some condition.
‘Oh, but I’ll take them,’ he said.
On their ride back to town Bert instructed Kenneth to make arrangements with a train drover: one hundred head of cattle, two hundred miles, to be railed to the lucerne flats of the southern parts.
Then they said goodbye and Bert walked back into town. Kenneth stabled the ponies and returned to Goldsborough Mort’s. He went to his desk. For some minutes he fiddled with items there, playing with ink bottle, nib, penholder, blotter and ledger book. He sat in thought, chewing the wooden end of his penholder, reducing it to a fibrous wick. The office women peered at him from behind their fingers, with his long teeth, long face, long ears and long, pale, flattened locks. He flashed a toothy smile. You had to love the way he loved himself – it was enviable. Using careful strokes with huge initial capitals, he wrote up a record of arrangements for the sale of the Coolah Red Devons to Bert Shepherd, Wholesale Butcher, of Murrumburrah-Harden.
Then he sat back and stabbed his nib in the ink-stained kauri pine of his desktop.
‘What have I done?’ Kenneth said. ‘Did I outright say they were his? They are my father’s mob, Warner Tarbett the First’s, I will call him, when I get my family tree, my family’s lot – and I seem to have given them away. I must have done. I have. They are gone. I feel a big life ahead of me. On to the rail yards they go. Here is the proof of it, in my own writing, ready to be signed by Sir Donny boy, who advised me don’t take them. Something’s got into my head. Nothing’s the same in the air, and I know why.
‘It’s them string-ups. It’s when we saw the prison that I said he could buy them. Why does that make me glad? What have I done to be glad, except lived a bit longer than blokes my own age choked in Bathurst Gaol or shot in Belgium wearing khaki?’
He went on in this vein of resentment, surprise, humility, fear and amazement. Three stock and station boys had gone to the war, leaving Kenneth Tarbett at home to be advanced in the agency. One lay dead at Suvla Bay, one was in Palestine with horses, and the third, Duncan McIver, was missing in action in France. Goldsborough Mort’s was seen as doing its part and Kenneth – of serving age and fitness – was so far safe from a coward’s white feathers in the post or slipped under the doormat of the boarding house where he lodged. Indeed, he was safer than that as a pampered pet of Sir Don and Lady Penelope McIver, grieving for their son.
Safe from accusing righteousness, but not from that man, Bert Shepherd, who roused a bloke’s spirit and made him wonder at the bigness of things attempted, and try them.
So Kenneth decided: he would be the train drover himself and get the stock delivered. And after that life would become larger.
When the clock came around to dinnertime he snorted, threw down his pen like a twanging dart and set off back through the town to find the butcher, to tell him he was in his care.
W HEN M ARCUS F RIENDLY CALLED AT
The Whistle
that day, the editor looked up from his desk in his small glassed room and nodded a greeting – whatever the needs of the paper, they could wait.
Tim Atkinson stood up from his line-caster, leaving the oily black machine to sullenly tremble and creak back to stillness.
‘Take over, Spotty,’ he said to the apprentice, grabbing his crutches while the proofreader predicted the mistakes that would flow from a tyro at the keys.
The two friends sat on a public bench in the municipal rose gardens.
‘The hangman must still be in town,’ said Marcus, ‘as there hasn’t been a train left since nine. I’d like to look him in the eye. Hear what he has to say.’
‘Struth, brother,’ said Tim, peering around in case they were being overheard, though they had only sparrows and wilting red roses for company, and the sight of a leering youth with rabbit teeth, Kenneth Tarbett, passing along the street in a white sweat.
‘Oh, but I’ll take them,’ he said.
On their ride back to town Bert instructed Kenneth to make arrangements with a train drover: one hundred head of cattle, two hundred miles, to be railed to the lucerne flats of the southern parts.
Then they said goodbye and Bert walked back into town. Kenneth stabled the ponies and returned to Goldsborough Mort’s. He went to his desk. For some minutes he fiddled with items there, playing with ink bottle, nib, penholder, blotter and ledger book. He sat in thought, chewing the wooden end of his penholder, reducing it to a fibrous wick. The office women peered at him from behind their fingers, with his long teeth, long face, long ears and long, pale, flattened locks. He flashed a toothy smile. You had to love the way he loved himself – it was enviable. Using careful strokes with huge initial capitals, he wrote up a record of arrangements for the sale of the Coolah Red Devons to Bert Shepherd, Wholesale Butcher, of Murrumburrah-Harden.
Then he sat back and stabbed his nib in the ink-stained kauri pine of his desktop.
‘What have I done?’ Kenneth said. ‘Did I outright say they were his? They are my father’s mob, Warner Tarbett the First’s, I will call him, when I get my family tree, my family’s lot – and I seem to have given them away. I must have done. I have. They are gone. I feel a big life ahead of me. On to the rail yards they go. Here is the proof of it, in my own writing, ready to be signed by Sir Donny boy, who advised me don’t take them. Something’s got into my head. Nothing’s the same in the air, and I know why.
‘It’s them string-ups. It’s when we saw the prison that I said he could buy them. Why does that make me glad? What have I done to be glad, except lived a bit longer than blokes my own age choked in Bathurst Gaol or shot in Belgium wearing khaki?’
He went on in this vein of resentment, surprise, humility, fear and amazement. Three stock and station boys had gone to the war, leaving Kenneth Tarbett at home to be advanced in the agency. One lay dead at Suvla Bay, one was in Palestine with horses, and the third, Duncan McIver, was missing in action in France. Goldsborough Mort’s was seen as doing its part and Kenneth – of serving age and fitness – was so far safe from a coward’s white feathers in the post or slipped under the doormat of the boarding house where he lodged. Indeed, he was safer than that as a pampered pet of Sir Don and Lady Penelope McIver, grieving for their son.
Safe from accusing righteousness, but not from that man, Bert Shepherd, who roused a bloke’s spirit and made him wonder at the bigness of things attempted, and try them.
So Kenneth decided: he would be the train drover himself and get the stock delivered. And after that life would become larger.
When the clock came around to dinnertime he snorted, threw down his pen like a twanging dart and set off back through the town to find the butcher, to tell him he was in his care.
W HEN M ARCUS F RIENDLY CALLED AT
The Whistle
that day, the editor looked up from his desk in his small glassed room and nodded a greeting – whatever the needs of the paper, they could wait.
Tim Atkinson stood up from his line-caster, leaving the oily black machine to sullenly tremble and creak back to stillness.
‘Take over, Spotty,’ he said to the apprentice, grabbing his crutches while the proofreader predicted the mistakes that would flow from a tyro at the keys.
The two friends sat on a public bench in the municipal rose gardens.
‘The hangman must still be in town,’ said Marcus, ‘as there hasn’t been a train left since nine. I’d like to look him in the eye. Hear what he has to say.’
‘Struth, brother,’ said Tim, peering around in case they were being overheard, though they had only sparrows and wilting red roses for company, and the sight of a leering youth with rabbit teeth, Kenneth Tarbett, passing along the street in a white sweat.
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