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

timber but not trees was young Kevin who had lost his arm working for a sawmill. Surprising how many failed to spot the single Ironbark intruder in the windbreak.
    Needless to say there were men who tried to bluff, or laugh their way through, or devise delaying tactics. Such ruses which can be seen as extensions of character had served them in the past. The sore loser became angry when he lost! Others offered money. Why not? It was the full world on display, in miniature. One or two tried to enter via the side door, as it were: ‘Isn’t there some other way we could arrange this? Can’t we sit down and discuss it? What I know about gum trees would fit on the head of a pin, but I do know I’d be a good man for your daughter.’ The bank manager sent his short-sighted son. A dark stranger from another town claimed a photographic memory: accordingly the first eucalypt he had never seen before finished him. Silence was generally ingrained; only a few never stopped talking. Now and then Ellen in her room could hear a loud voice from a sloping paddock. Performers from a passing circus had heard the story of the beautiful daughter and argued for too long about drawing lots. One of the nattiest of the dangerous commercial travellers put his name forward; Holland went into town and talked him out of it.
    Evidently the very idea of a test to win a man’s daughter was either nerve-racking or else altogether too strange: suitors were known to have drunk seven schooners an hour before. A country jockey fronted up accompanied by his strapper who mentioned to Ellen the jockey was already married. ‘I’ll have to take a squiz at a leaf,’ said another one. For that I’ll need a ladder.’ At the sight of these men dolled up for the occasion in a new shirt and haircut Ellen felt a faint shift into sadness, the flutter of a white bird in a cage; others came as they were; some stank. A procession; all sizes.
    Ellen didn’t really like the look of any of them.
    These were men willing to bypass the traditional words, whispers and hesitancies, the cajoling and the hopeful jokes and the clumsy shoulder-stroking, the incredible attentiveness which will sap a man’s energy, deliberate absentmindedness as well, which form a mosaic of necessary slowness … It allows the woman to choose the man, while giving the man the illusion it is he who has taken her. Whereas—outside the yellowish town these suitors who had arrived to line up for the test could, in a sense, reach the same goal with their backs turned, reciting facts. It wasn’t even necessary to look in her direction (the schoolteacher was the exception—his downfall).
    â€˜Yessiree, these country types,’ Holland complained, ‘they give the impression they know the land inside out, but ask them and they can’t tell you the names of ordinary things in front of them. We can be talking here about a eucalypt that’s as common as the flies.’
    It began to occur to Ellen that the degree of difficulty was so extreme only a few men on earth could name all the eucalypts; aside from her father, that is, in his dark coat. This might go on for years, with no result. And she began to relax, prematurely.
    The trouble was the degree of difficulty activated one of the laws of curiosity: as each man who stepped forward failed, and the flood of suitors reduced to a trickle, the unattainability of the prize increased Ellen’s desirability still further.
    Holland and his daughter were apparently oblivious to this. Now that the matrimonial question was more or less settled their visits to town resumed, where Ellen was immediately looked at and discussed with fresh calculation.

    It was summer. The trunks of trees were hot. In the river, where smooth stones lay under water like pears suspended in syrup, Ellen kicked and floated, and examined her arms as she dangled her legs from the bridge.
    Then a New Zealander burst through