonder if she still has those awful pains! She is almost a woman now-—quite! I wonder if I—what nonsense! But she was not part of the fraud: and, —I’m not sure that it was toothache. It’s rather absurd! What would the “Weekly Mail’ sav!”

As he approached the cross-roads, near the Show Ground, Riddell pulled his horse into a walk, and let the reins fall on the animal’s neck. The hor>-e lowered its head, and, with a lazy indifference chose ihe road turning northward front the Show Ground. Ten minutes afterwards Mark Riddell was riding at a smart canter along the main

northern road, which runs through the watershed of the Clarence river. At nine o'clock that evening, the Logan family had, with two exceptions, retired for the night. Old Vincent Logan sat smoking by the side of a dying fire in the kitchen, and Norah Logan was leaning idly over the slip-rails of the home-paddock, listening to the croaking of a big bull-frog on the bank of the little creek. She was in her eighteenth year then, and such a beauty as one rarely sees, in or out of the bush. As she stood there, dreaming and wondering, she heard a horse’s feet crushing the dead twigs and fallen leaves in the apple-tree scrub. Then a man rode across the clear patch, and up to the slip-rails. ‘■Ohl Oh! He's cotne back!” Norah spoke in the hushed whisper of the confessional. but the very air she breathed quivered its answer to the emotion in her voice. “Norahl Is this you? Child, you are a beautiful woman!” "Oh, no! But—but. why did you go away, and not tell me? I thought they would have killed me on that day, because —I would not —” “Oh. Norah! What a brute I was! But I had not dreamed of it then, and I have only half dreamed of it sinee. Norah, forgive me!” The moon sank behind a dark liank of cloud while they stood there, the three-rail fence between them, and old Vineent Logan, sitting in the slabwalled kitchen, knocked the ashes out of his pipe upon the dead fire, and went to bed. And when the old man awoke at six o’clock next morning, he was obliged to ask his wife to make his early cup of tea, for there was no Norah in the homestead by Whyanella Creek. It was strange, too, because none of the horses were missing, and the old side-saddle still hung in the outhouse behind the kitchen. The horse from Maitland had carried a double burden through the bush the night before: because Mark Riddell had told beautiful, blaek-eyed Norah that she must take away no single thing—not even a recollection—from the run by Whyanella Creek. It was very nearly daylight, and the market women were walking past with huge baskets on their heads, when Howard Kerr rose from my side in the garden at the end of Rua d’Aura. He shivered as we turned to walk baek to our hotel, for the morning air was fresh. “And what became of them. Kerr?” I asked, just as we reached the door of the Europa. “Ah! Riddell had left Sydney, when you first went out,” replied Kerr. “His unde, or somebody died, and they live in Ireland now. Somewhere in the south, I believe. I must send his wife a few wattle leaves one of these days, to remind her of the Clarence river bush I ” Then Kerr and I went up to bed.