Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

‘This is yours, Eddie,’ said Prowse. ‘He’s no great shakes to look at. But quiet. We call ’im the Blue Mule.’

Even Jim saw fit to laugh. It was the laughter of experience over ignorance and city ways. He spat again, and smoothed the moustache hanging like two black bootlaces either side of his invisible lips.

At this moment there was a great gnashing and barking of dogs, sidling and fretting of wild-eyed horses, as a pack of little foxterriers shot round the corner of the shed where the ill-assorted company was assembled. The Blue Mule snorted and kicked when the leader of the terrier pack flung himself on the kelpie bitch in an attempt at rape.

Jim the father cracked his whip and caught the terrier in the balls just as the master of the pack arrived.

‘Now, now, Jim!’ complained the one who was the boss judging by the manager’s subservience. ‘Shouldn’t be such a bastard, should you?’

Another one in spectacles, the boss didn’t leave off smiling. Whereas Denny the stockman’s glasses were framed in inferior metal, Mr Lushington’s were gold-rimmed, their lenses so large and round his expression would have benefited by their shape had he been less benign than his manner suggested.

As the terrier was yelping for his slashed balls the manager tried to joke it off. ‘Looks like Jim didn’t get it from the missus last night. Eh, Mr Lushington? What ’ud you say?’

Mr Lushington only smiled. He was an elderly pear-shaped gentleman, seated on a chestnut taffy-tailed hack of considerable girth, which gleamed, as did his rider’s leggings, from constant attention by those who serve the rich. Across the pommel of his saddle, he carried, neatly rolled, an oilskin to protect him from the worst caprices of the weather. While at his heels, or those of the resplendent chestnut, skipped on wooden legs the terrier pack at various stages of growth and decay.

Prowse must have thought it time he impressed those under him with the confidential nature of his relationship with the boss, for he approached as close as the latter’s stirrup-iron allowed, and informed him in a lowered tone of voice, ‘This is Eddie — the cove we had the letter about. I expect you’ll like to have a word with ’im.’

The manager, the two stockmen, the jackeroo himself, all were looking to the owner to dissolve the state of impotence to which his position had reduced them. But Mr Lushington implied only obliquely, by a drawn-out whinnying sigh, that he had absorbed his manager’s information. Still smiling from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, he sat looking, not at the young man recommenhded to is patronage, but at the chain of distant hills.

‘The Judge’s son,’ Eddie Twyborn thought he heard before the grazier turned his chestnut and, preceded by the terrier pack, made for the paddocks, the respectful manager and two stockmen leaping at their saddles, the jackeroo almost rupturing himself as he landed on a pommel, on the razor-back of his awkwardly articulated nag.

As a boy on holiday in the country Eddie sat ponies no better and no worse than others, but had lost his dignity astraddle the beast known as the Blue Mule. He took up a position at the rear of the Lushington cavalcade, thumping with his heels at unresponsive ribs.

The party crossed the jingling bridge, hooves spanking over loosely-linked planks, and headed out along the flat. An anus opened and disgorged, a vulva split and gushed. Only the ostracised Eddie Twyborn at the tail end was to any extent aware of such events. Greg Lushington and Don Prowse were turned in their saddles towards each other, exchanging esoteric information, the one wearing his normal protective smile, while the other had pinned on the bland badge of unashamed sycophancy. Between the head and the rear of the column rode the apathetic stockmen, blue-serge shoulder blades resigned to the action of their brumbies’ razor-cruppered, harsh-coated rumps.

Eddie’s nose began to run, his eyes to smart from the wind, and a little from humiliation. All he had experienced of life left him, not that it would have been of much use, reduced as he was to ignorant boyhood in remotest Patagonia. There was surely some dormant instinct he could summon up in self-defence. After all, he had been decorated, officially for valour, though actually for a desperate instinct which had carried him across no-man’s-land in what they considered the desired direction. Now, in a man’s world as opposed to no-man’s-land, with a litter of rational, unrevealing clues replacing the irrational signposts of nightmare, he found himself at a loss. In his boyhood he had shown a slight talent for wood-carving (a kookaburra on a cigar-box lid) and for tying some of the fancier knots. With another boy he had modelled a crusaders’ castle in plasticine; they had won a prize. These were all he could produce out of the waste-bin of memory to pit against the esoterica of Gregory Lushington and Don Prowse; even less open to human advances the two stockmen, whose silence and primitive forms suggested links with chthonic forces.

So Eddie Twyborn thumped desperately with his heels at the shaggy barrel of the Blue Mule, who refused to share his rider’s urge to keep up with the cavalcade, perhaps accepting disdain as the passport to a peaceful existence; while the rider was forced to admit that he had to shine, regardless of geography, climate, or whichever sexual role he was playing.

As he continued thumping automatically at his wholly unresponsive mount, loss of faith in himself was replaced by an affinity with the landscape surrounding him. It happened very gradually, in spite of a sadistic wind, the sour grass, deformed trees, rocks crouching like great animals petrified by time. A black wagtail swivelling on a grey-green fence-post might have been confusing an intruder had he not been directing one who knew the password. The red road winding through the lucerne flat into the scurfy interior seemed to originate in memory, along with the wood-carving, boy-scout knots, and plasticine castle. For all the contingent’s knowledgeable remarks on wool, scours, fluke and bluestone as they mounted the contours of Bald Hill, the scene’s subtler depths were reserved for the outcast-initiate.

He allowed his horse to convey him at last as the latter would have wished. The two of them furled in the gusty swaths of an autumn gale, snatched at by meagre, isolated trees, warned by the cawing of watchful crows, the animal seemed to maintain a logical distance between themselves and what is considered normality.

Whenever the cavalcade halted the laggards drew abreast to the tune of renewed outbursts of instruction from the boss and ‘yes yes Mr Lushington’ from his acquiescent manager, ‘bluestone the creeks termorrer,’ bluestone being the apparent panacea. In the keen air it glittered for Eddie-Eudoxia like a Byzantine jewel.

The stockmen had ridden off to muster the mob of Bald Hill wethers, the chief objective of this somewhat desultory expedition, Like a cluster of parasites infesting a hide of almost identical colour, the dirty fleeces of the sheep could be seen in slight motion in a cleft of the stony hillside.

Embracing the panorama with a Napoleonic gesture, the grazier announced, presumably for his protégé, ‘Wonderful sheep country. You wouldn’t find better on the Hunter, though the fellers up there don’t care to admit it.’

Eddie did not know what to do beyond grunt back in manly fashion. His boss seemed appeased.

By now the shouts of the stockmen had startled the mob of sheep, and the frantic exertions of the little faded kelpie were keeping them bunched as she drove them in the right direction.

On arrival, the sheep propped, milled in tight formation, then fanning out, stood coughing and staring, some of them stamping. Awaiting further orders from her tyrant, the kelpie flattened herself on the stones.