South of the Line/The Preposterous Partner

IMULTANEOUSLY with the roar of the explosion, a geyser of earth, roots, and stones shot skyward, to fall rattling amongst the neighbouring trees, and again the silence of the bush closed down.

"Five!" counted Creswell aloud, and grinned through his sweat. He had taken to talking to himself of late, though he had no notion of it. A man has little time for noticing anything besides his work when he battles with the Queensland bush.

"Not so bad," he added judicially, inspecting the churned-up earth and root ends that were all that the dynamite charge had left of a six-foot eucalyptus stump. "Not so bad."

With hardly a pause, he went on to the next, a stubborn bloodwood, and opened the attack with a crowbar. It was killing work, and it was killing Creswell, though he would have been the first to ridicule such a suggestion. No one did suggest it, because no one in the Nambye district cared one way or another. If a crazy "new chum" chose to work himself to death in the bush, whose business was it but his own? That was Nambye's attitude. Such a thing had happened before, and would no doubt happen again, until the over-zealous pioneer realized that the correct method of acquiring a pineapple plantation is to relieve his neighbours of their played-out acres at a fancy figure.

But then Nambye did not know. No one knew, except Joyce Helliar, what manner of fever it was that consumed Bob Creswell, and she kept that knowledge to herself. It was doubtful if Nambye would understand. Few men suffer from overscrupulousness, and that was what ailed Creswell. Two years ago the flick of a coin had decided whether he or his partner Soames should go to the War. Soames had won, and Creswell had never forgotten it. Soames was to fight his country's enemies; Creswell was to fight nothing more romantic than the Queensland bush and a bank overdraft. The humiliation of it! And he had given his word—there was no wriggling out—his word that he would "look after the place—and Joyce"; that was how the happy-go-lucky Soames had put it, with a nudged elbow and a grin at the last injunction that was entirely lost on his more stolid partner Three times Creswell had written asking to be let off, pleading with Soames that it was more than he could bear; but he received no reply. Soames had only written twice, soon after he left, the chatty, inconsequential letters of a man without a care in the world, and his name had never appeared in the casualty lists. Until that happened Creswell considered himself bound.

"Look after the place—and Joyce!" That was all he had to go upon, and he had gone upon it to such effect that five acres were already bearing, another five of virgin bush were cleared and ready for the plow, the overdraft was at least stationary, Joyce was as well as a perfectly healthy young woman can be, and he had reduced himself to the semblance of a scarecrow. A fool? Perhaps; but some men are built like that.

Joyce dismounted at the edge of the clearing, a cool white figure against the sweltering background of the bush, and coo-ee'd twice before Creswell looked up and came shambling toward her. His beard was rather more ragged than ever, she noticed; his clothes, clotted and smeared with red earth, seemed to hang from his broad, angular shoulders. The inevitable question was in his eyes, and Joyce met it with a smile and a shake of the head.

"I can't make it out," he said, sitting in the grass beside her and scraping the earth from his boots with a twig. He always said that, and Joyce's reply was invariably the same.

"No news is good news, remember." Then Creswell would subject her to his slow, appraising scrutiny, and talk about "the place," always about "the place."

The usual programme was proceeding without a hitch, when Joyce introduced an entirely unlooked-for remark:

"Have you had any dinner?"

It had a marked effect on Creswell. He was in the midst of a minute description of blasting operations, and he stopped dead, staring at her in a daze.

"Yes—that is, I think so," he faltered.

"But you're not quite sure," said Joyce gravely. "Well, perhaps you can find room for these."

She watched him as he sat munching the sandwiches she had brought, his eyes never leaving his handiwork out in the clearing.

"Not so bad, is it?" He nodded in the direction of the dynamite débris. "Five in a week. It'll please Clem."

"If it doesn't, it ought to," said Joyce, with unusual asperity. The sight of Creswell that morning had somehow come as a shock.

He regarded her in blank amazement for a moment. To Creswell such a remark savoured almost of sacrilege.

"I mean it," she added firmly. "I think he's very lucky to have a partner to carry on as you are, and—and he ought to write and say so."

Creswell looked away across the clearing with a puzzled frown. He had always regarded women as peculiar, but there was something radically wrong here. She was thinking of him—him instead of Soames.

"Oh, I don't know," he said patiently. "I expect he has plenty to do without writing—plenty to do. Besides"—he turned with a sudden earnestness—"what is anything—anything—that I can do here compared with what he is doing over there?"

Joyce did not answer. What could she say? That he, Creswell, would have found time to write under any circumstances? That it was not his fault, but his misfortune that he was not "over there," too, and that he was paying for it doublefold? In short, that Creswell was worth three of Soames, anyhow? When is it possible for a woman to say what is in her mind? And so Joyce Helliar did not answer. She was sorry now that she had said so much.

He showed her "the place", as though she had not seen it from end to end a hundred times. The young pines were coming on, weren't they? First crop in another three months, and then—down with the overdraft! She followed his gaunt, restless figure between the rows, and watched the pleasure lighting his eyes when she made an admiring comment. She found that—"Clem would like to see that" pleased him most.

He even demonstrated for her benefit, and with child-like pride, the workings of the latest addition to the corrugated-iron humpy on the top of the hill a real live shower-bath, consisting of a riddled kerosene tin filled with water and hoisted by a rope and pulley.

"Can't you just see him wriggling and spluttering under it, after a hard day in the bush?" he demanded triumphantly.

Joyce admitted that she could, though at that particular moment she was paying more attention to the fact that Creswell's trousers were upheld with wire nails instead of buttons, and that his mouth had taken to twitching.

That night the dry spell broke. It began with rain that beat a welcome tattoo on the roof of Creswell's humpy.

"Good!" he muttered, and lay staring up at the ridge pole with a contented smile. It was just what the young pines wanted.

But what they did not want was precisely what the playful Queensland climate saw fit to give them during the next two hours. The clamour overhead broke into a deafening crescendo. The roof trembled and sagged as though under the assault of battering-rams. With his face pressed close to the window-pane, Creswell looked out through a sheet of falling water, and, by the fitful gleam of lightning, caught distorted glimpses of red earth churned to a morass, of thriving paw-paw trees beaten to a pulp. And this was on the hilltop. What of the young pines on the slope? He flung open the door and went outside. At the first impact he was beaten to his knees, so he crawled—crawled on hands and knees down the bed of a cataract that was the slope of the hill. He could see nothing, but he could feel, and he must know. Inaction was the hell of it!

Things jostled him and swept by in a turmoil of water. He wondered vaguely what they were. His wondering developed into a stubborn refusal to believe what they were, until his hand went out involuntarily and grasped an uprooted pineapple plant. Then he knew. There was an ever-growing dump of them at the bottom of the hill, and against this he sank exhausted.

He was aroused by brilliant sunshine and the derisive call of a "laughing jackass." What could be more appropriate? Creswell laughed, too—a mirthless sound that came from the soul. The world was still in existence, then, the same old world of rolling red-earth hills, bush, and sunshine; only the puny works of man had passed. The young pines were no more. It was as though in a frenzy the fingers of some giant hand had descended on the fair face of the hillside and clawed it to ribbons.

Creswell rose slowly and plodded through ankle-deep mud to the humpy. There he methodically prepared breakfast, and an hour later had resumed operations on the refractory bloodwood stump with a crowbar.

It was so that Joyce found him when she dismounted at the edge of the clearing. One glimpse of the chaos on the hillside was enough; her glance returned to the dishevelled figure at work on the bloodwood stump, and a mist came into her eyes. She could not bring herself to speak when he came toward her.

"Nasty damp night," he said, with a wry smile, and proceeded to scrape the mud from his boots with a twig.

Involuntarily her hand went out.

"Bob," she said softly—"oh, Bob!"

He turned and looked into her tear-filled eyes, which caused him to look away again.

"More than half my fault," he jerked out. "Might have known that slope was a bit too steep. The other will be better—when it's cleared."

"It's not that, Bob—not the place. What does it matter compared with—with other things?"

He did not answer. Soames might have made things a bit clearer before he went away, Creswell reflected. It made it difficult to know just what to say to a woman with tears in her eyes. What did the place matter? Wasn't it clear enough that it meant everything to the two of them—a home, a future? That when Soames came back he, Creswell, would discreetly remove himself, and that this, the little he could do for his partner, was all that had kept him going during the past nightmare months, all that spurred him even now to fresh endeavour? Evidently not. There was a hitch somewhere. He stared helplessly across the clearing.

Her voice seemed to be coming from a long way off, but he heard it. He distinctly heard her saying. "... It's not the place, Bob; it's you," and the words caused his clasped hands to tighten their grip.

"I?" he demanded harshly. "What do you mean?"

"Can't you see?" questioned Joyce. "Can't you see that it isn't right for you to go on and on like this—that no man can stand it?"

"Clem's standing it," grinned Creswell.

"Not without a rest," she objected quietly—"not without a single break, alone in the bush, month after month, year after year. He at least has excitement, change, people to talk to—oh, all the things that a man can't do without and remain"

"Yes?"

"A man," she ended desperately.

"Thanks," said Creswell, staring at his boots.

"It's the truth," flashed Joyce. "Take a little—ever such a little holiday. Come down to Nambye and stay with Father and me for a week. There's tennis and—and a piano. Anything for a change." She took hold of his arm and shook him gently. "Do, Bob—for me!"

Creswell shrank from her. Suddenly he was afraid, mortally afraid of himself. After all these months and years of iron discipline, it had come to this! And what if some day this same discipline failed? Such a contingency had never presented itself before. The mere thought of it now frightened him into speech.

"Thanks," he muttered, a senseless smile twisting his lips. "But why all this trouble over me?"

He was aware that she moved away from him, but he dared not look round, not until he heard the beat of her pony's hoofs and caught a glint of white vanishing amongst the trees.

So in some way he had offended her. Perhaps it was as well. He walked slowly across the clearing and picked up the crowbar.

Then came the armistice, and not long afterward a telegram for Joyce. It was from Soames, and it invited her and Creswell to dinner at an hotel in Brisbane. She smiled in spite of herself—it was so exactly like Clem. But the smile died from her lips as she glanced toward the hills, and she went to Brisbane alone.

At the hotel an immaculate individual in khaki met her in the vestibule. It was Clem—Clem with such a prodigious difference that for a moment she was at a loss. But only for a moment. She soon found him to be the same old Clem, boyish of face and manner, care-free, irresponsible, skimming over the surface of life with his usual adroitness. He had changed in nothing but his clothes, she decided.

"Where's Bob?" he asked suddenly, as though his partner's absence had only just struck him.

"He's not well," said Joyce.

"Poor old beggar! Still taking life too seriously?"

She nodded.

"Why didn't you write, Clem?"

Soames looked up from his soup and laughed.

"I should like to know how many times I meant to," he said; "but something always came in the way. Besides, if I had, there would have been nothing to say but mud, shells, and again mud. You saw it all in the papers."

"Yes," said Joyce.

"But I can't complain. Done pretty well, and the life does get a grip on you. I couldn't do anything else now—somehow everything seems so small. All the same." he added thoughtfully, "I should like to have seen old Bob."

Joyce found herself staring unseeingly at one of his glittering buttons.

"Aren't you going to see him?" she asked quietly.

"Don't see how I can," said Soames, crumbling the bread at the side of his plate. "I only came over in charge of a repatriated draft. I ought to sail to-morrow."

"Then" But Joyce stopped. The futility of what she was going to say to this man struck her dumb. Instead, she leant over the table, with one hand unconsciously extended on the cloth. "Clem," she said, "I want you to listen."

He looked up at that.

"Clem, you must see Bob." Something in her voice startled Soames into attentive silence. "You must," she repeated, with a defiant toss of the head; "you owe it to him. Oh, I know what you mean," she went on hurriedly; "everything's so small—it must be, after all you've seen and done. 'The place' means nothing to you now, but it does to Bob. It's—it's his life. You don't know what he has been through for you."

"For me?"

"Yes. I know it must sound comic, but it's the truth. I can't explain. You must see, then perhaps you'll understand."

Soames was as perturbed as he ever allowed himself to be. In rather a bewildered state of mind he left his servant to pack, and rushed up to Nambye the next morning in the fastest car Brisbane had to offer. He left it in the village and trudged alone up a red-earth bush track until he came to a small square clearing in the surrounding sea of eucalyptus trees.

At the slip rails his eye encountered in turn a corrugated iron humpy on the hilltop, a few tree stumps, and a red-earth slope with what appeared to be a rubbish heap at the bottom. This was "the place" as Soames saw it.

At the crest of the hill he caught sight of an exceedingly tall thin man at work on a tree stump, with a crowbar. This was his partner.

"Hullo, old man!" he called.

Creswell turned, stood for a moment with drooping jaw, then came shambling toward him. It was so that the partners met after three years.

During the next hour it was given Soames to understand. He marvelled at the destruction of five stumps per week. He exonerated his partner from all blame for the rubbish heap at the bottom of the hill, and waxed equally eloquent over the kerosene-tin shower bath and the fact that the bank overdraft was stationary. He even ate with apparent "relish the damper and salt beef that awaited them in the humpy. But where he surpassed himself was after the meal, when he went over to the window and stood looking out, wondering how he was going to tell his partner that he had precisely two hours in which to catch the steamer.

"'Pon my word, old man," he said, taking the deep breath of the diver before the plunge, "you've done such wonders with 'the place' I hate leaving it."

There followed an awkward silence, so he hurried on—

"The new slope's going to be a topper, I can see that; and, as you say, the other will do for oranges—er—but the fact is, I've found the only job I'm any good at, and—well, I must be getting on with it."

He turned. Creswell was standing beside the table, with set mouth and something in his eyes that Soames was at a loss to understand.

"What d'you mean?" he said shortly.

Soames had faced a variety of things in the past three years, but it is doubtful if any of them had been more objectionable than this. He squared his shoulders to it.

"I mean that soldiering has got me for keeps, Bob," he said. "I believe it's what I was made for—I can't see anything else. I never was any good here. I never should be; you know that."

"You mean you don't want 'the place'?" said Creswell.

Soames nodded and took refuge in pacing the floor.

"You can buy me out, or something," he suggested airily. "It's hard to explain, but"

"You needn't trouble," Creswell interposed. "I understand perfectly. But—what about Joyce?"

Soames stopped in his stride.

"Joyce?" he repeated.

"Yes," said Creswell doggedly. "Perhaps you've forgotten what your last words to me were?"

Soames remained motionless, thinking furiously. Then quite suddenly he remembered. He saw it all. He could have laughed, but for Creswell's eyes. He crossed the room to this preposterous partner of his and laid a hand on either of his shoulders.

"Bob," he said, "as well as being the soundest man I ever knew, you're an old fool, No, I haven't forgotten. 'The place' is all right, but you haven't looked after Joyce as I meant you to. Don't you think you'd better be getting on with it?"

A cloud of red dust marked the passage of Soames's car toward Brisbane. Creswell turned back into the humpy, paused for a while in deep thought, then proceeded with the utmost deliberation to bathe, shave, and dress. This done, he passed down the bush track to Nambye, and found Joyce alone, in a hammock on the veranda.