Part 51 (1/2)
”I wonder if it would matter if I took all my things off?” she began reflectively. Then she gasped out: ”Why Louis, where are the five trees?”
He sprang to his feet, staring about in bewilderment. The sun was above their heads, red and leaden; all round stretched the scorched scrub; the creek lay to their right but the five trees had vanished, swallowed up in a thick, dun-coloured fog.
”Lord, we're in for a dust-storm, old lady!”
”Will it hurt us?”
He dilated on the horrors of dust-storms, and how they buried people and choked the water-holes. It grew dark, not a breath of wind stirred the scrub, not a bird moved or twittered in the few trees fringing the creek.
”It may pa.s.s us by,” said Louis. ”They're often very localized. But if it gets us, be sure not to speak, or your mouth will be full of dust, and keep your eyes shut tight.”
They plodded on. Once Marcella started violently as a parakeet flew by with a brilliant flash of pink and green wings and a screaming cry. They found it difficult to breathe. It seemed as though all the air had been sucked up behind the advancing wall of dust and sand. One moment they were walking in clear, though breathless air; the next the storm was upon them, stinging and blinding and burning as the particles of dust were hurled with enormous velocity by the wind.
Marcella gave a little cry of fear, and in the process got her mouth filled with dust as Louis had prophesied. Groping out blindly she found his hand, and they clung together. She would have given anything to be able to speak, for the horror of the ancient doom of Lashnagar rose up all round her and gripped her. But for more than an hour they battled in silence, unable to go either backwards or forwards. When finally the storm pa.s.sed over, leaving them with parched throats and red-rimmed, aching eyes and blistered skin, it was dusk--the swift dusk of the sub-tropics.
Marcella wanted to stay and wash the dust away in the creek; Louis, remembering the food shortage, insisted on pus.h.i.+ng on. But when darkness fell they were going blindly in the direction they guessed to be right for they could see nothing of the five trees. Louis got depressed.
Marcella felt tired enough to be depressed too, but had to keep his spirits up. She was just going to suggest that they should give up and rest supperless for the night when they heard a faint ”coo-ee,” and even more faintly the plodding sound of a horse's steps. Louis excitedly gave an answering shout, and in a few minutes they saw a horse looming through the darkness.
”What a good job I've found you,” came a boy's voice, and they saw a small figure standing beside them, reaching about to the horse's shoulder.
”Were you looking for us?” said Marcella. ”And are we found? We don't seem to be anywhere.”
”I was looking for the sheep. I came across twenty back there, suffocated with the dust. I don't know what he'll say when he knows! But it's a good thing I found you, else you'd have gone on all night.”
He turned then, and they followed him. He said nothing more until after about two miles of silent tramping they turned the corner of a high fence threaded with wonga-vine, and saw the lights of a homestead.
Marcella felt she understood fire-and sun-wors.h.i.+ppers. She could cheerfully have wors.h.i.+pped the twinkling light.
A dog began to bark excitedly; half a dozen children, with one uns.e.xed garment shaped like a bathing-dress each, turned out to stare at them.
A man of fifty or thereabouts, with a thin, rather tragic face came along the low verandah built all along the front of the Homestead, and looked at them enquiringly.
”Were you in that storm, chum?” he asked. Louis nodded.
”Come right in! What, got a girl with you, too? Enough to finish you off! Mother!” he added, raising his voice, ”Here's a young woman come to see us.”
A little meek woman in a faded blue frock came out on to the verandah.
”Wherever have you come from?” she asked. They explained, and she seemed to do ten things at once, while they were speaking. Louis was irresistibly reminded of a music-hall _prestidigitateur_. She was giving directions for more chops to be put into the frying-pan, clean water to be fetched from the creek and put in a kerosene tin in ”Jerry's room,” a cloth laid over the bare boards of the already prepared table, and a tin of jam found from the store. Marcella felt at home at once. It was the simple, transparent welcome of Lashnagar again.
The architecture of Loose End was entirely the invention of John Twist.
It consisted of a chain of eight rooms. As the family grew, another room was leaned against the last one. One of the boys at Gaynor's had been heard to express the opinion that Loose End would, some day, reach right across the Continent.... The middle and largest room had two doors at opposite sides. It was the living-room. The others, which were either stores, bedrooms, or fowl-pens, had a window in one wall--gla.s.sless, formed of trellis--and a door in the other. A boarded platform ran right round the house to a depth of nine feet and the roof of the rooms, projecting over the platform, kept out rain and heat. There was much corrugated zinc and rough wood, many kerosene tins and boxes in the make-up of Loose End, but all the rooms were miraculously watertight.
The room into which Marcella was shown was a sleeping-room and nothing more. There were three hammocks slung from wall to wall and one camp-bed still folded up. But while she was apparently talking to Marcella, Mrs.
Twist whisked open a tin trunk, put a white linen cloth on the little table in the corner and, running out of the room, came back with a small, cracked mirror she had borrowed from her own room.
When she came into the living-room, after strenuous work in removing the dust of travel, Marcella found that Louis had been taken possession of by some of the children, and been to the creek for a bathe. One of them--apparently a girl, since she was called Betty--had filled a jam tin with water and put in a bunch of bush roses; the big kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling shone upon seven cropped heads, seven brown faces and fourteen bare, brown legs swinging from the bench on which the children sat. Fourteen bright eyes s.h.i.+ning in faces polished with soap divided pa.s.sionate interest between Marcella and the epoch-making pot of jam on the table. Mr. Twist told the guests to sit down; he made the tea while Mrs. Twist dished up an enormous tin full of chops and fried eggs, placing a china was.h.i.+ng-basin full of potatoes beside them.
”We need such a lot,” she said with a laugh. ”I did have an enamelled soup tureen I used for the potatoes, but the enamel chipped off a bit and I thought it might hurt the children if they swallowed it. So now we put the potatoes in the was.h.i.+ng-basin and wash up in the tureen.”