Inheritors a Novel

Inheritors A Novel Penton, Brian (1904-1951) A digital text sponsored by Australian Literature Gateway University of Sydney Library Sydney 2003 http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/peninhe © University of Sydney Library. The texts and images are not to be used for commercial purposes without permission Source Text: Prepared from the print edition published by Angus and Robertson Sydney 1936 530pp. All quotation marks are retained as data. First Published: 1936 823.91A Australian Etext Collections at novels 1910-1939 Inheritors A Novel Sydney Angus and Robertson 1936 FOR CECIL MANN At last the old man died And left his sons a legacy, Of hate and fear and broken pride, To wear beneath their finery: And the dream's lie, and the pain Of the seed that dies to be born again. — ANDREW PRYOR. The characters in this book are fictional. So are the institutions, mines, banks, etc., named and described. This is not to say that the book is a work of imagination. On the contrary. To acknowledge the memoirs, travel books, histories, letters, and manuscripts on which the author has drawn for the details of background and period would require a big volume. He would like to confess his indebtedness especially to Sir Timothy Coghlan's Labour and Industry in Australia, to Professor Shann's Economic History of Australia, to Ann Williams' history of the Vigilantes of San Francisco, which opens up a little known by-blow of Australian affairs, and to the truly splendid pictures of life, industry, and the eccentrics of the outback to be found in the writings of C. E. W. Bean. INHERITORS Part I: The Family at Cabell's Reach Chapter One: The Old Man UNDER the ferocious heat of the Queensland midsummer afternoon the iron roof cracked and strained. The family sitting round the table in the big dining-room of Cabell's Reach stared down anxiously at their plates as though expecting the flimsy shell of rafters to splinter over their heads. About them lay the debris of festivities into which fear had intruded, petrifying them with their hands full of tinselled paper and the gewgaws vomited by bon-bons. Against the distress, anger, or resentment on their faces, these wilted proclamations of “Peace and Goodwill” and “Merrie Christmas” had the sardonic prominence of some monument of human aspiration and piety left standing in a landscape rifted by war. Derek Cabell, glaring at the bowed heads of his wife and children, brought his fist down on the arm of the chair again and cried, “Shams! Makebelieves! Lies, I tell you. Lies, lies, lies, like everything else in the country.” He sucked the breath back through his lips and held it for another long silence before he growled, “Christmas! In a hog-pen — in a den of thieves, upstarts, scum!” Emma, at the bottom of the table, pushed a wisp of hair from her damp face, glanced at him impatiently, a trifle defiantly, reached out to pull the fly-cover over the remains of the pudding, and edged into her chair again, primly upright with her hands in her lap. Beside her Larry, their eldest son, lanky, morose, dark, turned a cup of tea in his big hands, sunburnt, work-stained, with the tar caked under the nails. Next to Cabell, Larry's younger brother James fidgeted a finger under his high, stiff collar, opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it, brushed a speck of confetti from the lapel of his coat, and concentrated his disapproving stare on the wall. For half a minute longer the only movement at the table was from the youngest boy, Geoffrey. His plump hand stabbed a fork into pellets of bread and his washed-out little eyes flashed sly glances towards his father. The girl, Harriet, on her father's right, pressed herself back in her chair, with one hand on the edge of the table and the other at her throat. Her eyes were fixed on her father's hands, clutched round the arms of his chair, the knuckles shining whitely. In the grip of those hands she seemed to find the essence of some terrifying proposition. Her eyes widened looking at them, and the heat flush deepened on her face. Thus they awaited the next spasm of a familiar outburst — brought on them, as always, by some trifle, some chance word — the bitterness of which confirmed dim suspicions they did not want to have confirmed, rumours that threw the shadows of a dishonourable past across their young lives. Fights, bloodshed, trickeries, shameful liaisons, and all the inhumanities of a time when men had struggled for a foothold in the new land — out of this dark drama their parents had come, scarred and stained by it, twisted and embittered. Strange things were said of their father, Rusty Guts Cabell, who arrived in this valley in 1847, forty-one years ago, with a handful of sheep and cattle, slaughted the blacks, fought everybody, dug himself in — very strange things that threatened to burden them for life. But still stranger things loomed intimidatingly behind the personality of the old landtaker himself, behind his outbursts of irascible protestation. His shifty eyes, always sliding sideways to door and window as though he expected someone to come creeping on him, his secretive habits, the ugly marks on his face, but above all the eagerness to justify himself, which spoke through all his outcries against the country — these things hinted at alarming mysteries, mysteries he seemed always threatening to reveal, to concrete as inescapable facts, as disgraceful episodes in their own personal histories, that would shut them off for ever from their fellows and from all hope of fulfilling life's bright promises. To Cabell, glancing from face to face, their silent opposition and dislike were as tangible as the dusty air in his lungs, as the glare of sunlight beating in through the rattans on the veranda. It exasperated and saddened him, made him want to take hold of them and shake them, made him droop his head and sigh. He laid his hand palm upwards on the table in a gesture of appeal and muttered argumentatively, “There are two sides to every story — if anybody took the trouble to trace it back.” But in the rigid mask he turned on them he left no chink through which they might have pried out the forgivable motives of his life. His left eye was blind and patched with a raw-hide leather patch, the right peered out through lids narrowed to a slit by forty-six years in the sun of a land where an iron roof ten miles away flashes back cruel thumbs of light to gouge the eyeballs. Forty-six years of the bullocking labour that makes a man drain even the muscles of his mouth for the extra ounce of energy to move a bogged dray-wheel, for the extra spark of endurance to survive some inhuman ordeal, had pressed his lips into a thin, tight line. A weal bitten into his cheek by a myall's spear dragged his mouth up at the left corner into a mirthless, supercilious smile. Healing dry and hard, the wound had left a furrow of red cicatrice to stand out, like a fresh raddle stain, against the pallor of his face and the inky blackness of his beard. No flesh remained to soften the gaunt cheek-bones or the line of his jaw. His neck rose out of his collar like a bone, bleached and stiff. And dominating every other feature — underlining, with its hawklike immensity and truculence, the calculating glance of his eye, the challenging twist of his mouth, the hostile jut of his chin — his beak of a nose curved its sharp bridge out and down, and its indrawn nostrils suggested strain, expectation, and ceaseless irritability. The father's words passed a slight stir round the table. Harriet turned her eyes away quickly. Larry grunted. Emma's impatience leaked into her fingers, become suddenly busy among the litter of food and plates on the table. Geoffrey slumped deeper into his chair behind his barrier of sly glances. But reaching James the stir became articulate. He licked his lips, pushed his chair back and said, “Well — if we've finished I'll go and write some letters.” He spoke out the brutal intolerance of their youth resenting the dead hand of the past and the law which visited the sins of the father upon his children. Turning in his chair to focus his one eye, Cabell found a jaw as obstinate as his own pushed out towards him. “No, we haven't finished, you puppy,” he snapped. “You'll please to hold your tongue and listen.” The boy tried to hide the nervousness of his hands in his vast cravat. “But we've heard it before,” he said doggedly, “and it's — it's . .” But he baulked at telling the old man that his life, with its stories of violence and suffering, was unpleasant to the ears of a new generation, a new and gentler code of ethics and social decency. His eyes wavered and he finished, “ . so hot sitting in here.” Cabell sniffed. “Too hot for your namby-pamby hide, is it? Well you'll get broken in. You'll sweat the starch out of that clerk's collar the same as I had to.” The fresh young face, with full red lower lip and clear eyes and rounded chin, seemed suddenly to hang at the end of a long vista of years — his own face before this country had clawed it.

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