Read Online The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower - Free Book Online

the low hill above his old home, and the present one of the Stevensons. He had even done some work on the grave plot of his mother and father. He supposed that none of his three brothers had seen, or ever would come back to see, their graves. They had left home years before to roam about the country from town to town, taking jobs when and where it pleased them. They, too, could be dead for all he knew. The inconsistent piety which had led him to the cemetery did not carry him so far as to make him care if they were.
    Just the same, as a man who actively believed in God—‘I am Church of England’—Harry was, in most companies, though not unique, certainly among the few. And, after this morning’s sacred task, as he walked down the deadly, littered street, buffeted by a hot wind, he was rather more conscious of this than usual.
    The smell of over-ripe fruit, fried fish and new leather composed the dusty air. A double-decker bus lazing at the terminus overslept the time-table: its driver, leaning out of the window, was suddenly recalled to the idea of time and motion by the sight of a cart and horse returning to the dairy. With a jolt of alarm—for he was normally conscientious—he was inside and off so quickly that the conductor had to swim the blue stream of the exhaust for twenty yards before he could jump on.
    The audience—it was Saturday and the men who were free from furnaces and boiling steel stood outside Russell’s—said, ‘Ha!’ and turned away to listen to the few among them who spoke—about work, about horses, and what would win this afternoon. They rummaged abstractedly among their teeth and listened, disappeared into Russell’s for some beer, and came out again to stand and stare at the housewives with their shopping baskets, and the girls adangle with earrings and bracelets and curls.
    The young unmarried men, conscious of their unaccustomed whiteness and thickly brilliantined hair, grinned knowingly at one another as the girls passed, and made audible comments, but were permitted no further licence. They were all reserved, at seventeen or eighteen, by the girls they would eventually marry. To be seen in intimate, necessarily provocative, conversation with another girl would have been to invite a vendetta.
    The older men were dour, with a look of uncharitable hardness about their eyes. Self-enclosed, past the age when living is itself sufficient incentive to go on living, with atrophied capacities for thinking or feeling, they worked grimly towards old age and death. Their wives flirted with the tradesmen, looked for lovers, and their children feared them. Preparing for a picnic or a dance they would be silent suddenly at the entry of their father into the room. Was he drunk? What would he say?
    This attitude of humourless endurance, natural to a few, had been imposed on most by parents like themselves, surroundings of monotonous ugliness, participation in wars the young could not remember, and by a brief education delivered with so little relevance to circumstance and ability as to be incomprehensible.
    Recalling the healthy, weather-beaten faces of Coolong, the clear, tremendous sky that arched the miles of open country, Harry felt he knew where was the better place to be.
    He fancied that he recognized a few old neighbours, school-friends, and he walked stiffly by. He told himself that it was because he was anxious to have the visit to Emily over; in fact, he was embarrassed, sensed the uselessness of talk, knew there would be nothing to exchange but antagonism. To prefer the bush to Ballowra was to be an outcast, a bushwhacker. To come back clean-handed, well-dressed, from the bush was not good.
    Passing the terminus, he lengthened his stride.
    Farther along the street ahead of him, going in the same direction, Emily and her friend Patty, having spent the money given to them by Lilian, were on the way back to their paddock.
    Emily wore a salmon-pink