Read Online Eucalyptus by Murray Bail - Free Book Online Page A

disobedience in its nature. Still, it should be admitted material difficulties can deepen the beauty of timber. The impulse is always to pick up and admire a piece of Jarrah—stroke it like a cat. Is it possible to say a piece of timber is ‘proud’? Unlike those that split at the slightest blow: that is, the skinny shivering pine, the spineless acacia? Jarrah had quite a name for endurance under the ground and under water. Streets were paved with it in Mediterranean Sydney and Marvellous Melbourne, the wood long outlasting the men who cut it into lengths, not to mention the loyal floorboards in ballrooms and grand hotels.
    Handsome tree, straight and tall, it won’t cultivate in plantations. (Cussedness, again.) Holland once had a stepfather called Jarraby, known to be proud, stubborn.
    Away from Western Australia few people would know a Jarrah tree, even if they bumped into one.
    Now it happened that the local schoolteacher was the early favourite to win Ellen’s hand because he possessed the double qualification of an education and a real affinity for wood; carving heavy bowls for sensitive fruits such as peaches and grapes had become his solitary pastime. Sure enough, by lunchtime on the first day he had correctly named eighty-seven eucalypts, and was doing it well when he went blank at the fatly handsome Jarrah up against the fence behind the house.
    â€˜Take your time,’ Holland said, and cleared his throat. ‘No use going like a rat up a drainpipe,’ he wanted to say.
    He liked the young teacher. And there was no need to rush. As always it is fatal to panic. From the densities of Sydney the young teacher had been transferred to the country, a difficult lesson in drabness. Several times he had seen Ellen on the main street. Late afternoons and Sundays he walked along the dirt road, past the Salmon Gum, hoping she might emerge. And the property itself, all those broad acres of river frontage, big old homestead, barely came into the teacher’s equation at all.
    On the point of saying ‘Jarrah!’ one eye became entangled in the foliage of the Karri ( E. diversicolor ) nearby.
    â€˜That’s too bad,’ Holland stubbed his cigarette. ‘That’s a shame. I had you down as a real chance.’

    Before setting out, each suitor was invited into the house—into the parlour, no less—for a cup of tea. Holland could sit back and examine them. In a real sense the test began there and then. Coming forward to serve them was the prize herself, more speckled, certainly more beautiful than they remembered or had ever imagined, allowing a glimpse of cleavage and a shadow of what appeared to be faint consternation.
    From the day her father made his decision on the marriage question she hardly knew what to say to him, or anyone. No ancient grandmother, wise mother or interested sisters were at hand to help. It hardly mattered that the eucalyptus test would sort out the contestants, wheat from the chaff and all that, a process simultaneously healthy and unhealthy, as her father put it. ‘Only a man with golden hair, a golden-haired boy out of the ordinary, is going to name all these trees—someone like your old father here,’ he had said to her.
    The early suitors were all locals. At the sight of some she couldn’t help laughing, until her father said, ‘That’ll do now!’
    One was a retired shearer, old enough to be her grandfather—no teeth. The town’s one and only part-time plumber put on a virtuoso display of relaxation on the floral sofa, stretching out his legs and calling for another cup of tea, only to step out the front door and fail to identify the very first tree he pointed to, the Black Peppermint, which is as common as rain. Even Holland gave a small laugh. Many who managed to reach eighty or more without a stumble were knocked out by a common roadside gum; lack of concentration, according to Holland. Another one who knew