Free Return to Coolami by Eleanor Dark Page B

caught it and his brain seized upon it too, feverishly seeking an escape from thoughts too torturing and profitless—
    A creek down there. He tried to follow it but it lost itself among the trees. He looked farther across the valley at tiny scattered farmhouses and wondered vaguely what sort of a living they made. He sat down on a rock and realised with surprise that he hadn’t had his cigarette yet, and decided he’d prefer a pipe after all. His thoughts began to dart about upon the immediate surface of
here
and
now
, like wary skaters on thin ice. He looked across towards the Black Ranges and regretted that he’d never, after all, found time to explore them as he’d always meant to when he was a boy. Wild country; they said there was gold there. You’d want to be in condition for it, and to have another good bushman with you. Jim—
    And the Wild Dog Ranges out beyond the Cox. Queer names began to drift back to him, touched with the glamour of his boyhood. Tumbledown Mountain and Toppleover Peak. And the Cloudmaker—
    High cliffs and tangled gullies dwarfed into deceptive flatness by the great expanses round them. Savage country, all but unknown, drowned in its mysterious and ineffable blue—
    What a feat they’dperformed, those chaps, those pioneers! Almost incredible that they should ever have got through at all! Miraculous, when you thought of the place they’d passed farther down where the road and the railway crawled huddled together along a ridge with the world falling away on either side.
    A pebble rolled beside him. He looked up and saw Susan standing on the path.
2
    Millicent left the car at last with a little sigh. Drew had climbed out rather stiffly a few moments earlier and was now hovering with the chamois-leather in his hand, rubbing and scowling at a faint scratch from a branch on one of the doors. Near the fire Susan was still crouching with a matchbox in her hand, watching the flames; and Bret’s head and shoulders were just visible over there on the scrubby hillside.
    She turned back ruefully to the blue view she had demanded and wondered if it had anything to do with the sudden illogical depression which had gripped her. Probably, she decided; almost certainly. Because a sight like that broke down your defences, opened your heart, made you in an instant mysteriously receptive. While you looked at it any small pleasure could become a joy almost unbearably poignant; and any anxieties could be transformed into veritable monsters of menace or despair.
    So that now, for the moment, it had become unspeakably dreadful to be married to a cross man with a chamois-leather; to see your daughter with the wings of her youth drooping and bedraggled; to watch your son-in-law going off by himself to think and worry, not knowing how beautifully simple and how simply beautiful his life could be. To wonder about Colin, and whether, as Margery so stoutly maintained, he wasreally – had really given up—
    And to live in a house at Ballool—
    And to be fifty-six with life behind you – spirited away somehow when you weren’t looking—
    And to be made to feel, in the face of all this beauty and vastness, exactly like an ant, incredibly small, and quite ludicrously unimportant—
    Oh, well—!
    And anyhow, she concluded, making a swift grimace of defiance at the view before she turned her back on it, it was very possible that the divinest discontent might be unromantically allied with the emptiest stomach. So she went over to the fire and began to unpack the hamper, watching Susan out of the corner of her eye.
    Susan hadn’t even seen her. Heaven only knew what she was thinking, with her dark eyes fixed so absent-mindedly on the fire.
3
    She was thinking that whatever else might be said for honesty it was, from her own experience, about as bad a policy as one could have. Perhaps her thinking had been wrong, but it had been honest; perhaps the very