From Billabong to London

HOLIDAYS AT BILLABONG.

IF you came to the homestead of Billabong by the front entrance, you approached a great double gate of wrought iron, which opened stiffly, with protesting creaks, and creaked almost as much at being closed. Then you found yourself in a long, winding avenue, lined with tall pine-trees, beyond which you could catch glimpses, between the trunks, of a kind of wilderness-garden, where climbing roses and flowering shrubs and gum-trees and bush plants, and a host of pleasant, friendly, common flowers grew all together in a very delightful fashion. Seeing, however, that you were a visitor by the front entrance, you could not answer the beckonings of the wilderness-garden, but must follow the windings of the avenue, on and on, until the wild growth on either side gave place to spreading lawns and trim flower-beds, the pine-trees ended, and you came round a kind of corner formed by an immense bush of scarlet bougainvillea, and so found the house smiling a welcome.

Very rarely were any doors or windows shut at Billabong. The kindly Australian climate makes the sunlit winter air a delight; and if in summer it is sometimes necessary to shut out heat, and possibly intrusive snakes, as soon as the sun goes down everything is flung wide open to admit the cool evening breeze that comes blowing across the paddocks. Billabong always looked as if it were open to welcome the newcomer.

It was a red house of two storeys, looking lower than it was because of its width and the great trees that grew all round it, as well as because of its broad balconies and verandahs. From either side the garden stretched away until hedges of roses blocked the entrance to orchard and vegetable patches. The house stood on a gentle rise, and in front the trees had been thinned so that across the smooth lawn you looked over stretching paddocks, dotted with gum-trees, and broken by the silver gleam of a reed-fringed lagoon. There was no other house visible—only the wide, peaceful paddocks. The nearest road was two miles away, and it was seventeen miles to the nearest town. Perhaps, seen from the front, Billabong might have seemed a little lonely.

But, in fact, no one ever dreamed of coming to Billabong by the front. There had, of course, been a few exceptions to the rule; as in the case of a new Governor-General, who had been brought in state to see it as a typical Australian station, and had greatly annoyed the inmates by bringing his dogs in to luncheon and feeding them with bones on the dining-room carpet, which happened to be a Persian rug of value. The Billabong folk looked back to that visit with considerable disgust. Sometimes other strangers found their way to the great iron gates, and up the avenue; but not often. Occasional callers did not come to Billabong, since the owner and his motherless children were not ceremonious people, and in any case, no one drives seventeen miles in the Australian bush to pay a call of ceremony. Those who came were prepared to stay, and were more immediately concerned with the disposal of their horses than with any other consideration; so that it followed that the chief entrance to Billabong was known as “the back way.”

The tracks alone would have told you that. As you came up from the outer paddocks, the gravel of the drive was smooth and untouched save for the gardener’s rake; but the other tracks, deep and well trodden, swept round beside the garden and turned in to the courtyard of the stables—big, red-brick buildings, looking almost as large as the house itself. It was always cheerful and exciting at the stables, for all the dogs took charge of you directly you arrived, and made vigorous remarks about you, until they were quite sure whether you were a person to be trusted. “Swagmen”—the bush tramps of Australia—loathed the Billabong dogs very exceedingly; and the dogs returned the feeling in a lively fashion, so that the progress of a swagman from the outer gate to the security of the back yard was apt to be fraught with incident and marked by haste. But if your respectability were evident, the dogs became merely enthusiastic, inspecting visitor and horses with well-bred curiosity, and finally accompanying you to the gate with demonstrations of friendliness, and parting from you with regret.

Within the gate you had, as Murty O’Toole, the head stockman, put it, “your choice thing of tracks.” One led across the gravelled yard to the kitchen and its long row of out-buildings; another took you in the shade of a row of pepper-trees to Mr. Linton’s office, where interviews with the men were held, and all the business of a big station went forward. Another—Jim and Norah Linton liked this one—went directly to the orchard, where, on hot days, might be found cherries and apricots, peaches, nectarines, great red Japanese plums, guavas, and long beds of strawberries and raspberries. But the most worn track of all led through a porch that opened in a creeper-hung fence, on the other side of which you found yourself in the garden, and presently on the side verandah, a pleasant place, half closed in by passion fruit vines and clematis, and made very homely and comfortable with long basket-chairs and tables where books and magazines lay. There were rugs on the tiled floor, and, here and there, tall palms in oaken tubs. Nearly all the year round, the Billabong folk were to be found on the side verandah.

It was vacant just now, save for one inmate, a big man in riding dress, asleep on a rush lounge. His whip and broad felt hat were tossed on the table beside him, and a collie, also asleep, lay in a patch of sunlight near. It was mid-winter, yet the sun shone warmly across the sheltered space; a good corner to bask in, after the keen wind sweeping across the paddocks. Everything was very quiet. The glass doors leading into a room close by were open, but no sound came from the house, and the big man slept like a child. Presently, however, a chorus of barking came from the stables, and the sleeper stirred and opened his eyes.

“Billy, I expect,” he said, yawning. “Believe I’ve been asleep.” He glanced at his watch. “Half-past three!—it’s high time that black rascal was here.”

He got up, stretching himself, and went to the edge of the verandah—a mighty figure of a man, well over six feet, with broad shoulders and a loosely hung frame indicative of great strength. His hair and close-cropped beard were turning grey; but the whole face held an indefinable boyishness, due perhaps to the twinkle that was never far from the deep-set eyes. As he watched, the chorus of barking drew nearer, the gate in the porch swung open, and a native boy came through, his black face a startling contrast to his white shirt and spotless moleskin breeches. He grinned broadly as he neared the verandah.

“You’re late, Billy,” David Linton said.

“Plenty that pfeller mare lazy,” said the dusky one, cheerfully. “That one gettin’ old, boss. Better me ride one of this year’s lot—eh?” He handed over a leather mailbag and a bundle of papers, remaining poised on one foot, in evident anxiety as to his answer.

“One of the new young horses?—what, to carry out mails and parcels? No, thanks, Billy, I’m not keen on experiments that lead to broken legs,” replied the squatter, laughing. “Old Bung-Eye is good for the job for a long time yet.” Then, in answer to the downcast face as the black boy turned away, “I’ll see what Mr. Jim says about your taking one of the new lot out mustering—if you behave yourself and take him gently.”

“Plenty!” said Billy, rejoicing. “That black colt, boss—him going to make a mighty good horse——”

“We’ll see what Mr. Jim says. Be off—it’s high time you had the cows in the milking-yard.” The gate slammed behind the ecstatic Billy as his master went back to his chair and unlocked the mailbag.

He lifted a rather furrowed brow half an hour later at a step beside him—the housekeeper, round, fat and cheery, her twinkling eyes almost lost in her wide, jolly face.

“Will you have tea now, sir?”

“The children are not in, are they, Brownie?”

“Not yet,” Mrs. Brown answered, smoothing her spotless apron. “Mr. Jim said they’d be back at four-ish; but when it comes to gettin’ back it’s generally—as a rule more ‘ish’ than ‘four.’ Would you rather wait a little, sir?”

“I think so,” said the squatter, absent-mindedly, his glance wandering back to the letter in his hand. “Yes—there’s no hurry, Brownie—and Miss Norah seems to like to pour out my tea.”

“She do, bless her,” said Mrs. Brown. “I always say meals aren’t the same to Miss Norah if you’re not there, sir. Poor lamb—and so soon goin’ back to that there school. Mighty little she gets for tea there, I’ll be bound.”

“Well, she doesn’t strike one as ill-fed, Brownie—and you know she likes school.”

“I know she likes home better,” said Brownie, darkly. “Me, I don’t hold with schools. I was glad when Master Jim came home for good an’ I’ll be gladder when it’s Miss Norah’s last term. Edication’s all very well in its way, like castor-oil; but you can get too much of it. Why, Miss Norah’s grandma never even heard of half them fancy things she knows, and where’d you find a better manager of a house than she was? What she didn’t know about curing bacon——!” Brownie sighed in inability to express fitly the superhuman attainments of her nursling’s ancestress.

“Well, you know, Brownie, I look to you for all that side of Norah’s education,” said Mr. Linton pacifically. “And you say yourself that the child is no bad housekeeper.”

“I should think she isn’t,” retorted Mrs. Brown. “Mighty few girls, though I say it as shouldn’t, cook better than Miss Norah, or can be handier about a house. But where’s the use of all them other things? Physics, which ain’t anything to do with medicine, an’ brushwork that’s not even first-cousin to a broom an’ physi—something—or—other, which is learnin’ more about your inside than any young lady has any call for. No, I don’t hold with it at all. But it doesn’t seem to hurt her, bless her!”

“No, I don’t think it hurts her,” David Linton said. “Learning does not seem to make her any less healthy, either in mind or body; and that’s the main thing, Brownie. You mustn’t grumble at the bit of extra polish—they all have it nowadays, and it’s no bad thing.” His eyes lit up suddenly. “There they come,” he said. “Is your kettle boiling?”

There were sounds of hoof-beats on the track, faint at first and then more distinct. The dogs burst into a wild chorus of welcome. Brownie disappeared hurriedly in the direction of the kitchen, and Mr. Linton lay back in his long chair and gave his letter a half-hearted attention, his eyes wandering to the door in the porch. Presently came quick feet and merry voices, the door swung open, and three people entered in a pell-mell fashion and descended upon the verandah like a miniature cyclone.

“I know we’re late, but we couldn’t help it,” Norah said breathlessly. “There was such a heap to do in the Far Plain, Dad—you ask the manager!” She shot a laughing glance at her brother, an immensely tall individual, who responded by lazily pitching his hat at her. “Oh, the wind is cold, Dad—we raced home against it, and it cut like a knife. But it was lovely. Have you had tea? I do hope you haven’t.”